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A DAUGHTER OF THE VINE

by

GERTRUDE ATHERTON

Author of
"Senator North," "The Californians," etc.







New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
1923

Copyright, 1899
By Dodd, Mead and Company

Printed in U. S. A.




A Daughter of the Vine




BOOK I




I


Two horses were laboriously pulling a carriage through the dense
thickets and over the sandhills which in the early Sixties still made an
ugly breach between San Francisco and its Presidio. The difficulties of
the course were not abridged by the temper of the night, which was torn
with wind and muffled in black. During the rare moments when the flying
clouds above opened raggedly to discharge a shaft of silver a broad and
dreary expanse leapt into form. Hills of sand, bare and shifting, huge
boulders, tangles of scrub oak and chaparral, were the distorted
features of the landscape between the high far-away peaks of the city
and the military posts on the water's edge. On the other side of the
bay cliffs and mountains jutted, a mere suggestion of outline. The ocean
beyond the Golden Gate roared over the bar. The wind whistled and
shrilled through the rigging of the craft on the bay; occasionally it
lifted a loose drift and whirled it about the carriage, creating a
little cyclone with two angry eyes, and wrenching loud curses from the
man on the box.

"It's an unusually bad night, Thorpe, really," said one of the two
occupants of the carriage. "Of course the winters here are more or less
stormy, but we have many fine days, I assure you; and they're better
than the summer with its fogs and trade winds--I am speaking of San
Francisco," he added hastily, with newly acquired Californian pride. "Of
course it is usually fine in the country at any time. I believe there
are sixteen different climates in California."

"As any one of them might be better than England's, it is not for me to
complain," said the other, good-naturedly. "But I feel sorry for the
horses and the man. I don't think we should have missed much if we had
cut this ball."

"Oh, I wouldn't miss it for the world. Life would be suicidal in this
God-forsaken country if it were not for the hospitality of the San
Franciscans. Some months ago two officers whose names I won't mention
met in a lonely spot on the coast near Benicia Fort, on the other side
of the bay, with the deliberate intention of shooting one another to
death. They were discovered in time, and have since been transferred
East. It is better for us on account of San Francisco--Whew! how
this confounded thing does jolt!--and the Randolph parties are always
the gayest of the season. Mr. Randolph is an Englishman with the
uncalculating hospitality of the Californian. He has made a pot of money
and entertains lavishly. Every pretty girl in San Francisco is a belle,
but Nina Randolph is the belle _par excellence_."

"Is she a great beauty?" asked Thorpe, indifferently. He was wondering
if the driver had lost his way. The wheels were zigzagging through
drifts so deep that the sand shot against the panes.

"No, I don't know that she is beautiful at all. Miss Hathaway is that,
and Mrs. McLane, and two of the 'three Macs'. But she has it all her
own way. It's charm, I suppose, and then--well, she's an only child and
will come in for a fortune--a right big one if this place grows as
people predict. She's a deuced lucky girl, is Miss Nina Randolph, and
it will be a deuced lucky fellow that gets her. Only no one does. She's
twenty-three and heart-whole."

"Are you in love with her?"

"I'm in love with her and Guadalupe Hathaway and the 'three Macs' and
Mrs. McLane. I never met so many attractive women in one place."

"Would it be Mrs. Hunt McLane--a Creole? I met her once in Paris--got to
know her very well."

"You don't say. She'll make things hum for you. There's something else I
wanted to say. I thought I'd wait and see if you discovered it yourself,
but I believe I won't. It's this: there's something queer about the
Randolphs in spite of the fact that they're more to the front than any
people in San Francisco. I never leave that house that I don't carry
away a vague impression that there's something behind the scenes I
don't know anything about. I've never spoken of it to anyone else; it
would be rather disloyal, after all the kindness they've shown me; but
I'm too curious to know how they will impress you. I've only been here
six months, and only know what everybody else knows about them--"

"Do you know, Hastings," said the Englishman abruptly, "I think
something is wrong outside. I don't believe anyone is guiding those
horses."

Hastings lowered the window beside him and thrust out his head.

"Hi, there, Tim!" he shouted. "What are you about?"

There was no reply.

"Hello!" he cried, thinking the wind might have miscarried his voice.

Again there was no reply; but the horses, gratefully construing the
final syllable to their own needs, came to a full stop.

Hastings opened the door and sprang on to the hub of the wheel,
expostulating angrily. He returned in a moment to his companion.

"Here's the devil to pay," he cried. "Tim's down against the dashboard
as drunk as a lord. There's nothing to do but put him inside and
drive, myself. I'd chuck him into a drift if I were not under certain
obligations of a similar sort. Will you come outside with me, or stay
in with him?"

"Why not go back to the Presidio?"

"We are about half-way between, and may as well go on."

"I'll go outside, by all means."

He stepped out. The two men dragged the coachman off the box and huddled
him inside.

"We're off the road," said Hastings, "but I think I can find my way.
I'll cut across to the Mission road, and then we'll be on level ground,
at least."

They mounted the box. Hastings gathered the reins and Thorpe lit a
cigar. The horses, well ordered brutes of the livery stable, did their
weary best to respond to the peremptory order to speed.

"We'll be two hours late," the young officer grumbled, as they
floundered out of the sandhills and entered the Mission Valley.

"Damn the idiot. Why couldn't he have waited till we got there?"

They were now somewhat sheltered from the wind, and as the road was
level, although rutty, made fair progress.

"I didn't mean to treat you to a nasty adventure the very night of your
arrival," continued Hastings apologetically.

"Oh, one rather looks for adventures in California. If I hadn't so much
sand in my eyes I'd be rather entertained than otherwise. I only hope
our faces are not dirty."

"They probably are. Still, if we are not held up, I suppose we can
afford to overlook the minor ills."

"Held up?"

"Stopped by road-agents, garroters, highway robbers--whatever you like
to call 'em. I've never been held up myself; as a rule I go in the
ambulance at night, but it's no uncommon experience. I've got a revolver
in my overcoat pocket--on this side. Reach over and get it, and keep it
cocked. I _couldn't_ throw up my hands. I'd feel as if the whole United
States army were disgraced."

Thorpe abstracted the pistol, but although the long lonely road was
favourable to crime, no road-agents appeared, and Hastings drove into
the outskirts of the town with audibly expressed relief.

"We're not far now," he added. "South Park is the place we're bound for;
and, by the way, Mr. Randolph projected and owns most of it."

A quarter of an hour later he drove into an oval enclosure trimmed with
tall dark houses, so sombre in appearance that to the old Californian
they must now, in their desertion and decay, seem to have been grimly
prescient of their destiny.

As the carriage drew up before a brilliantly lighted house the door
opened, and a man-servant ran down the steps.

"Keep quiet," whispered Hastings.

The man opened the door of the carriage, waited a moment, then put his
head inside. He drew it back with a violent oath.

"It's a damned insult!" he cried furiously.

"Why, Cochrane!" exclaimed Hastings, "what on earth is the matter with
you?"

"Captain Hastings!" stammered the man. "Oh I--I--beg pardon. I
thought--Oh, of course, I see. Tim had taken a drop too much. A most
deplorable habit. Can I help you down, sir?"

"No, thanks."

He sprang lightly to the sidewalk, followed with less agility by the
Englishman, who still held the cocked pistol.

"I forgot about this thing," said Thorpe. "Here--take it. I suppose we
don't enter the houses of peaceable citizens, even in California,
carrying loaded firearms?"

Cochrane led the horses into the little park which prinked the centre of
the enclosure, and the young men ascended the steps.

"I'd give a good deal to know what set him off like that," said
Hastings. "Hitherto he's been the one thoroughly impassive creature I've
met in California; has a face about as expressionless as a sentinel on
duty."

He pushed open the door and they entered a large hall lavishly decorated
with flowers and flags. Many people were dancing in a room at the right,
others were strolling about the hall or seated on the stair. These made
way rather ungraciously for the late comers, who went hurriedly up to
the dressing-room and regarded themselves in the mirror.

"We're not dirty, after all," said the Englishman in a tone of profound
relief. He was a tall thin man of thirty or less with a dark face lean
enough to show hard ungraceful lines of chin and jaw. The mouth would
have been sensual had it been less determined, the grey eyes cold had
they been less responsive to humour. Mrs. McLane had told him once that
he was the type of man for whom civilization had done most: that an
educated will and humour, combined with high breeding, had saved him
from slavery to the primal impulses. His voice was harsh in tone but
well modulated. He held himself very erectly but without
self-consciousness.

Hastings' legs were his pride, and there were those who averred that
they were the pride of the Presidio. His face was fair and round, his
eyes were as talkative as his tongue. A past master of the noble art of
flirting, no one took him more seriously than he took himself. He spoke
with the soft rich brogue of the South; to-day it is hardened by years
of command, and his legs are larger, but he is a doughty general, eager
as ever for the hot high pulse of battle.

"Come on, Dud," he said, "time is getting short."

As they walked down the stair a man who was crossing the hall looked up,
smiled charmingly, then paused, awaiting them. He was a small man of
dignified presence with a head and face nobly modelled. His skin was
faded and worn, it was cut with three or four deep lines, and his hair
was turning grey, but his black eyes were brilliant.

"Don't turn us out, Mr. Randolph," cried Hastings. "It was not
indifference that made us late; it was an ill-timed combination of
Tim and rum. This is the English friend you were kind enough to say
I could bring," he added as he reached the hall. "Did I tell you his
name?--Thorpe, Dudley Thorpe, of Hampshire. That may interest you.
You English are almost as sectional as we are."

Mr. Randolph had already grasped Thorpe's hand warmly and was bidding
him welcome. "My home was further north--Yorkshire," he said. "Come into
the parlour and meet my wife and daughter." As they pushed their way
through the crowd he "sized up" the stranger with the rapid scrutiny of
that period. "You must make yourself at home in my house," he said
abruptly. "There are few English here and I am more glad than I can
express to meet you."

"Ah--thanks!" Thorpe was somewhat taken aback, then remembered that he
was in the newest section of the new world. And he had heard of the
hospitality of the Californian.

They had entered a large room, canvassed for the evening and denuded of
all furniture except the long rows of chairs against the walls. The
musicians were resting. Men were fanning girls flushed and panting after
the arduous labours of the waltz of that day. At one end of the room
were some twenty or thirty older women.

Thorpe looked about him curiously. The women were refined and elegant,
many of them with beauty or its approximate; three or four were Spanish,
black-eyed, magnetic with coquetry and grace. The men, even the younger
men, had a certain alertness of expression, a cool watchful glance; and
they were all gentlemen. This fact impressed Thorpe at once, and as
they walked down the long room something he said betrayed his thoughts.

"Yes," said Mr. Randolph, quickly. "They are all from the upper walks of
life--men who thought there would be a better chance for them in the new
community than in even the older American ones. And they keep together
because, naturally, they are the law-abiding class and responsible for
the future of the country. That also accounts for what you find in their
faces. This sort of life develops character very quickly. There is
another element in California. You will see it--Ah! here is my wife."

A tall raw-boned woman with weak blue eyes and abundant softly piled
hair had arisen from the group of matrons and was advancing toward them.
She was handsomely dressed in black velvet, her neck covered with point
lace confined under the loose chin by a collar of diamonds.

She looked cold and listless, but spoke pleasantly to the young men.

"We are glad to welcome an Englishman," she said to Thorpe; and to
Hastings: "You are not usually so late, and I have heard a round dozen
inquiring for you."

Thorpe, as he exchanged commonplaces with her, reflected that no woman
had ever attracted him less. As he looked into the face he saw that it
was cold, evil, and would have appeared coarse but for the hair and
quiet elegance of attire. Despite her careful articulation, he detected
the broad o and a of the Yorkshire people. The woman was playing the
part of a gentlewoman and playing it fairly well. When the thin lips
moved apart in an infrequent smile they displayed sharp scattered teeth.
The jaw was aggressive. The hands in their well-adjusted gloves were
large even for her unusual height. As Thorpe remarked that he was
prepared to admire and enjoy California, one side of her upper lip
lifted in an ugly sneer.

"Probably," she replied coldly. "Most people catch it. It's like the
measles. I wish Jim Randolph liked it less."

Thorpe, for the first time, experienced a desire to meet Nina Randolph.

Hastings disengaged him. "Come," he said, "I'll introduce you to Miss
Randolph and one or two others, and then you can look out for yourself.
I want to dance. Mrs. McLane is not here. There are the 'three Macs,'"
indicating a trio surrounded by a group of men,--"Miss McDermott,
classic and cold; Miss McAllister, languid and slight; Miss McCullum,
stocky and matter-of-fact. But it will take you a week to straighten
them out. Here--look--what do you think of this?"

Thorpe directed his glance over the shoulders of a knot of men who
surrounded a tall Spanish-looking girl with large haughty blue eyes and
brown hair untidily arranged. She wore an old black silk frock with
muslin bertha. Her face interested Thorpe at once, but in a moment he
had much ado to keep from laughing outright. For she spoke never a word.
She merely _looked_; taking each eager admirer in turn, and by some
mysterious manipulation of eyelash, sweeping a different expression
into those profound obedient orbs every time. As she saw Hastings she
nodded carelessly, and, when he presented Thorpe, spoke for the first
time. She merely said "Good-evening," but her voice, Spanish, low,
sweet--accompanied by a look--made the stranger feel what a blessed
thing hospitality was.

"So that is your Miss Hathaway," he said, as Hastings once more led him
onward. "What a pity that such a beautiful girl should be so poor. But
she'll probably marry any one of these incipient millionaires she
wants."

"Poor?" cried Hastings. "Oh, her get-up. She affects to despise
dress--or does. God forbid that I should presume to understand what goes
on behind those blue masks. Her father is a wealthy and distinguished
citizen. Her mother inherited a hundred thousand acres from one of the
old grandees. What do you think of her?"

"Her methods are original and entertaining, to say the least. Does she
never--converse?"

"When she has something to say; she's a remarkable woman. That must be
Miss Randolph. Her crowd is always the densest."

As Thorpe was presented to Nina Randolph he forgot that he was a student
of heredity. He had never seen so radiant and triumphant a being. She
seemed to him, in that first moment, to symbolize the hope and joy
and individualism of the New World. Small, like her father, she was
perfectly modelled, from her round pulsing throat to the tips of her
tiny feet: ignoring the fashion, her yellow gown fitted her figure
instead of a hoop-skirt. Her black hair was coiled low on her head, but,
although unconfined in a net, did not, like Miss Hathaway's "waterfall,"
suggest having been arranged in the dark. Her black eyes, well set and
wide apart, sparkled with mirth. The head was thrown back, the chin
uplifted, the large sweet human mouth, parted, showed small even teeth.
The eyebrows were heavy, the nose straight and tilted, the complexion
ivory-white, luminous, and sufficiently coloured.

As she saw Hastings, she rose at once and motioned her group aside.

"Whatever made you so late?" she exclaimed. "And this is Mr. Thorpe? I
am so relieved that you have not been garotted, or blown into the bay.
Captain Hastings is always the first to arrive and the last to leave--I
was sure something had happened."

"You look remarkably worried," murmured Hastings.

"I cannot depress my other guests. They also have their rights." She
gave Thorpe a gracious smile. "I have saved the fifth dance from this
for you, and you are also to take me in to supper. Now I must go. _Hasta
luego!_ Captain Hastings, as it's all your fault, I shall not give you a
dance till after supper."

She spun down the room in the clasp of an army officer little taller
than herself. Thorpe's eyes followed the fluent pair darting through the
mob of dancers with the skill and energy of that time. Miss Randolph's
eyes glittered, her little feet twinkled. She looked the integer of
happy youth; and Thorpe turned away with a sigh, feeling old for the
moment under the pressure of his large experience of the great world
beyond California. He became aware that Hastings was introducing him to
several men, and a moment later was guided to the library to have a
drink. When he returned, it was time to claim Miss Randolph.

"Do you care to dance?" he asked as he plied her fan awkwardly. "I am
rather rusty. To tell the truth, it's eight years since I last danced,
and I never was very keen on it. I should say that I've been travelling
a lot, and when I'm home I go in for sport rather more than for the
social taxes."

"What a relief to find a man who doesn't dance! Let us go into the
conservatory. Have you been much in America? How is it that you and
Captain Hastings are such great friends?"

"He came over when a lad to visit some English relatives whose place
adjoins ours, and we hit it off. Since then I have visited him in
Louisiana, and we have travelled in Europe together."

"I suppose he amuses you--you are certainly unlike enough."

"Not in the least--he's the prince of good fellows. What a jolly place!"

They had passed through the library and entered the conservatory: a
small forest of palms, great ferns, and young orange-trees; brought,
Miss Randolph explained, from Southern California. Chinese lanterns
swung overhead. Rustic chairs and sofas, covered with the skins of
panthers, wild cats, and coyotes, were grouped with much discretion.

Miss Randolph threw herself into a chair and let her head drop against
the yellow skin on the back. Thorpe drew his chair close in front of
her. In a moment he discovered that her lids were inclined to droop, and
that there were lines about her mouth.

"You are tired," he said abruptly. "Shall I fetch you a glass of
champagne?"

"Oh, no; it wouldn't do me a bit of good. Hot rooms and dancing always
tire me. I'm glad when the season is over. In another month or so
we shall be going to Redwoods, our country home--about thirty miles
south of San Francisco. You must come down with us; we have good
shooting,--deer and quail in the mountains, and snipe and duck in the
marshes."

"You are very kind," he said, and his reply was as mechanical as her
invitation. He knew that all but the edge of her mind was turned from
him, and was sufficiently interested to wish to get down into her
thought. He went on gropingly: "I will confide to you that army life
bores me a good deal, and as I intend to spend six months in California,
I shall travel about somewhat." Then he added abruptly: "You are
utterly unlike an English girl."

"I am a Californian. Blood does not go for much in this climate. You'll
understand why, if you stay here long enough."

"In what way is it so unlike other places? I feel the difference, but
cannot define it."

"It's the wickedest place on earth! I suppose there are wicked people
everywhere, but California is a sort of headquarters. It seems to be a
magnet for that element in human nature. I wish I had been born and
brought up in England."

"Why?" he asked, smiling but puzzled, and recalling Hastings'
imaginings. "I never saw any one look less wicked than yourself. Are you
wicked?" he added, audaciously.

She flirted her fan at him, and her eyes danced so coquettishly that he
no longer saw the drooping lids. "_Our_ wickedness takes the form of
flirtation,--heartless and unprincipled. Ask Captain Hastings. We are
all refusing him in turn. Talk to me about England, while I study you
and determine which line to take. I haven't typed you yet--I never make
the fatal mistake of generalising."

As he answered the questions she put to him in rapid succession, his own
impressions changed several times. He was charmed by her intelligence,
occasionally by a flash of something deeper. Again, he saw only the
thrilling beauty of her figure, and once something vibrated across his
brain so fleeting that he barely realised it was an echo of the
repulsion her mother had inspired.

"Well? What are your conclusions?" she demanded suddenly.

"I--what?"

"You have been sizing me up. I want to know the result."

"You shall not," he said stubbornly. "I--I beg pardon; I have lost the
knack of polite fencing."

"I had read that Englishmen were blunt and truthful beings--either
through conscious superiority or lack of complexity, I forget which. My
father and the few others out here are almost denationalised."

"Well, I did beg pardon. And when a man is talking and receiving
impressions at the same time, the impressions are not very well
defined."

"But you think quickly and jump at conclusions. And minds of that sort
sometimes make mistakes."

"I frequently make mistakes. Among the few things I have learned is
not to judge people at sight--nor in a lifetime, for that matter. I
certainly don't pretend to size up women, particularly women like
yourself."

"That was very neat. Why myself? I am a very transparent young person."
She flirted her lashes at him, but he fancied he saw a gleam of defiance
shoot between them.

"You are not transparent. If you are kind enough to let me see a good
deal of you, I fancy I shall know something of twenty Miss Randolphs by
the time I leave California."

"Some you will like, and some you will not," she replied, with calm
disregard of her previous assertion. "Well, I shall know what you think
of me before long--don't make any mistake about that. Shall we flirt,
by the way, or shall we merely be friends?"

"The last condition would give greater range to your inherent
wickedness."

She laughed, apparently with much amusement. "I have a good many
friends, nevertheless,--real friends. I have made it my particular art,
and have rules and regulations. When they transgress, I fine them."

"Suppose we begin that way. I'd like to know the rules."

"N-o, I don't think I want to. You see, the rule I most strictly
enforce is that when the party of the other part transgresses, I never
sit with him in a conservatory again."

"Let us cut the rules by all means. I feel a poor helpless male, quite
at your mercy: I haven't been in a conservatory for years. Although I've
made a point of seeing something of the society of every capital I've
visited, I've forgotten the very formula of flirtation. I might take a
few lessons of Hastings--"

"Oh, don't! What a combination that would be! I will teach you all that
it is necessary for you to know."

"Heaven help me. I shall be wise and sad when I leave California.
However, I face my fate like a man; whatever happens, I shall not run.
Just now it is my duty to wait on you. Shall I bring your supper here?"

"Yes--do. You will find a table behind that palm. Draw it up. There. Now
bring what you like for yourself, but only a few oysters for me."

He returned in a few moments followed by a man, who spread the table
with delicate fare.

Miss Randolph nibbled her oysters prettily. Thorpe was about to fill her
glass with champagne, when she shook her head.

"I cannot," she said. "It goes to my head--one drop."

"Then don't, by all means. I hope you like it, and are resisting a
temptation."

"I detest it, as it happens. If you want to see me in the high heroic
rôle, which I infer you admire, you must devise a temptation of another
sort."

"I think your dear little sex should be protected from all temptation. I
rather like the Oriental way of doing things."

"Don't you flatter yourself that a wall fifteen feet high, and covered
with broken glass, would protect a woman from temptations, if she wanted
them. A man, to keep a woman inside that wall, must embody all the
temptations himself."

Thorpe looked at her, and drew his brows together.

"That was a curious remark for a girl to make," he said, coldly.

"You mean it would be if I were English. But I am not only American, but
Californian, born and brought up in a city where they are trying to be
civilised and succeeding indifferently well. Do you suppose I can help
seeing what life is? I should be next door to an idiot if I could."

"I hardly know whether you would be more interesting if you had been
brought up in England. No," he added, reflectively, after a moment, "I
don't think you would be."

"What you really think is, that I should not be half so interesting, but
much more ideal."

"If I thought anything of the sort, it was by a purely mechanical
process," he said, reddening. "I have lived out of England too much to
be insular in all my notions."

"I don't believe an Englishman ever changes on certain points, of which
woman is one; heredity is too strong. If you sat down and thought it all
over, you'd find that although you could generalise on a more liberal
scale than some of your countrymen, your own personal ideals were much
the same as theirs."

"Possibly, but as I don't intend to marry till I'm forty,--when I intend
to stand for Parliament,--I'm not bothering about ideals at present."

"That was a more insular remark than you evidently imagine.
However--speaking of ideals, I should say that California generated them
more liberally than any other country--through sheer force of contrast.
I have grown rather morbid on the subject of good people, myself. I grow
more exacting every month of my life; and the first thing I look for in
a new man's face is to see, first, whether he has a mind, and then,
whether it controls all the rest of him. I've seen too much of practical
life to have indulged much in dreams and heroes; but I've let my
imagination go somewhat, and I picture a man with all the virtues that
you don't see in combination out here, and living with him in some old
European city where there are narrow crooked streets, and beautiful
architecture, and the most exquisite music in the cathedrals."

Her voice had rattled on lightly, and she smiled more than once during
her long speech. But her eyes did not smile; they had a curious, almost
hard, intentness which forced Thorpe to believe that her brain was
casting up something more than the froth of a passing mood.

"I am afraid you won't meet your hero of all the virtues," he said,
"even in a picturesque old continental town. But I think I understand
your feeling. It is the principle of good in you demanding its proper
companionship and setting."

"Yes, that is it," she said, softly. "That is it. I am no worse than
other girls; but I flirt and waste my time abominably. It would be all
right if I did no more thinking than they do; but I do so much that, if
I were inclined to be religious, I believe I'd run, one of these days,
into a convent. However, I can always look forward to the old European
town."

"Alone?"

"I suppose when your left eyebrow goes up like that you're trying to
flirt. I don't know that I'd mind being alone, particularly. It would
be several thousand times better than the society of some of the
people I've been forced to associate with. I love art,--particularly
architecture and music,--and I'm sure I could weave a romance round
myself. Yes, I'm sure I should love it as much as I hate this country,"
she added with such vehemence that Thorpe set down his fork abruptly.

"You are very pale," he said; "I think you had better take a little
champagne. Indeed, you must be utterly worn out. I can imagine what a
lot you have had to do and think of to-day."

He filled her glass, and she drank the champagne quickly.

"I have a shocking head," she said; "but I _need_ this. I have been out
eight nights in succession, and have been on the go all day besides.
Mother never attends to anything; and father, of course, is too busy to
bother with parties. Cochrane and I have to do everything."

"Tell me some more of your ideals," said Thorpe. He was not sure that he
liked her, but she piqued his curiosity.

"Ideals? Who ever had an ideal after a glass of champagne--except to be
in the wildest spirits for the rest of one's life? There will be no
champagne in Bruges--that's the city I've settled on; but I can't even
think of Bruges. Champagne suggests Paris, and they tell me Paris is
even more wicked than San Francisco. Is it?"

Her eyes were sparkling with merriment; but although she refilled her
glass, there was no suggestion as yet of the bacchante about her. The
colour had come back to her face, and she looked very charming.
Nevertheless Thorpe frowned and shook his head.

"I should prefer to talk about Bruges," he said. "I've been there, and
can tell you all you'd like to know. When I go back, I'll send you some
photographs."

"Thanks--but I have a whole portfolio full. I want to hear about Paris.
I'm afraid you're a bit of a prig."

"No man could be less of a prig. I hope you are above the silly idea
that, because we English have a slightly higher standard than other
nations, it follows that we are prigs. You were entirely delightful a
few moments ago; but I don't like to see a woman drink when it affects
her as it does you."

The colour flew from her cheeks to her hair, and her eyes flashed
angrily. "You _are_ a prig, and you are extremely impertinent," she
said.

Thorpe sprang to his feet, plunging his hands into his pockets.

"Oh--don't--don't--" he exclaimed. "I'm afraid I was rude. I assure you,
I did not intend to criticise you. Please say you forgive me."

She smiled and shrugged her shoulders. "You look so really penitent,"
she said gaily. "Sit down and fill my glass, and drink to
our--friendship."

He was about to remonstrate; but reflecting that it would be a bore to
apologise twice in succession, and also that what she did was none of
his affair, he filled her glass. She touched it to his, and threw
herself back against the skins, sipping the wine slowly and chattering
nonsense. He refilled her glass absently the fourth time; but when she
pushed it across the table again, he said, with some decision:

"Be careful. This champagne is very heady. I feel it myself."

She drained the glass. For a moment they stared hard at each other in
silence, Thorpe wondering at the sudden maturity in the face before him.
All the triumphant young womanhood had gone out of it; the diabolical
spirit of some ancestor entombed in the depths of her brain might have
possessed her for the moment, smothering her own groping soul. The
distant music filled the conservatory with a low humming sound, such as
one hears in a tropical forest at noon. Suddenly Thorpe realised that
the evil which is in all human souls was having its moment of absolute
liberty, and that the two dissevered particles, his and hers, recognised
each other. He had knocked his senseless many times in his life, but he
felt no inclination to do so to-night; for so much more than what little
was evil in this girl attracted and magnetised him. His brain was not
clear, and it was reckless with its abrupt possession by the idea that
this woman was his mate, and that, for good or for evil, there was no
escaping her. He sprang to his feet, pushed the table violently aside,
took her in his arms and kissed her. For a moment she was quiescent;
then she slipped from his embrace and ran down the conservatory,
thrusting the ferns aside. One fell, its jar crashing on the stone
floor. He saw no more of her that night.




II


Two days later Thorpe was strolling up and down the beach before the
Presidio. The plaza was deserted; here and there, on the verandahs of
the low adobe houses surrounding it, officers lay at full length in
hammocks, smoking or reading, occasionally flirting with some one in
white.

Every trace of the storm had fled. The warmth and fragrance and
restlessness of spring were in the air. The bay, as calm as a mountain
lake, reflected a deep blue sky with no wandering white to give it
motion. Outside the Golden Gate, the spray leaped high, and the ocean
gave forth its patient roar. The white sails on the bay hung limply.
Opposite was a line of steep cliffs, bare and green; beyond was a
stupendous peak, dense and dark with redwoods. Farther down, facing the
young city, hills jutted, romantic with sweeping willows. Between was
the solitary rock, Alcatraz, with its ugly fort of many eyes. Far to the
east was a line of pink mountains dabbled with blue, tiny villages
clinging to their knees.

Thorpe's keen eye took in every detail. It pleased him more than
anything he had seen for some time. After a long rainy day in quarters,
trying to talk nonsense to the Presidio women in their cramped parlours,
and giving his opinion of California some thirty times, he felt that he
could hail the prospect of a week of fresh air and solitude with the
enthusiasm of a schoolboy. He kept the tail of his eye on the square,
ready to hasten his steps and disappear round the sand dunes, did any
one threaten to intrude upon his musings.

He saw a man ride into the plaza, dismount at the barracks, and a moment
later head for the beach. Thorpe's first impulse was to flee. But he
stopped short; he had recognised Mr. Randolph's butler.

The man touched his hat as he approached.

"A note from Miss Randolph, sir."

Thorpe opened the note. It read:

     MY DEAR MR. THORPE,--I should like to see you this afternoon, if
     you are disengaged. If not, at your earliest convenience. I hope
     you will understand that this is not an idle request, but that I
     particularly wish to see you.

                    Sincerely,
                         NINA RANDOLPH.

"Tell Miss Randolph that I will call at three," said Thorpe, promptly.

He had no wish to avoid the interview; he was quite willing that she
should turn the scorpions of her wrath upon him. He deserved it. He did
not pretend to understand Nina Randolph, deeply as he had puzzled over
her since their memorable interview; but that he had helped her to
violate her own self-respect, there could be little doubt, and he longed
to give her what satisfaction he could. He had lived his inner life very
fully, and knew all that the sacrifice of an ideal meant to the higher
parts of the mind. Whether Miss Randolph had ever kissed a man before
or not, he would not pretend to guess; but he would have been willing to
swear that she had never kissed another in the same circumstances; and
he burned to think that he had been the man to cast her at the foot of
her girlish pedestal. Whatever possibilities for evil there might be in
her, instinct prompted him to believe that they were undeveloped. Her
strong sudden magnetism for him had passed with her presence, and,
looking back, he attributed it entirely to the momentary passion of
which he was ashamed; but he felt something of the curious tie which
binds thinking people who have helped each other a step down the moral
ladder.

After luncheon, he informed Hastings that he was going to the city, and
asked for a horse.

"I'll go with you--"

"I don't want you," said Thorpe, bluntly. "I have a particular reason
for wishing to go alone."

"Oh, very well," said Hastings, amiably. "The savage loves his solitude,
I know."

The road between the army posts and San Francisco was well beaten.
Thorpe could not have lost his way, even if the horse had not known
every inch of it.

He reached the city within an hour. It was less picturesque by day than
by night. The board sidewalks were broken and uneven, the streets muddy.
The tall frame buildings of the business section looked as if they had
been pieced together in intervals between gambling and lynching.
Dwelling-houses with gardens about them were scattered on the heights.

Two miles south of the swarming, hurrying, swearing brain of the city
was the aristocratic quarter,--South Park and Rincon Hill. The square
wooden houses, painted a dark brown, had a solid and substantial air,
and looked as if they might endure through several generations.

The man, Cochrane, admitted Thorpe, and conducted him to the library.
The room was unoccupied, and, as the door closed behind the butler,
Thorpe for the first time experienced a flutter. He was about to have a
serious interview with a girl of whose type he knew nothing. Would she
expect him to apologise? He had always held that the man who kissed and
apologised was an ass. But he had done Miss Randolph something more than
a minor wrong.

He shrugged his shoulders and took his stand before the fireplace. She
had sent for him; let her take the initiative. He knew woman well enough
to follow her cues, be the type new or old. Then he looked about him
with approval. One would know it was an Englishman's library, he
thought. Book-shelves, closely furnished, lined two sides of the large
and lofty room. One end opened into the conservatory--where palms did
shelter and the lights were dim. The rugs and curtains were red, the
furniture very comfortable. On a long table were the periodicals of the
world.

Miss Randolph kept him waiting but a few moments. She opened the door
abruptly and entered. Her face was pale, and her eyes were shadowed; but
she held her head very high. Her carriage and her long dark gown made
her appear almost tall. As she advanced down the room, she looked at
Thorpe steadily, without access of colour, her lips pressed together.
He met her half way. His first impression was that her figure was the
most beautiful he had ever seen, his next the keenest impulse of pity he
had felt for any woman.

She extended her hand mechanically, and he took it and held it.

"Is it true that I kissed you the other night?" she asked, peremptorily.

"Yes," he said, ungracefully.

"And I had drunk too much champagne?"

"It was my fault," he said, eagerly. "You told me that you had a bad
head. I had no business to press it on you."

"You must think I am a poor weak creature indeed, if my friends are
obliged to take care of me," she said drily. "I was a fool to touch
it--that is the long and the short of it. I have given you a charming
impression of the girls of San Francisco--sit down: we look idiotic
standing in the middle of the room holding each other's hand--I can
assure you that there was not another girl in the house who would have
done what I did, or whom you would have dared to kiss. In a new country,
you know, the social lines are drawn very tight, and the best people
are particular to prudery. It is necessary: there are so many dreadful
women out here. I am positive that in the set to which Captain Hastings
has introduced you, you will meet a larger number of well-conducted
people than you have ever met in any one place before."

"It is very good of you to put on armour for your city," he said,
smiling. "I shall always think of it as your city, by the way. But I
thought you did not like California."

"It is my country. I feel great pride in it. You will find that it
is a country with a peculiar influence. Some few natures it leaves
untouched--but they are precious few. In the others, it quickens all
the good and evil they were born with."

Thorpe looked at her with a profound interest. He was eager to hear all
that she had to say.

"I have never before had occasion to speak like this to any man," she
went on. "If I had had, I should not have done so. I should have carried
it off with a high hand, ignored it, assumed that I was above criticism.
I only speak to you so frankly because you are an Englishman. People of
the same blood are clannish when away from their own land. I say this
without coquetry: I care more for your good opinion than for that of any
of the others--I am so tired of them!"

"Thank you--even if you did rather spoil it. You have it, if it really
matters to you. Surely, you don't think I misunderstand. I insist upon
assuming all the blame--and--upon apologising."

"Well, I am glad you apologised. Although you were not the most to
blame, just for the moment it made me feel that you were. I have already
forgiven you." She dropped her eyes for a moment, then looked at him
again with her square, almost defiant regard. "There is something I have
been trying to lead up to. It is this--it is not very easy to say--I
want you to make a promise. There is a skeleton in this house. Some
people know. I don't want you to ask them about it. My father will ask
you here constantly. I shall want you to come, too. I ask you to promise
to keep your eyes shut. Will you?"

"I shall see nothing. Thanks, thanks." He got up and moved nervously
about. "We will be friends, the best of friends, promise me that. No
flirtation. No nonsense. There may be something I can do to help you
while I am here. I hope there will be."

"There will not, but I like you better for saying that--I know you are
not demonstrative." She threw herself back in her chair and smiled
charmingly. "As to the other part--yes, we shall be the best of friends.
It was hard to speak, but I am glad that I did. I knew it was either
that or a nodding acquaintance, and I had made up my mind that it should
be something quite different. When we are alone and serious, we will
not flirt; but I have moods, irrepressible ones. If, when we meet in
society, I happen to be in a highly flirtatious humour, you are to flirt
with me. Do you understand?"

"Certainly, certainly, I agree--to keep you from flirting with other
men."

"Now fetch that portfolio over there,--it has Bruges in it,--and tell me
something about every stone."

They talked for two hours, and of much beside Bruges. Haphazardly as she
had been educated in this new land, her natural intelligence had found
nutrition in her father's mind and library. Thorpe noted that when
talking on subjects which appealed to the intellect alone, her face
changed strikingly: the heavy lids lifted, the eyes sparkled coldly, the
mouth lost its full curves. Even her voice, so warm and soft, became,
more than once, harsh and sharp.

"There are several women in her," he thought. "She certainly is very
interesting. I should like to meet her again ten years hence."

He did.

"Why don't you travel?" he asked. "It would mean so much more to you
than to most women. Even if Mr. Randolph cannot leave this fair young
city he is building up, and your mother won't leave him, you could go
with some one else--"

"I never expect to leave California," she said shortly. Then, as she met
his look of surprise, she added: "I told you a fib when I said that I
did not dream, or only a little. I get out of my own life for hours at
a time by imagining myself in Europe, cultivating my mind, my taste for
art, to their utmost limit, living a sort of impersonal life--Of course
there are times when I imagine myself with some one who would care for
it all as much as I, and know more--and all that. But I try to keep to
the other. I have suffered enough to know that in the impersonal life is
the surest content. And as for the other--it could not be, even if I
ever met such a man. But dreams help one enormously, and I am the richer
for all I have indulged in."

Thorpe stood up again. Under a rather impassive exterior, he was a
restless man, and his acquaintance with Nina Randolph had tried his
nerves.

"I wish you had not given me half confidences, or that you would refrain
from rousing my curiosity--my interest, as you do. It is hardly fair. I
don't wish to know what the family skeleton is, but I do want to know
_you_ better. If you want the truth, I have never been so _intrigué_ by
a woman in my life. And I have never so wanted to help one. I have been
so drawn to you that I have had a sense of having done you a personal
wrong ever since the other night. A man does not usually feel that way
when he kisses a girl. I see it is no use to ask your confidence now;
but, mind, I don't say I sha'n't demand it later on."

At this moment the butler entered with the lamps. He was followed
immediately by Mr. Randolph, who exclaimed delightedly:

"Is it really you, Mr. Thorpe? I have just sent you a note asking you to
dine with us on Sunday. And you'll stay to dinner to-night--no, I won't
listen to any excuses. If you knew what a pleasure it is to meet an
Englishman once more!"

"Hastings will think I am lost--"

"I'll send him a note, and ask him to come in for the evening, and I'll
get in a dozen of our neighbours. We'll have some music and fun."

"Very well--I am rather keen on staying, to tell you the truth. Many
thanks."

"Sit down. You must see something of sport here. It is very interesting
in this wild country."

"I should like it above all things." Thorpe sat forward eagerly,
forgetting Miss Randolph. "What have you that's new? I've killed pretty
nearly everything."

"We will have an elk hunt."

"I want to go, too," said Nina, authoritatively.

Thorpe turned, and smiled, as he saw the hasty retreat of an angry
sparkle.

"I am afraid you would be a disturbing influence," he said gallantly.

"I shouldn't disturb you," she said, with the pertness of a spoilt
child. "I am a good shot myself. I can go--can't I, papa?"

Mr. Randolph smiled indulgently. "You can do anything you like, my
darling," he said. "I wonder you condescend to ask."

Nina ran over and kissed him, then propped her chin on top of his head
and looked defiantly at Thorpe.

"If you don't take me," she remarked, drily, "there will be no hunt."

"On the whole, I think my mind would concentrate better if you were not
absent," he said.

She blew him a kiss. "You _are_ improving. _Hasta luego!_ I must go and
smooth my feathers." And she ran out of the room.

The two men talked of the threatened civil upheaval in the United States
until dinner was announced, a half hour later.

Mrs. Randolph did not appear until the soup had been removed. She
entered the dining-room hurriedly, muttering an apology. Her toilette
had evidently been made in haste: her brooch was awry; and her hair,
banded down the face after the fashion of the time, hung an inch below
one ear and exposed the lobe of the other, dealing detrimentally with
her dignity, despite her fine physique.

She took no part in the conversation for some time. It was very lively.
Mr. Randolph was full of anecdote and information, and enjoyed
scintillating. He frequently referred to Nina, as if proud of her
cleverness and anxious to exhibit it; but the guest noticed that he
never addressed a word--nor a glance--to his wife.

Suddenly Thorpe's eyes rested on a small dark painting in oils, the head
of an old man.

"That is rather good," he said, "and a very interesting face."

"You have probably never heard of the artist, unless you have read the
life of his sister. I was so fond of the man that I resent his rescue
from oblivion by the fame of a woman. His name was Branwell Brontë, and
that is a portrait of my grandfather."

"If Branwell 'ad a-conducted hisself," said a heavy voice opposite,
"'ee'd a-been the wonder of the family. Mony a time a 've seen 'im coom
into tha Lord Rodney Inn, 'is sharp little face as red as tha scoollery
maid's 'ands, and rockin' from one side of tha 'all to tha hother, and
sit doon at tha table, and make a carica_chure_ of ivvery mon thot coom
in. And once when 'ee was station-master at Luddondon Foote a 've 'eard
as 'ow a mon coom runnin' oop just as tha train went oot, and said as
'ow 'ee was horful anxious to know if a certain mon went hoff. 'Ee tried
describin' 'im, and couldn't, so Branwell drew pictures of all the
persons as 'ad left, and 'ee recog_nised_ the one as 'ee wanted."

There was a moment's silence, so painful that Thorpe felt his nerves
jumping and the colour rising to his face. He recalled his promise, and
looked meditatively at the strange concoction which had been placed
before him as Mrs. Randolph finished. But his thought was arbitrary. An
ignorant woman of the people, possibly an ex-servant, who could only
play the gentlewoman through a half-dozen rehearsed sentences, and
forget the rôle completely at times! He had not expected to find the
skeleton so soon.

"That is _carne con agi_, a Chile dish," said Mr. Randolph, suavely.
"I'm very fond of Spanish cooking, myself, and you had better begin your
education in it at once: you will get a good deal out here."

"I am jolly glad to hear it. I'm rather keen on new dishes." He glanced
up. Mr. Randolph was yellow. The lines in his face had deepened. Thorpe
dared not look at Nina.




III


Some eight or ten people, including Hastings, came in after dinner.
Mrs. Randolph had gone upstairs from the dining-room, and did not
appear again. Her dampening influence removed, Mr. Randolph and Nina
recovered their high light spirits; and there was much music and more
conversation. Miss Randolph had a soprano voice of piercing sweetness,
which flirted effectively with Captain Hastings' tenor. Thorpe thought
Hastings an ass for rolling his eyes out of his head, and finally turned
his back on the piano to meet the large amused glance of Miss Hathaway.
He sat down beside her, and, being undisturbed for ten minutes, found
her willing to converse, or rather to express a number of decided
opinions. She told him whom he was to know, what parts of California he
was to visit, how long he was to stay, and after what interval he was to
return. Thorpe listened with much entertainment, for her voice was not
tuned to friendly advice, but to command. Her great eyes were as cold as
icicles under a blue light; but there was a certain cordiality in their
invitation to flirt. Thorpe did not respond. If he had known her first,
he reflected, he should doubtless have made an attempt to dispossess
her court; but the warm magnetic influence of Nina Randolph held him,
strengthened by her demand upon his sympathy. Still he felt that Miss
Hathaway was a person to like, and remained at her side until he was
dismissed in favour of Hastings; when he talked for a time to the
intellectual Miss McDermott, the sweet and slangy Miss McAllister, who
looked like an angel and talked like a gamin, to Don Roberto Yorba, a
handsome and exquisitely attired little grandee who was trying to look
as much like an American as his friend Hiram Polk, with his lantern jaws
and angular figure. It was the first city Thorpe had visited where there
was no type: everybody suggested being the father or mother of one, and
was of an individuality so pronounced that the stranger marvelled they
were not all at one another's throats. But he had never seen people more
amiable and fraternal.

He did not see Nina alone again until a few moments before he left. He
drew her out into the hall while Hastings was saying good-night to Mr.
Randolph.

"May I come often?" he asked.

"_Will_ you?"

"I certainly shall."

"Will you talk to me about things that men scarcely ever talk to girls
about,--books and art--and--what one thinks about more than what one
does."

"I'll talk about anything under heaven that you want to talk
about--particularly yourself."

"I don't want to talk about myself."

Her face was sparkling with coquetry, but it flushed under the intensity
of his gaze. His brown skin was paler than when he had entered the
house, his hard features were softened by the shaded lamp of the hall,
and his grey eyes had kindled as he took her hand. She looked very
lovely in a white gown touched up with red velvet bows.

"I believe you'll be a tremendous flirt by the time you leave here," she
said, trying to draw her hand away. "And don't tell me this is your
first experience in eight years."

"I've known a good many women," he said, bluntly. "At present I am only
following your cues--and there are a bewildering lot of them. When you
are serious, I shall be serious. When you are not--I shall endeavour to
be frivolous. To be honest, however, I have no intention of flirting
with you, fascinating and provocative as you are. I'd like awfully to be
your intimate friend, but nothing more. Good-night."




IV


South Park in the Fifties and Sixties was the gayest quarter of
respectable San Francisco, with not a hint of the gloom which now
presses about it like a pall. The two concave rows of houses were the
proudest achievements of Western masonry, and had a somewhat haughty
air, as if conscious of the importance they sheltered. The inner park
was green and flowered; the flag of the United States floated proudly
above. The whole precinct had that atmosphere of happy informality
peculiar to the brief honeymoon of a great city. People ran, hatless,
in and out of each other's houses, and sat on the doorsteps when the
weather was fine. The present aristocracy of San Francisco, the landed
gentry of California whose coat-of-arms should be a cocktail, a side of
mutton, or a dishonest contract, would give not a few of their dollars
for personal memories of that crumbling enclosure at the foot of the
hill: memories that would be welcome even with the skeleton which,
rambling through these defaced abandoned houses, they might expect to
see grinning in dark spidery corners or in rat-claimed cupboards. Poor
old houses! They have kept silent and faithful guard over the dark tales
and tragic secrets of their youth; curiosity has been forced to satisfy
itself with little more than vague and ugly rumour. The memories that
throng them tell little to any but the dead.

There lived, in those days, the Randolphs, the Hathaways, the Dom Pedro
Earles, the Hunt McLanes, the three families to which the famous "Macs"
belonged, and others that have no place in this story. Before his second
week in California was finished, Thorpe knew them all, and was petted
and made much of; for San Francisco, then as now, dearly loved the
aristocratic stranger. He rode into the city every day, either alone or
with Hastings, and rarely returned without spending several moments or
hours with Nina Randolph. Sometimes she was alone, sometimes companioned
by her intimate friend, Molly Shropshire,--a large masculine girl of
combative temper and imbued with disapproval of man. She made no
exception in favour of Thorpe, and when he did not find her in the way,
he rather enjoyed quarrelling with her. Mrs. Randolph made no more
abrupt incursions into the table talk and spent most of her time in her
room. Occasionally Thorpe met in the hall a coarse-looking woman whom he
knew to be a Mrs. Reinhardt and the favoured friend of Mrs. Randolph.
Mr. Randolph was often in brilliant spirits; at other times he looked
harassed and sad; but he always made Thorpe feel the welcome guest.

Thorpe, during the first fortnight of their acquaintance, snubbed his
maiden attempt to understand Nina Randolph; it was so evident that she
did not wish to be understood that he could but respect her reserve.
Besides, she was the most charming woman in the place, and that was
enough to satisfy any visitor. Just after that he began to see her alone
every day; Miss Shropshire had retired to the obscurity of her chamber
with a cold, and socialities rarely began before night. They took long
walks together in the wild environs of the city, once or twice as far as
the sea. Both had a high fine taste in literature, and she was eager for
the books of travel he had lived. He sounded her, to discover if she
had ambition, for she was an imperious little queen in society; but she
convinced him that, when alone or with him, she rose high above the
petty strata of life. With a talent, she could have been one of the most
rapt and impersonal slaves of Art the world had ever known; and, as it
was, her perception for beauty was extraordinary. Thorpe wished that she
could carry out her imaginings and live a life of study in Europe; it
seemed a great pity that she should marry and settle down into a mere
leader of society.

Toward the end of the second fortnight, he began to wonder whether he
should care to marry her, were he ready for domesticity, and were there
no disquieting mystery about her. He concluded that he should not, as he
should doubtless be insanely in love with her if he loved her at all,
and she was too various of mood for a man's peace of mind. But in the
wake of these reflections came the impulse to analyse her, and he made
no further attempt to snub it.

He went one evening to the house of Mrs. Hunt McLane, a beautiful young
Creole who held the reins of the infant city's society in her small
determined hands. Born into the aristocracy of Louisiana, she had grown
up in the salon. Her husband had arrived in San Francisco at the period
when a class of rowdies known as "The Hounds" were terrorising the city,
and, when they were finally arrested and brought to trial, conducted the
prosecution. The brilliant legal talent he displayed, the tremendous
personal force which carried every jury he addressed, established
his position at the head of the bar at once. His wife, with her wide
knowledge of the world, her tact, magnetism, and ambition, found no one
to dispute her social leadership.

As Thorpe entered, she was standing at the head of the long parlour; and
with her high-piled hair, _poudré_, her gown of dark-red velvet, and her
haughty carriage, she looked as if she had just stepped from an old
French canvas.

She smiled brilliantly as Thorpe approached her, and he was made to feel
himself the guest of the evening,--a sensation he shared with every one
in the room.

"I have not seen you for three days and seven hours," she said. "How
are all your flirtations getting on?"

"All my what?"

"Dominga Earle is making frantic eyes at you," indicating, with a rapid
motion of her pupils, a tall slender Mexican who undulated like a snake
and whose large black fan and eyes were never idle. "'Lupie Hathaway is
looking coldly expectant; and Nina Randolph, who was wholly animated a
moment ago, is now quite listless. Not that you are to feel particularly
flattered; you are merely something new. Turn over the pages,--Dominga
is going to sing,--and I am convinced that she will surpass herself."

Mrs. Earle was swaying on the piano stool. Her black eyes flashed a
welcome to Thorpe, as he moved obediently to her side. Then she threw
back her head, raised her eyebrows, dilated her nostrils, and in a
ringing contralto sang a Spanish love-song. Thorpe could not understand
a word of it, but inferred that it was passionate from the accompaniment
of glance which played between himself and a tall blonde man leaning
over the piano.

When the song and its encore finished, she was immediately surrounded,
and Thorpe slipped away. Miss Randolph was barricaded. He went over to
Miss Hathaway, who sat between Hastings and another officer, _looking_
impartially at each. They were dismissed in a manner which made them
feel the honour of her caprice.

"That was good of you," said Thorpe, sinking into a chair opposite her.
"It is rarely that one can get a word with you, merely a glance over
three feet of shoulder."

Miss Hathaway made no reply. It was one of her idiosyncrasies never to
take the slightest notice of a compliment. She was looking very
handsome, although her attire, as ever, suggested a cold disregard of
the looking-glass. Thorpe, who was beginning to understand her, did not
feel snubbed, but fell to wondering what sort of a time Hastings would
have of it when he proposed.

She regarded him meditatively for a moment, then remarked; "You are
absent-minded to-night, and that makes you look rather stupid."

Again Thorpe was not disconcerted. Speeches of this sort from Miss
Hathaway were to be hailed as signs of favour. If she did not like a
man, she did not talk to him at all. He might sit opposite her
throughout the night, and she would not part her lips.

"I am stupid," he replied. "I have been all day."

"What is the matter?" Her voice did not soften as another woman's might
have done, but it betrayed interest. "Are you puzzling?"

He coloured, nettled at her insight; but he answered, coldly:--

"Yes; I am puzzling."

"Do not," said Miss Hathaway, significantly. "Puzzle about any one else
in California, but not about Nina Randolph."

"What is this mystery?" he exclaimed impatiently, then added hastily,
"oh, bother! I am too much of a wanderer to puzzle over any one."

Miss Hathaway fixed her large cold blue regard upon him. "Do you love
Nina Randolph?" she asked.

"I am afraid I love all women too much to trust to my own selection of
one."

"Now you are stupid. Go and talk to Nina." She turned her back upon him,
and smiled indulgently to a new-comer.

He crossed the room; a group of men parted with indifferent grace, and
he leaned over Nina's chair.

She was looking gay and free of care, and her eyes flashed a frank
welcome to Thorpe. "I thought you were not coming to talk to me," she
said, with a little pout.

"Duty first," he murmured. "Come over into the little reception-room and
talk to me."

"What am I to do with all these men?"

"Nothing."

"You are very exacting--for a friend."

"If you are a good friend, you will come. I am tired and bored."

She rose, shook out her pretty pink skirts, nodded to her admirers, and
walked off with Thorpe.

He laughed. "Perhaps they will console themselves with the reflection
that as they have spoiled you, they should stand the consequences."

They took possession of a little sofa in the reception-room. Another
couple was in the window curve, and yet another opposite.

"We have not had our hunt," said Nina; "the country has been a mud-hole.
But we are to have it on Monday, if all goes well."

"Who else is to be of the party?"

"Molly, Guadalupe, and Captain Hastings. Don't speak of it to any one
else. I don't want a crowd."

She lay back, her skirts sweeping his feet. A pink ribbon was twisted in
her hair. The colour in her cheeks was pink. The pose of her head, as
she absently regarded the stupid frescoes on the ceiling, strained her
beautiful throat, making it look as hard as ivory, accentuating the
softer loveliness of the neck. Thorpe looked at her steadily. He rarely
touched her hand.

"I have something else in store for you," she said, after a moment.
"Just beyond the army posts are great beds of wild strawberries. It was
a custom in the Spanish days to get up large parties every spring and
camp there, gather strawberries, wander on the beach and over the hills,
and picnic generally. We have kept it up; and if this weather lasts, if
spring is really here, a crowd of us are going in a couple of weeks--you
included. You have no idea what fun it is!"

"I shall not try to imagine it." He spoke absently. He was staring at a
curling lock that had strayed over her temple. He wanted to blow it.

"I am tired," she said. "Talk to me. I have been gabbling for an hour."

"I'm not in the mood for talking," he said, shortly. "But keep quiet, if
you want to. I suppose we know each other well enough for that."

The other people left the room. Nina arranged herself more comfortably,
and closed her eyes. Her mouth relaxed slightly, and Thorpe saw the
lines about it. She looked older when the animation was out of her face,
but none the less attractive. His eyes fell on her neck. He moved
closer. She opened her eyes, and he raised his. The colour left her
face, and she rose.

"Take me to papa," she said; "I am going home."




V


The party for the elk-hunt assembled at Mr. Randolph's door at four
o'clock on Monday morning. Miss Hathaway's large Spanish eyes were heavy
with the languor of her race. Miss Shropshire looked cross. Even the men
were not wholly animate. Nina alone was as widely awake as the
retreating stars. She rode ahead with Thorpe.

They made for the open country beyond the city. What is now a large and
populous suburb, was then a succession of sand dunes, in whose valleys
were thickets of scrub oak, chaparral, and willows. A large flat lying
between Rincon Hill and Mission Bay was the favourite resort of elk,
deer, antelope, and the less aristocratic coyote and wild cat. It was to
this flat that Mr. Randolph's party took their way, accompanied by
vaqueros leading horses upon which to bring back the spoils of the
morning.

The hour was grey and cold. The landscape looked inexpressibly bleak. A
blustering wind travelled between the sea and the bay. From the crests
of the hills they had an occasional glimpse of water and of the
delapidated Mission, solitary on its cheerless plain. In the little
valleys, the thickets were so dense they were obliged to bend their
heads. The morning was intensely still, but for the soft pounding of the
horses' hoofs on the yielding earth, the long despairing cry of the
coyote, the sudden flight of a startled wild cat.

"We are all so modern, we seem out of place in this wilderness," said
Thorpe. "I can hardly accept the prophecy of your father and other
prominent men here, that San Francisco will one day be the great
financial and commercial centre of Western America. It seems to me as
hopeless as making cake out of bran."

"Just you wait," said Nina, tossing her head. "It will come in our time,
in my father's time. You haven't got the feel of the place yet, haven't
got it into your bones. And you don't know what we Californians can do,
when we put our minds to it."

"I hope I shall see it," he replied, smiling; "I hope to see California
at many stages of her growth. I am a nomad, you know, and I shall make
it the objective point of my travels hereafter. The changes--I don't
doubt if they come at all they will ride the lightning--will interest me
deeply. May there be none in you," he added, gallantly. "I cannot
imagine any."

Her eyes drooped, and her underlids pressed upward,--a repellant trick
that had made Thorpe uncomfortable more than once. "That is where you
will find the changes upon which the city will not pride itself," she
said. "Fortunately, there won't be many of them."

"You are unfair," he said, angrily. "You told me to ask you no
questions, and this is not the first time you have deliberately pricked
my curiosity--that is not the word, either. The first night I dined at
your house--" he stopped, biting his lip. He had said more than he
intended.

"I know. You thought you had discovered the secret--I know exactly what
you thought. But you have come to the conclusion since that there is
more behind. Well, you are right."

"What is your secret? I have had opportunities to discover. I hope I
need not tell you that I have shut my ears; but I wish you would tell
me. I don't like mystery. It is sensational and old-fashioned. Between
such friends as ourselves, it is entirely without excuse. It is more
than possible that, girl-like, you have exaggerated its importance, and
you are in danger of becoming morbid. But, whether it is real or
imaginary, let me help you. Every woman needs a man's help, and you can
have all of mine that you want. Only don't keep prodding my imagination,
and telling me not to think. I am close upon thinking of nothing else."

"Well, just fancy that that is my way of making myself interesting;
that I cannot help flirting a little, even with friends." She laughed
lightly; but her face, which was not always under her control, had
changed: it looked dull and heavy.

"That is pure nonsense," he said, shortly. "Do you suppose you make
yourself more interesting by hinting that your city will one day be
ashamed of you?"

"Ah, perhaps _that_ was an exaggeration."

"I should hope so."

"I meant one's city need not know everything."

"You are unpleasantly perverse this morning. I choose to take what you
said as an exaggeration; but there is something behind, and I feel
strongly impelled to say that if you don't tell me I shall leave."

"If I did, you would take the next steamer."

"I am the one to decide that. At least give me the opportunity to reduce
your mountain to a mole-hill."

"Even you could not. And look--I see no reason why friends should wish
to get at one another's inner life. The companionship of friends is
mental only. I have given you my mind freely. You have no right to ask
for my soul. You are not my lover, and you don't wish to be, although I
don't doubt that at times you imagine you do."

"I am free to confess that I have imagined it more than once. I will
set the example by being perfectly frank with you. If I could understand
you, if I were not tormented by all sorts of dreadful possibilities,
I should have let myself go long before this. Does that sound
cold-blooded? I can only say in explanation that I was born with a good
deal of self-control, and that I have strengthened my will by exercise.
It would be either one extreme or the other with me. At first I thought
I should not want to marry you in any case. I am now sufficiently in
love with you to long to be wholly so."

Nina stole a glance at him with a woman's uncontrollable curiosity, even
in great moments. But he had turned his head from her, and was hitting
savagely at his boot.

"I will be frank to this extent, by way of return: The barrier between
us is insurmountable, and you would be the first to admit it. I will
tell you the whole truth the day before you leave; that must content
you. And, meanwhile, nip in the bud what is merely a compound of
sympathy and passion. I know the influence I exert perfectly. I have
seen more than one man go off his head. It humiliates me beyond
expression."

"It need not--although it is extremely distasteful to me that you should
have seen men go off their heads, as you express it. But passion is the
mightiest factor in love; there is no love without it, and it is bound
to predominate until it is satisfied. Then the affections claim their
part; and a dozen other factors, mental companionship for one, enter in.
But, for Heaven's sake, don't add to your morbidity by despising
yourself because you inspire passion in men. The women who do not are
not worth considering."

"Is that true? Well, I am glad you have suggested another way of looking
at it. I don't think I am morbid. At all events no one in this world
ever made a harder fight not to be."

They were riding through a thicket, and he turned and brought his face
so close to hers that she had only a flashing glimpse of its pallor and
of the flame in his eyes.

"It is your constant fight that wrings my heart," he said. "Whatever it
is against, I will make it with you, if you will let me. I am strong
enough for both. And who am I that I should judge you? I have not lived
the life of a saint. We all have our ideals. Mine has been never to give
way except when I chose, never to let my senses control my mind for an
instant. I believe, therefore, that I am strong enough to help and
protect you against everything. And, whatever it is, you shall never be
judged by me."

They left the thicket at the moment, and she pushed her horse aside,
that she might no longer feel Thorpe's touch, his breath on her neck.
"You are the most generous of men," she said; "and you can have the
satisfaction of knowing that you have made me think better of myself and
of human nature than I have ever thought before. But I cannot marry you.
Not only is the barrier insurmountable, but I don't love you. Here we
are."




VI


Thorpe at this time spent few hours in his own company. There was
abundant distraction: either a social entertainment every day or
evening, or a lark in the city. The wild life about the plaza, the
gambling houses, the saloons, the fatal encounters in the dark
contiguous streets, the absolute recklessness of the men and women,
interested him profoundly. As he spent money freely, and never passed a
gaming table without tossing down a handful of coin as ardently as any
adventurer, he was popular, and free to come and go as he liked.

The scene which he most frequented, which rose most vividly when he was
living his later life in England, was El Dorado. It had three great
windows on the plaza and six in its length,--something over a hundred
and twenty feet. The brilliant and extraordinary scene within was
visible to those who shunned it but stood with a fascinated stare; for
its curtains were never drawn, its polished windows were close upon
the sidewalk. On one side, down its entire length, was a bar set with
expensive crystal, over which passed every variety of drink known to
the appetite of man. Behind the bar were mirrors from floor to ceiling,
reflecting the room, doubling the six crystal blazing chandeliers, the
forty or fifty tables piled high with gold and silver, the hard intent
faces of the gamblers, the dense throng that ever sauntered in the
narrow aisles. At the lower end was a platform on which musicians played
droning tunes on hurdy-gurdies, and Mexican girls, who looked like
devils, danced. In the middle of the platform, awaiting the counters of
the patrons of the bar, one woman sat always. She was French, and dark,
and handsome, and weighed three hundred pounds. Dressing such a person
was expensive in those days of incredible prices, and that room was very
warm; she wore but a yard or two of silk somewhere about the belt.

Thorpe often sat and watched the faces of the gamblers: the larger
number were gently born, and more than one told him that he had been a
schoolmaster, a college professor, a clergyman, a lawyer, a doctor--all
had failed, or had been ambitious for quicker betterment, and drifted
to the golden land, there to feel the full weight of their own
incompetence. They came there night after night, and when they had no
money to gamble with they sauntered with the throng, or leaned heavily
against the noble pillars which supported the ceiling. Thorpe afterward
often wondered what had become of them. It is doubtful if there is a
living soul who knows.

Occasionally Thorpe picked up a heap of woman in the street, put it in
a carriage, and saw it safely to a night's lodging. Sometimes the woman
mumbled feeble gratitude, as often cursed him because he would not give
her drink. One night, when rambling about alone, he knocked down a man
who was beating a pretty young Mexican woman, then collared and carried
him off to the calaboose. The girl died, and a few days later he went to
the court-house to testify. The small room was packed; the jurors were
huddled in a corner, where they not only listened to the testimony, but
were obliged to talk out their verdict, there being no other
accommodation.

The trial was raced through in San Francisco style, but lasted several
hours. Thorpe sat it out. There was no testimony but his and that of the
coroner; but the lawyer and the district-attorney tilted with animus and
vehemence. When they had concluded, the judge rose, stretched himself,
and turned to the jury.

"You've heard the whole case," he remarked. "So you do your level best
while I go out for a drink. He killed her or he didn't. It's swing or
quit." And, expectorating impatiently among the audience, he sauntered
out.

The jury returned a verdict of "not guilty," and the man was lynched in
the quiet and orderly manner of that time.




VII


A week later forty or fifty people were camped beside the strawberry
fields on the hills beyond the army posts and sloping to the ocean. Mr.
Randolph and Nina, the McLanes, Miss Hathaway, Miss Shropshire, the
"three Macs," the Earles, and a half-dozen young men were domiciled in a
small village of tents on the eminence nearest the city. The encampments
were a mile apart; and in the last of them a number of the Californian
grandees who had made the land Arcadia under Mexican rule enjoyed the
hospitality of Don Tiburcio Castro, a great rancher who was making an
attempt to adapt himself to the new city and its enterprising promoters.

Thorpe and Hastings walked over from the Presidio. They found the
entire party assembled before the largest tent, which flew the American
flag. As the young men approached, all of the ladies formed quickly into
line, two and two, and walked forward to meet them. The men, much
mystified, paused, raised their caps, and stood expectant. Mrs. McLane
stepped from the ranks, and, with much ceremony, unrolled several yards
of tissue paper, then shook forth the silken folds of the English flag,
and presented it to Thorpe.

"It is made from our sashes, and we all sewed on it," she announced.
"You will sleep better if the Union Jack is flying over your tent."

"How awfully jolly--what a stunning compliment," stammered Thorpe,
embarrassed and pleased. "It shall decorate some part of my surroundings
as long as I live."

Mr. Randolph himself fixed the flag, and Thorpe exclaimed impulsively to
Mrs. McLane, with whom he stood apart: "Upon my word, I believe I am
coming under the spell. I wonder if I shall ever want to leave
California?"

"Why not stay? Unless you have ambitions, and want to run for Parliament
or be a diplomat or something, or are wedded to the English on their
native heath, I don't see why you shouldn't remain here. It is rather
slow for us women: we are obliged to be twice as proper as the women of
older civilisations; but a man, I should think, especially a man of
resource like you, ought to find twenty different ways of amusing
himself. You not only can have all that is exciting in San Francisco,
watching a city trying to kick out of its long clothes, but you can
saunter about the country and see the grandees in their towns and on
their ranchos, to say nothing of the scenery, which is said to be
magnificent."

"It isn't a bad idea. My past is not oppressing me, but I believe I
should enjoy the sensation of beginning life over again. It would be
that--certainly. But then I am an Englishman, you know, and English
roots strike deep. Still, I have a half mind to buy a ranch here and
come back every year or so. And I have a favourite brother who is rather
delicate; it would be a good life for him."

"Do think of it," said Mrs. McLane, in the final tone with which she
dismissed a subject that could claim her interest so long and no longer.
She had liked Thorpe more in Paris, where he was not in love with
another woman. She moved away with her husband, a big burly man with a
face curiously like Sir Walter Scott's, and Thorpe plunged his hands in
his pockets and strolled over the hill. The slopes were covered with
strawberry vines down to the broad white beach. The large calm waves of
the Pacific rolled ponderously in and fell down. Cityward was the Golden
Gate with its white bar. Beyond it were steep cliffs, gorgeous with
colour.

"Does England really exist?" he thought. "One could do anything reckless
in this country."

He had been the only man to miss his elk at the hunt, and he had spent
the rest of the day in hard riding. When the fever wore off, his reason
was thankful that Nina Randolph had refused him, and he made up his mind
to leave California by the next steamer. He had heard of the wonders
worked by Time, and none knew better than he how to make life varied
and interesting. He persuaded himself that he was profoundly relieved
that she did not love him. Once or twice he had been nearly sure that
she did. He had not seen her alone since the morning of the hunt, and,
when they had met, her manner had been as frank and friendly as ever.

He joined Mrs. Earle, who had draped a reboso about her head, and was
fluttering an immense fan. For the first time since his arrival in San
Francisco, he plunged into a deliberate flirtation. Mrs. Earle was one
of those women who flirt from the crown of her head to the sole of her
foot, and she was so thin that Thorpe fancied he could see the springs
which kept her skeleton in such violent motion. Her eyebrows were
marvels of muscular ingenuity, and all the passions were in a pair of
great black eyes which masked a brain too shrewd to try the indulgence
of old Dom Pedro Earle, a doughty Scot, too far.

Once, as they repassed a tent, Thorpe saw a vibration of the door, and a
half moment later heard a loud crash. Mrs. Earle's eyebrows went up to
her hair, but she only said:

"Your eyes are as grey and cold as that sea, señor; but they will get
into a fine blaze some day, and then they will burn a hole in some poor
woman's heart. And your jaw! _Dios de mi alma!_ What a tyrant you must
be--over yourself most of all! I flirt with you no more. You are the
sort of man that husbands are so jealous of, because you do not know how
to trifle. _Adios, señor, adios!_"

She swayed over to her husband; and at the same moment Nina ran out of
the tent which had attracted Thorpe's attention. She wore a short white
frock and a large white hat, which made her look very young. In her hand
she carried a small tin horn, upon which she immediately gave a shrill
blast.

"That means work," she cried. "Get down to the patch."

The servants spread a long table on a level spot, and fetched water from
a spring, carrying the jugs on their shoulders. The cook, in a tent
apart, worked leisurely at a savory supper. The guests scattered among
the strawberry-beds, and plucked the large red fruit. Each had a small
Mexican basket, and culled as rapidly as possible; the positions they
were forced to assume were not comfortable. All were very gay, and now
and then fought desperately for a well-favoured vine.

Nina, who had been ousted by Mrs. Earle's long arms, which flashed round
a glowing patch like two serpents, sprang up and ran down to the foot of
the hill, where the vines were more straggling and less popular. Thorpe
followed, laughing. Her hat had been lost in the fray; her hair was down
and blown about in the evening wind, and her cheeks were crimson.

"I hate long-legged long-armed giantesses," she exclaimed, attacking a
vine spitefully. "And Spanish people are treacherous, anyhow. That patch
was mine."

Thorpe laughed heartily. Her temper was genuine. His spirits suddenly
felt lighter; she looked like a spoilt child, not like a girl with a
tragic secret.

"She upset my basket, too," continued Nina, viciously. "But she upset
half her own at the same time, and I trod on them, on purpose."

"Here, let me fill your basket while you make a mud pie." He plucked his
portion and hers, while she dug her fingers into the sand, and recovered
her temper. As Thorpe dropped the replenished basket into her lap, she
tossed her hair out of her eyes, and smiled up at him.

"Sit down and rest," she said, graciously. "Supper won't be ready for a
half hour yet, and that hill is something to climb."

The others had finished their task, and disappeared over the brow of the
hill. The west was golden; even the sea was yellow for the moment.

"We know how to enjoy ourselves out here," said Nina, contentedly,
sinking her elbow into the sand. "I should think it a good place to
pitch your tent."

She flirted her eyelashes at him, and looked so incapable of being
serious that he answered, promptly,--

"I shall, if I can find some one to make it comfortable."

"You don't need to go begging. You're quite the belle. Several that are
more or less _éprises_ are splendid housekeepers."

"I am not looking for a housekeeper."

"What are you looking for?" she asked, audaciously. Her chin was in her
hand; her unbound hair clung about her; her tiny feet moved beneath the
hem of her frock.

He also was lying on his elbow, his face close to hers. He had always
followed her cues, and if she wished to flirt at this late date he was
quite willing to respond. He made up his mind abruptly to dismiss all
plans and drift with the tide.

"You," he said, softly.

"Are you proposing to me?"

He noted that she ignored his actual proposal, and commended her tact.

"I am not so sure that I am; I am surer that I want to."

"You are a cautious calculating Englishman."

"I believe I am--up to a certain point."

"Your face looks so hard and brown in that shadow. I've had men propose
the third time they met me."

"Probably."

"You can propose, if it will ease your mind. I shall never marry."

"Why not?"

"I think it would be heavenly to be an old maid, and make patchwork
quilts for missionaries."

"I shall take pleasure in imagining you in the rôle when I am digging
away at Blue Books and Reports."

"Ah, never, never more!" she chanted, lightly.

He paled slightly, then lifted a strand of her hair and drew it across
his lips. It was the first caress he had given her in their six weeks of
friendly intimacy, and her colour deepened. He shook the hair over her
face. Her eyes peered out elfishly.

"I suspect we are going to flirt this week," she said, drily.

"If you choose to call it that." Her hair was clinging about his
fingers.

"Suppose we make a compact--to regard nothing seriously that may occur
this week."

"Why are you so afraid of compromising yourself?"

"That belongs to the final explanation. But it is a recognised canon of
strawberry-week ethics that everybody flirts furiously. Friendship is
entirely too serious. Of course I shall flirt with you,--I shall let
Dominga Earle see that at once,--as I am tired of all the others. Will
you make the compact?"

"Yes."

The sun had dropped below the ocean; only a bar of paling green lay on
the horizon. Voices came faintly over the hill, and the shadows were
rapidly gathering.

Thorpe's face moved suddenly to hers. He flung her hair aside and kissed
her. She did not respond, nor move. But when he kissed her again and
again, she did not repulse him.

"I want you to understand this," he said, and his voice had softened, a
rare variation, nor was it steady. "I have not let myself go because you
proposed that compact. I am quite willing to forget it."

"But I am not. I expect you to remember it."

"Very well, we can settle that later. Meanwhile, for this week, we will
be happy. Have you ever let any man kiss you before?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know? What a thing to say!"

"Some one may have found me napping, you know."

"You are very fond of being enigmatical. Why can't you give a straight
answer to a straight question?"

"Well--what I meant was that you should not ask impertinent questions.
But, if you insist,--as far as I know, only two men have kissed me,--you
and my father."

He drew a quick breath. The ugliest fear that had haunted him took
flight. He believed her to be truthful.

He stood up suddenly, and drawing her with him, held her closely until
he felt her self-control giving way. When he kissed her again, she put
up her arms and clung to him, and kissed him for the first time. He knew
then, whatever her reason for suggesting such a compact, or her ultimate
purpose, that she loved him.

The mighty blast of a horn echoed among the hills and cliffs. Nina
sprang from Thorpe's arms.

"That is one of papa's jokes," she said. "It isn't the horn of the
hunter, but of the farmer. Come, supper is ready. Oh, dear!" She
clapped her hands to her head. "I can't go up with my hair looking like
this. I can just see the polaric disgust of the Hathaway orbs; it goes
through one like blue needles. And then the malicious snap of Mrs.
Earle's, and the faint amusement of Mrs. McLane's. And I've lost my
hairpins! And I never--never--can get to my tent unseen. I'm living with
'Lupie and Molly, and they're sure to be late--on purpose; I hate
women--Here! Braid it. Don't tell me you can't! You must!"

She presented her back to Thorpe, who was clumsily endeavouring to adapt
himself to her mood. The discipline of the last six weeks stood him in
good stead.

"Upon my word!" he exclaimed, in dismay, "I never braided a woman's hair
in my life."

"Quick! Divide it in three strands--even--then one over the other--Oh,
an idiot could braid hair! Tighter. Ow! Oh, you _are_ so clumsy."

"I know it," humbly. "But it clings to my fingers. I believe you have it
charged with electricity. It doesn't look very even."

"I don't imagine it does. But it feels as if it would do. Half way down
will be enough--"

"Hallo!" came Hastings's voice from the top of the hill. "Are you two
lost in a quicksand?"

"Coming!" cried Nina. She sprang lightly up the hill, chattering as
merrily as if she and the silent man beside her had spent the last
half-hour flinging pebbles into the ocean.

They separated on the crest of the hill, and went to their respective
tents. A few moments later Nina appeared at the supper-table with her
disordered locks concealed by a network of sweet-brier. The effect was
novel and bizarre, the delicate pink and green very becoming.

"Heaven knows when I'll ever get it off," she whispered to Thorpe, as
she took the chair at his side. "It has three thousand thorns."

The girls were in their highest spirit at the supper-table. Mr. McLane
and Mr. Randolph were in their best vein, and Hastings and Molly
Shropshire talked incessantly. Thorpe heard little that was said; he was
consumed with the desire to be alone with Nina Randolph again.

But she would have no more of him that night. After supper, a huge
bonfire was built on the edge of a jutting cliff, and the entire party
sat about it and told yarns. The women stole away one by one. Nina was
almost the first to leave.

The men remained until a late hour, and received calls from hilarious
neighbours whose bonfires were also blazing. Don Tiburcio Castro dashed
up at one o'clock, and invited Mr. Randolph to bring his party to a
grand _merienda_ on the last day but one of their week, and to a ball at
the Mission Dolores on the evening following.




VIII


When the party broke up for the night Thorpe walked a half mile over the
dunes, until, for any evidence of civilisation, he was alone in the
wilderness, then lay down on the warm sand and took counsel with
himself.

He had taken the plunge, and he had no regrets. He recalled his doubts,
his certainty that the Randolph skeleton was not the figment of a
girl's morbid imagination, his analysis of a temperament which he was
only beginning to understand, and wherein lay gloomy foreshadowings, the
fact that her first appeal had been to his animalism and that the appeal
had been direct and powerful. Until the morning of the elk-hunt, he had
not admitted that he loved her; but in a flash he had realised her
tragic and desolate position, little as he guessed the cause, and
coincidently his greater love for her had taken form so definitely that
he had not hesitated a moment to ask her to marry him. Later, he had
persuaded himself that he was well out of it; but between that time and
this he had allowed himself hardly a moment for meditation.

To-night he had not a regret. The certainty that she loved him put his
last scruple to flight, and changed his attitude to her irrevocably. He
had never loved before, nor had she. She seemed indivisibly and
eternally a part of him, and he recalled the sense of ownership he had
experienced the night he had met her, when the evil alone in her claimed
him. To-night the sense was stronger still, and he no longer believed
that there was a spark of evil in her; the moment he became a lover, he
became an idealist. He exaggerated every better quality into a
perfection; and all other women seemed marionnettes beside the one who
could make him shiver with hopes and fears, affect his appetite, and
control his dreams, who made him wild to surrender his liberty before he
was thirty, and accept a woman of the people as a mother-in-law.

The full knowledge suddenly poured into his brain that he was in love,
he,--Dudley Thorpe, who had crammed his life so full of other interests
that he had rarely thought of love, believing serenely that it would
arrive when he was forty, and ready for it. He lay along the sands and
surrendered himself to the experience, the most marvellous and delicious
he had ever known. Once he caught himself up and laughed, then felt that
he had committed a sacrilege. He knew that as he felt then, as he might
continue to feel during his engagement, was an isolated experience in a
man's life. He felt like clutching at even the tremours and fears that
assailed him, and cutting them deep in his brain, that he might have
their memory sharp and vivid when he was long married and serenely
content. He was happier in those moments, lying alone on the dry warm
sand under the crowding stars which had outlived so many passions, than
when he had held her in his arms. He felt that something had escaped him
when they had been together, some thought had strayed; and he determined
to concentrate his faculties more fully and to become a master in love.
He did nothing by halves, and he would be completely happy.

Then his thoughts became practical once more. Her admission that she
loved him had given him a right to control her life, to protect her, to
think for both. He was a very high-handed man, and, having made up his
mind to marry Nina Randolph, he regarded her opposition as non-existent.
He would argue it out with her, when she was ready to speak, knowing
that the mental tide of woman, when undammed, must have its way; but he
alone would decide the issue.

He should no longer torment himself with imaginings, rehearsing every
ill that could befall a woman, whether the act of her own folly or the
cruel hatching of Circumstance. It mattered nothing; he should marry
her. His want of her was maddening. The desire to pluck her from her
present life, to make her happy, possessed him.




IX


The next morning all were up at eight and picking strawberries for
breakfast. The prolonged and vociferous music of the horn had precluded
all hope of laziness, and the late seekers after sleep were obliged to
turn out with the best grace possible. A plunge in the sea had animated
the men for the day, and the women were very fresh and amiable.

After breakfast they scattered about the hills and beach. It was a
cloudless dark-blue day. The air was warm and dry. The bleak sand dunes
were reclaimed for a brief season by the vivid green of willow and oak,
the fields of purple lupin and yellow poppy; the trade winds were
elsewhere, and the vegetation of San Francisco enjoyed its brief span of
life. A ship with all her sails spread drifted, sleepily, over the bar.

Thorpe and Nina climbed an eminence from which they could see the
Mission Dolores, far on the right, the smoke curling languidly from its
great chimneys; the square Presidio of romantic memories and prosaic
present; the distant city, whose loud feverish pulse they fancied they
could hear.

They sat down under a tree. Nina took off her hat, and threw back her
head. "I think I am the re-embodiment of some pagan ancestor," she said.
"On days like this, I care nothing for a single responsibility in life,
nor for what to-morrow will bring, nor for a religion nor a creed, nor
for the least nor greatest that civilisation has accomplished. I don't
even long for Europe and the higher intellectual life. It is enough that
I am alive, that my eyes see only beauty, and my skin feels warmth. I
worship the sun and the sky and the flowers and the trees and the sea,
above all the warm quick atmosphere. They seem to me the only things
worth loving."

"They are not the only things you love, however."

"No, I love you and my father. I hate my mother. But I always manage to
forget her existence when I am off like this, and she is out of my
sight--"

"Why do you hate your mother?"

"That is one of the things you are not to know yet. This week you are to
hear nothing that is not pleasant. I wish you to feel like a pagan,
too."

"I do. Some of your mandates are very easy to observe. We are reasonably
sympathetic on more points than one."

"We will imagine that all life is to be like this week--only no allusion
is to be made during this week to the future, and no allusion in the
future to this week."

"I will do all I can to respect your wishes as to the first. The second
is too ridiculous to notice. We will settle all that when the time
comes."

To this she vouchsafed no reply, but peered up into the boughs. Her
expression changed after a moment; it became impersonal, and her eyes
hardened as they always did when her mind alone was at work.

"So far, California has evolved no literature," she said. "When it
does, I don't doubt it will be a literature of light and charm and
comedy--and pleasurable pathos. Writers will continue to go to the
dreary moorlands, the dun-coloured skies of England for tragedy
settings, and for the atmosphere of tradition and history. It will be
hard for any writer who has travelled over the wonderful mountains and
valleys of California--you have only seen the worst of it so far--to
imagine tragedy in a land of such exultant beauty, under a sun that
shines in a blue sky for eight months of the year. Fancy Emily Brontë
writing 'Wuthering Heights' in California! The setting is all wrong for
anything deeper than the picturesque crimes of desperadoes. But it is
the very contrast, this very accompaniment of unreality, that makes our
tragedies the harder to bear. I have thought sometimes that if I could
come out here on a furious day in winter, and wander about the sand
hills by myself, I'd feel as if I had a better right to be miserable--"

"I thought we were to have no more such hints this week. I am tired of
innuendoes. As I have remarked before, you take an unfair advantage. Let
down your hair. It looks full of gold and red in this light, and I want
to see it spread out in the sun."

"Very well, put my hairpins in your pocket. Take it down yourself, and
don't pull, on your life."




X


The week passed very gaily; the mornings in long rambles, the early
afternoon in siesta, its later hours in visits to neighbouring camps,
followed by strawberry picking and long evenings about the fire or
walking on the beach.

Thorpe and Nina were comparatively alone most of the time; and her high
spirits, her lavish charm, her sudden moments of seriousness, and her
outbursts of passionate affection completed his enthralment. Several
times Thorpe caught Mr. Randolph's eyes following him with an expression
of peculiar anxiety, and it chafed him not to be able to declare his
purpose plainly; but for the week he was bound.

On the whole, it was a happy week. As it neared its end, Thorpe knew
that his mind was possessing hers, that her will was weakening, and
love flooding reason. Once or twice she gave him a glance of timid
appeal; but she would not discuss the position. His mastery was the more
nearly complete as he kept his promise and ignored the future.

On the last day but one the party went down the coast to attend Don
Tiburcio's _merienda_. It was to be given in a valley about a half-mile
inland, which the guests must approach through a narrow cañon fronting
the sea.

The walk along the beach and inland trail was easy and pleasant, but the
cañon was sown with rocks and sweet-brier; and the way was picked with
some discomfort.

"If I stub my toe, you can carry me," said Nina.

"I will," said Thorpe, gallantly. He was feeling particularly light of
heart. The week was almost over. Delightful in many ways as it had been,
he was eager to take the reins into his own hands.

"Look! look!" exclaimed Nina, and the party paused simultaneously.

Don Tiburcio Castro had suddenly appeared at the head of the cañon. He
was mounted on a large horse of a breed peculiar to the Californias,
golden bronze in colour with silver mane and tail. The trappings of the
horse were of embossed leather, heavily mounted with silver. His own
attire was magnificent. He wore the costume of the grandees of his
time,--a time which had fallen helplessly into the past during the
fourteen years of American possession; indeed, Don Tiburcio, who, like
many of his brethren, had for every day use adopted the garb of modern
civilisation, had the effect, as he sat motionless on his burnished
steed at the head of the cañon, of a symbolic figure at the end of a
perspective.

He wore short clothes of red silk, the jacket open over a lace shirt
clasped with jewels. His long botas of yellow leather were wound about
with red and blue ribbons; his broad sombrero was heavy with silver
eagles.

"I begin to feel the unreality of California," said Thorpe. "It is like
a scene out of a picture-book."

"After all, it is but one phase," replied Nina.

Don Tiburcio lifted his sombrero and rode down the cañon, the horse
stepping daintily over the rocks. The women waved their handkerchiefs,
the men their caps. Then the end of the perspective was closed once
more, this time by a group of women. And they wore full flowered gowns
with pointed bodice, rebosos draped about their dark graceful heads. Two
tinkled the guitar. The others wielded large black fans.

"Ay!" exclaimed Mrs. Earle. "Why did I not bring my reboso? 'Lupie, we
shall be forgotten."

"There are men," replied Miss Hathaway, as several dark beribboned heads
appeared above the rebosos. "They, too, may want a change. You can
desert me, Captain Hastings. I shall amuse myself."

"I don't doubt it," said Hastings, gloomily. "I don't flatter myself
that I could make you jealous."

"I welcome you," said Don Tiburcio, choosing his English very slowly,
and reining in. "The day ees yours, my friends. I am your slave. I have
prepare a little entertainment, but if it no is to your taste, but say
the word, and all shall be change."

Mr. Randolph made a terse and suitable reply. Don Tiburcio stood aside
that all might pass him, bowing repeatedly; and the party made its way
as quickly as possible to the entrance.

Doña Eustaquia Carillo de Brotherton, one of the most famous women of
the old régime, stood there, the girls making way for her, and for Doña
Jacoba Duncan, Mrs. Polk,--she who was beautiful Magdaléna Yorba,--and
Doña Prudencia Iturbi y Moncada. The first was happy with her American
husband; the second was not; Doña Jacoba's lines were as stern as when
she had beaten her beloved children with a green hide reata, her smile
as brilliant; and Doña Prudencia, who still (presumably) lamented the
late Reinaldo, had found mitigation in her great social importance, and
in her maternal devotion to the heir of her father-in-law's vast
estates.

The women all kissed each other, and those that could talk Spanish made
a soft pretty babel of sound that suggested perpetuity. The men were
presented, and those of the Randolph party taken prompt possession of by
the coquettish Californian girls. The men of the South were inclined to
be haughty at first, but shortly succumbed to the novel charm of the
American women.

"One can hardly realise the life they suggest," said Mr. Randolph to
Thorpe. "Not fifty miles from San Francisco, they are still living in
much of their primitive simplicity and state. In the south they are
still farther removed from all that we have done. Doña Prudencia lives
the life of a dowager empress."

They were in an open valley, shaded here and there with large oaks,
carpeted with flowers. The women seated themselves on the warm dry
ground, the caballeros,--as resplendent as Don Tiburcio,--and the more
modest Americans lying at their feet, smoking the cigarito. The
Californian girls tinkled their guitars and sang, with accompaniment of
lash and brow. The older women smoked daintily, and talked of the gay
old times. Thorpe, who was in no mood to parry coquetry,--and Nina was
receiving the court of no less than three caballeros,--bestowed himself
between Doña Eustaquia and Doña Prudencia, and charmed them with his
unfeigned interest.

In the middle of the valley was a deep excavation. From stout poles hung
two bullocks. In the course of an hour, the high beds of coals beneath
the beasts were ignited, and the smell of roast meat mingled with the
drowsy scent of the poppy and the salt of the sea.

When the bullocks were cooked, and the repast was spread some yards
away, the guests found on the table every delicacy known to the old
time. It was a very lively and a very picturesque feast, and no one felt
the exhilaration of it more than Thorpe. He could not see Nina. She was
on his side of the table, and eight or ten people were between; but it
was enough to know that she was there, and that before the day was over
they should find an hour together.

The wines until after the dessert were American; but as luncheon was
concluding a servant brought a great tray covered with small glasses
containing a colourless liquid.

"You must all dreenk with me to the glory and prosperity of California
in my native wine, the fierce mescal," said Don Tiburcio, rising. "Every
one--ah, yes, ladies, it ees strong: I would not advise you that you
take mooch; but one seep, just for the toast--ah, _muchas gracias_."

The company rose. The American women made a doubtful little peck at the
innocent-looking beverage, and shivered. The men consumed it heroically,
repressing their tears. Thorpe felt as if he were swallowing live
hornets; but, as he placed his glass on the table and bowed to the host,
his face was quite stolid.

The company drove home, and retired at once to siesta. The strawberry
picking was belated, and Nina gathered hers with the help of Mr. McLane.
At dinner she sat between Mr. McLane and Hastings, and did not look at
Thorpe. He racked his brain to remember what he could have done to
offend her.




XI


They did not walk on the beach that evening, but sat about the fire,
somewhat fatigued, but still in high spirits. Nina alone was quiet.
After a time she stole away, and went down to the water. Thorpe was
forced to infer that she wished to be alone, and did not follow her at
once. When at the end of a half-hour she had not returned, his
ill-carried impatience mastered him.

His feet made no sound on the sandy slope, nor on the beach. It was a
night of perfect peace and calm and beauty. The ocean was quiet. The
stars were thick; a thin young moon rode past them. But Nina was not
within the flood of light about him. He turned the corner of a jutting
rock, and came upon her.

She was sitting on a high stone, her hands pressed hard on her knees,
staring out to sea. Thorpe had seen her face bitter, tragic, passionate;
but he had never seen it look as it looked to-night. It might have been
the face of a woman cast up by the ocean, out of its depths, or a face
of stone for forty years. All the youth and life were out of it. It was
fixed, awful. Thorpe stood appalled. The sweet intercourse of the past
week seemed annihilated, the woman removed from him by a sudden breach
in time, or some tremendous crash in Circumstance. He dared not speak,
offer her sympathy. He felt that whether she had loved him or not in
this hour of abandonment to her despair, he must be an insignificant
feature in her life.

He stole away and sat down, dropping his face in his hands. His brain,
usually clear and precise, whirled disobediently. He felt helpless, his
manhood worthless. Nothing but a jut of rock stood between himself and
Nina Randolph, and it might have been the grave of one of them. Chaos
was in him, a troop of hideous imaginings. He wondered vaguely if the
mescal had affected him. It was cursed stuff, and the blood had been in
his head ever since he had drunk it.

He knelt down, and dashed the cold sea-water over his face and head, not
once, but several times. When he stood up, his brain was cool and
steady.

"I must either go to her," he thought, "or despise myself. It is not an
intrusion; I certainly have my rights."

He went rapidly round the bend, and lifted her from the stone before she
was aware of his presence, then held her at arm's length, a hand on each
shoulder.

The fixity left the muscles of her face. They relaxed in terror.

"What is your secret?" he demanded, peremptorily. "Have you had a
lover--a child? Is that it?"

"No."

"On your word of honour?"

"Yes."

"Are your parents unmarried?"

"Not that I know of."

"Have you loved some man that is dead?"

"I have never loved any man but you."

"Have you committed a crime? Are you in constant terror of discovery?"

"I have never injured any one but myself."

"Is there insanity in the family, cancer, consumption?"

"No."

"Then, in God's name, what is it? I have the right to know, and I demand
it; and the right to share your trouble and help you to bear it. I give
you my word of honour that, no matter what it is, it shall make no
difference to me."

She hung her head, and he felt her quiver from head to foot. Then she
fell to weeping silently, without passion, but shaking painfully. He
took her in his arms, and did what he could to comfort her, and he
could be very tender when he chose. Later, he coaxed and implored and
threatened, but she would not speak. Once she made as if to cling to
him, then put her arms behind her and clasped her hands together. The
act was significant; but Thorpe took no notice of it. He knew now that
it was going to be more difficult to marry her than he had anticipated,
that infinite tact and patience would be necessary. After a time, he
dried her eyes and led her up the hill to the door of her tent. The
others were still about the fire, and she went in unseen.




XII


Thorpe slept little that night. He wandered about the sand hills until
nearly dawn. It seemed to him that he had exhausted the category of
possible ills; he could think of nothing else. After all, it did not
matter. The woman alone mattered. He knew that when he had persuaded her
to marry him (he never used the word "if"), he could control her
imagination and make her happy; and no other man alive could do it. In
twenty different ways he could make her forget everything but the fact
that she was his wife.

The next day Nina did not appear until the party was gathered about the
table for luncheon. She explained that she had slept late in order to be
in good trim for the party that night, and had spent the rest of the
morning making an alteration in her evening frock.

She nodded gaily to Thorpe, and took a seat some distance from him. She
looked very pretty. Her spirits, like her colour, were high, her eyes
brilliant. Nevertheless, there was a change in her, indefinable at
first; then Thorpe decided that she had acquired a shade of defiance, of
hardness.

But he had no time for thought. Mrs. Earle's flashing eyes were
challenging him on one side, Miss Hathaway's fathomless orbs on the
other. Opposite, Miss Shropshire, for the first time, displayed an
almost feverish desire to engage his attention, and made herself
uncommonly agreeable.

The afternoon was spent in packing and resting for the dance. The only
woman to be seen without the tents was Miss Shropshire, who took Thorpe
for a long walk and entertained him with many anecdotes of Nina's
eccentricities.

"She is very mutable," said Thorpe, at length; "but I should not have
called her eccentric."

"Should not you?" demanded Miss Shropshire. "Now, I should. But then you
have seen so much of the world, so many varieties of women. Nina seems
very original to us out here. I often wonder, well as I know her, what
she will say and do next. Oh, Mr. Thorpe, does not that ship look
beautiful?"

But Thorpe, who found a certain satisfaction in talking of the beloved
object, gently led her back to her former theme, and learned much of
Nina's childhood and school-girl pranks. There was no hint of the
mystery, nor did he wish that there should be.

Shortly after supper they started on horseback for the Mission, the
evening gear following in a wagon. Horses and conveyance had been sent
by Don Tiburcio.

Nina rode between Mr. McLane and Captain Hastings, and kept them
laughing heartily. The day had passed and Thorpe had not had a word
with her. He rode last, with Miss Hathaway, glad of her society; for she
never expected a man to talk when he was not in the mood. Scarcely a
word passed between them; once or twice he had an uncomfortable
impression that her large cold inscrutable eyes were watching him
intently.

They rode through the heavy dusk of a Californian night, perfume and the
odd abrupt sounds of the New World about them. The landscape took new
form in the shadows. The stunted brush seemed to crouch and quiver,
ready to spring. The owl hooted across the sandy waste; and coyotes
yapped dismally. Many of the party were silent; but Nina's fresh
spontaneous laugh rang out every few moments, striking an incongruous
note. California itself was a mystery in that hour and did not consort
with the lighter mood of woman.

Suddenly they looked down upon the Mission. The church was dark, but the
long wing beside it flared with light. They rode rapidly down the hill
and across the valley. As they approached, they saw Don Tiburcio
standing on the corridor before one of the open doors. He wore black
silk short clothes and a lace shirt, his hair tied back with a ribbon.
Diamonds blazed among his ruffles and on his long white hands.

As he was making one of his long and stately speeches, Miss Hathaway
laid her hand on Thorpe's arm.

"Take my advice," she said, in her cool even tones. "Do not go near Nina
to-night. Let her alone. I think she wishes it."

Thorpe made no reply. Miss Hathaway might as well have asked him to hold
his breath until the entertainment was over.

The ladies went at once to a large room set aside for their use and
donned their evening frocks. These frocks were very simple for the most
part, organdie or swiss, and they were adjusted casually before the
solitary mirror.

Nina's gown was of white nainsook ruffled to the waist with lace, and
very full. The low cut bodice was gathered into the belt like a child's.
Sometime since a local goldsmith of much cunning had, out of a bar of
native gold, fashioned for her three flexible serpents. She wore one
through her hair, one on her left arm, and a heavier one about her
waist.

"_Dios de mi alma_, Nina," exclaimed Mrs. Earle; "you look like an imp
to-night. What is the matter with you? Your eyes look--look--I hardly
know what you do look like."

"Are you well, Nina?" asked Miss Hathaway, turning and smiting the girl
with her polaric stare. "Have not you a headache? Why not lie down and
not bother with this ball?"

For a moment Nina did not reply. She brought her small teeth together,
and looked into Miss Hathaway's eyes with passionate resentment.

"Just mind your own business, will you?" she said, pitching her voice
for the other woman's ear alone. "And you'd oblige me by transfixing
some one else for the rest of the evening. I've had enough of your
attentions for one day."

Then she shook out her skirts as only an angry woman can, and left the
room.

"Nina is in one of her unpleasant moods to-night," said Mrs. McLane,
attempting a glimpse of herself over Miss McDermott's shoulder, that she
might adjust a hairpin. "I have not seen her like this for some
time--seven weeks," and she smiled.

"She looks like a little devil," said Mrs. Earle. "I have not been here
long enough to become intimate with her moods, and I must say I prefer
her without them. What are you scowling about, 'Lupie? Is your sash
crooked? Can I fix it? But I forgot: you are above such trifles--Holy
Mary! Guadalupe Hathaway! what on earth is the matter with your back?"

"What?" asked Miss Hathaway, presenting her back squarely. There was a
simultaneous chorus of shrieks.

"Guadalupe, for Heaven's sake, what have you been doing?" cried Mrs.
McLane. "Your back is striped--dark brown and white."

"Oh, is that all?" asked Miss Hathaway, gathering up her fan and gloves.
"I suppose it got sunburned this morning at croquet. I had on a blouse
with alternate thick and thin stripes. _Hasta luego!_" and she moved
out, not with any marked grace, but with a certain dignity which saved
the stripes from absurdity.

"_Bueno!_" exclaimed Mrs. Earle, "I'd like to have as little vanity as
that. How peaceful, and how cheap!"

"I suspect that it is her vanity to have no vanity," said Mrs. McLane,
who was the wisest of women. "And if she did not happen to be a
remarkably handsome girl, I fancy her vanity would take another form.
But come, come, _mes enfants_, let us go. I feel half dressed; but as
this is a picnic I suppose it does not matter."

The guests were assembled in the large hall of the Mission: Mr.
Randolph's party, Don Tiburcio's, and several priests. The musicians
were on the corridor beyond the open window. Doña Eustaquia, Doña
Jacoba, Doña Prudencia, Mrs. Polk, and the priests sat on a dais at the
end of the room; behind them was draped a large Mexican flag. The rest
of the room was hung with the colours of the United States. The older
women of the late régime wore the heavy red and yellow satins of their
time, the younger flowered silks, their hair massed high and surmounted
by a comb. The caballeros were attired like their host.

The guests were standing about in groups after the second waltz, when
Don Tiburcio stepped to the middle of the room and raised his hand.

"My friends," he said, "my honoured compatriots, Don Hunt McLane and Don
Jaime Randolph have request that we do have the contradanza. Therefore,
if my honoured friends of America will but stand themselves against the
wall, we of California will make the favourite dance of our country."

The Americans clapped their hands politely. Don Tiburcio walked up to
Mrs. Earle, bowed low, and held out his hand. She rattled her fan in
token of triumph over her Northern sisters, and undulated to the middle
of the room, her hand in her host's.

The swaying, writhing, gliding dance--the dance in which the backbone of
men and women seems transformed into the flexible length of the
serpent--was half over, the American men were standing on tiptoe,
occasionally giving vent to their admiration, when Nina, her eyes
sparkling with jealously and excitement, moved along the wall behind a
group of people and stood beside Thorpe. He did not notice her approach.
His hands were thrust into his pockets, his eyes eagerly fixed on the
most graceful feminine convolutions he had ever seen.

"Dudley!" whispered Nina. He turned with a jump, and forgot the dancers.

"Well?" he whispered. "Nina! Nina!"

She slipped her hand into his. He held it in a hard grip, his eyes
burning down into hers. "Why--why?--I must respect your moods if you
wish to avoid me at times--but--"

"Do you admire that?"

"I did--a moment ago."

"Tell me how much."

"More than any dancing I have ever seen, I think," his eyes wandering
back to the swaying colorous groups of dancers. "It is the perfection of
grace--"

"Would you like to see something far, _far_ more beautiful?"

"I fear I should go off my head--"

"Answer my question."

"I should."

"You say you respect my moods. I don't want--I particularly don't want
to kiss you to-night. Will you promise not to kiss me if we should
happen to be alone?"

Thorpe set his lips. He dropped her hand. "You are capricious--and
unfair," he said; "I have not seen you alone for two days."

"It is not because I love you less," she said, softly. "Promise me."

"Very well."

"It is now ten. We shall have supper at twelve. At one, go down the
corridor behind this line of rooms to the end. Wait there for me. Ask no
questions, or I won't be there. This waltz is Captain Hastings'. I am
engaged for every dance. _Au revoir._"

Thorpe got through the intervening hours. He spent the greater part of
them with the four doñas of the dais, and was warmly invited to visit
them on their ranchos and in the old towns; and he accepted, although he
knew as much of the weather of the coming month as of his future
movements.




XIII


In the supper-room he sat far from Nina; but promptly at one he stole
forth to the tryst. The windows looking upon the back corridor were
closed. No one was moving among the mass of outbuildings. Not far away
he could see the rolling surface and stark outlines of the Mission
cemetery. A fine mist was flying before the stars; and a fierce wind,
the first of the trades, was screaming in from the ocean.

Nina kept him waiting ten or fifteen minutes. Her white figure appeared
at the end of the corridor and advanced rapidly. Thorpe met her half
way, and she struck him lightly with her fan.

"Remember your promise," she said. "And also understand that you are not
to move from the place where I put you until I give you permission. Do
you take that in?"

"Yes," he said, sullenly; "but I am tired of farces and promises."

"Shh, don't be cross. This has been a charming evening. I won't have it
spoiled."

"Are you quite well? Your colour is so high, and your eyes are
unnaturally bright."

"Don't suggest that I am getting anything," she cried, in mock terror.
"Small-pox? How dreadful! That is our little recreation, you know. When
a San Franciscan has nothing else to do he goes off to the pest-house
and has small-pox. But come, come."

He followed her into the room at the end of the corridor, and she lit a
taper and conducted him up a steep flight of stairs which was little
more than a ladder. At the top was a narrow door. It yielded to the
knob, and Thorpe found himself in what was evidently the attic of the
Mission.

"I was up here a month or two ago with the girls," said Nina. Her voice
shook slightly. "I know there are candles somewhere--there were, at
least. Stand where you are until I look."

She flitted about with the taper, a ghostly figure in the black mass of
shadows; and in a few moments had thrust a half-dozen candles into the
necks of empty bottles. These she lit and ordered Thorpe to range at
intervals about the room. He saw that he was in a long low garret, at
one end of which was a pile of boxes, at the other a heap of carpeting.

To the latter Nina pointed with her lighted taper. "Sit down there," she
said, and disappeared behind the boxes.

Thorpe did as he was bidden. His hands shook a little as he adjusted the
carpet to his comfort. The windows were closed. A tree scraped against
the pane, jogged by the angry wind. The candles shed a fitful light,
their flames bending between several draughts. The floor was thick with
dust. Rafters yawned overhead, black and festooned with cobwebs. It was
an uncanny place, and the sudden apparition of a large and whiskered rat
scuttling across the floor in terrified anger at having his night's rest
disturbed was not its most enlivening feature.

"Dudley!" said Nina, sharply.

"Yes?"

"Was that a rat?"

"It was."

"Oh, dear! dear! I never thought of rats. However," firmly, "I'm going
to do it. I told you that you were not to move; but if you should happen
to see a rat making for me, you go for him just as quickly as you can."

"The rats are much more afraid of you. The only danger you need worry
about is pneumonia. I expect to sneeze throughout your entire
performance--whatever it is to be."

"You press your finger on the bridge of your nose: if you sneeze, it
will spoil the effect of--of--a poem. Now, keep quiet."

For a moment he heard no further sound. Then something appealed to his
ear which made him draw a quick breath. It was a low sweet vibrant
humming, and the air, though unfamiliar, indicated what he had to
expect. Sinking deeper into his dusty couch, he propped his chin on his
hand; and, simultaneously, a vision emerged and filled the middle
distance.

For a moment it stood motionless, poised, then floated lightly toward
him, scarcely touching the floor, with a lazy rhythmic undulation which
was music in itself. The full soft gown with its ruffles of lace rose
and fell like billows of cloud, and in and out of a strip of crimson
silk she twined and twisted herself to the slow scarce-audible vibration
of her voice. She did not approach him closely, but danced in the middle
and lower part of the room, sometimes in the full light of the candles,
such as it was, at others retreating into the shadows beyond; where all
outline was lost, and she looked like a waving line of mist, or a
wraith writhing in an unwilling embrace.

And Thorpe? Outside, the storm howled about the corner of the Mission,
or whistled a discord like a devil's chorus; but in the brain of the man
was a hot mist, and it clouded his vision and played him many a trick.
The dust of the floor, the grime of the walls, the unsightly rafters
were gone. He lay on a couch as imponderable as ether. Overhead were
strangely carven beams, barely visible in the dusk of the room's great
arch. A gossamer veil of many tints, stirring faintly as if breathed
upon, hung before walls of unimaginable beauty. The floor trembled and
exhaled a delicious perfume. Flame sprang from opal bowls. But nothing
was definite but the floating undulating shape which had wrought this
enchantment. Its full voluptuous beauty, he recalled confusedly; dimmed
by the shadows which clung to it even in the light, it looked vaporous,
evanescent, the phantasm of a lorelei riding the sea-foam. Its swaying
arms gleamed on the dark; the gold-scaled sea-serpents glided and
twisted from elbow to wrist. Only the eyes were those of a woman, and
they burned with a languid fire; but they never met his for a moment.

Suddenly, with abrupt transition, she changed the air, which had been
almost a chant, and began dancing fast and furiously. Flinging aside the
scarf, she clasped her hands under rigid arms, as if leaning on them the
full weight of her tiny body. She danced with a headlong whirl that
deprived her of her wraith-like appearance, but was no less graceful.
With a motion so swift and light that her feet seemed continually
twinkling in space, she sped up and down the garret like a mad thing;
then, unlocking her hands, she flung them outward and spun from one end
of the room to the other in a whirl so dizzy that she looked like a
cloud blown before the wind, streaming with a woman's hair and cut with
yellow lightning.

She flew directly up to where Thorpe lay, and paused abruptly before
him. For the first time their eyes met. He forgot his promise. He
stumbled to his feet, grasping at her gown even before he was risen. For
a second she stood irresolute; then her supple body leaped backward,
and a moment later had flashed down the room and through the door.
Thorpe reached the door in three bounds. She was scrambling backward
down the stair, her white frightened excited face dropping through the
heavy dark. Thorpe got down as swiftly as he could; but she was far
ahead, and he could not chase her into the Mission. When he re-entered
the ball-room some time after, the guests were on the corridor waiting
for their char-à-bancs. He returned to the Presidio in the ambulance.




XIV


The next day Thorpe called at the Randolphs'. The man, Cochrane, who,
himself, looked yellow and haggard, informed him that the ladies were
indisposed with severe colds. Thorpe went home and wrote Nina a letter,
making no allusion to the performance at the Mission, but insisting that
she recognise his rights, and let him know when he could see her and
come to a definite understanding. A week passed without a reply. Then
Thorpe, tormented by every doubt and fear which can assail a lover,
called again. The ladies were still indisposed. It was Sunday. Thorpe
demanded to see Mr. Randolph, and was shown into the library.

Mr. Randolph entered in a few moments, and did not greet Thorpe with his
customary warmth. There were black circles about his eyes. His cheeks
looked thinner and his hand trembled.

"Have you been ill, too?" asked Thorpe, wondering if South Park were a
healthy locality.

"No; not ill. I have been much harassed--business."

"Nothing serious, I hope."

"It will right in time--but--in a new city--and with no telegraphic
communication with the rest of the world--nor quick postal
service--there is much to impede business and try the patience."

Thorpe was a man of quick intuitions. He knew that Mr. Randolph was
lying. However, that was not his business. He rose and stood before the
fire, nervously flicking his trousers with his riding-whip.

"Has it occurred to you that I love your daughter?" he asked, abruptly.
"Or--perhaps--she has told you?"

"She has not spoken to me on the subject; but I inferred as much."

"I wish, of course, to marry her. You know little about me. My
bankers--and Hastings--will tell you that I am well able to take care of
your daughter. In fact, I am a fairly rich man. This sort of thing has
to be said, I suppose--"

"I have not misunderstood your motives. I misjudge few men; I have lived
here too long."

"Oh--thanks. Then you have no objection to raise?"

"No; I have none."

"Your daughter loves me." Thorpe had detected a slight accent on the
pronoun.

"I am sure of that."

"Do you mean that Mrs. Randolph might object?"

"She would not be consulted."

Thorpe shifted his position uneasily. The hardest part was to come.

"Nina has intimated to me," he said, haltingly, "that there is a--some
mysterious reason which would prevent her marrying. I have utterly
disregarded that reason, and shall continue to do so. I purpose to marry
her, and I hope you will--will you?--help me."

Mr. Randolph leaned forward and twisted his nervous pale hands together.
It was at least three minutes before he spoke, and by that time Thorpe's
ear-drums were pounding.

"I must leave it to her," he said, "utterly to her. That is a question
which only she can decide--and you. Of course she will tell you--she is
too honest not to; but I am afraid she will stave it off as long as
possible. I cannot tell you; it would not be just to her."

"But you will do nothing to dissuade her?"

"No; she is old enough to judge for herself. And if she decides in your
favour, and you--are still of the same mind, I do not deny that I shall
be very glad. I should even be willing for you to take her to England,
to resign myself never to see her again--if I could think--if you
thought it was for the best."

"I wish I knew what this cursed secret was," said Thorpe, passionately.
"I am half distracted with it."

"Have you no suspicion?"

"It seems to me that I have thought of everything under heaven; and she
denied one question after the other. I am bound to take her word, and to
believe that the truth was the one thing I did not hit upon."

"Yes; if you had guessed, I think she would have told you, whether she
was ready or not. It is very strange. You are one of the sharpest men I
have ever met. Still, it is often the way."

"When can I see Nina?"

"In a few days--a week, I should say. Her cold is very severe."

"I have written to her, and she has not answered. Is it possible that
her illness is serious? I have put it down to caprice or some new
qualm."

"There is no cause for alarm. But she has some fever, and pain in her
eyes, and is irritable. When she is well I will take it upon myself to
see that you have an interview."

"Thank you." Mr. Randolph had not risen, but Thorpe felt himself
dismissed. He left the house in a worse humour than he had entered it.
He felt balked, repulsed, and disagreeably prescient. For the first time
in his life, he uneasily admitted that an iron will alone would not keep
a man on the straight line of march to his goal, that there was a chain
called Circumstance, and that it was forged of many metals.




XV


Thorpe determined not to go to the house again until either Nina or Mr.
Randolph sent for him. He would not run after any woman, he told himself
angrily; and once or twice he was in a humour to snap the affair in two
where it was and leave the country. But, on the whole, the separation
whetted his passion. That airy fabric of sentiment, imagination, and
civilisation called spiritual affinity, occasionally dominated him, but
not for long. His last experience of her had gone to his head: it was
rarely that of all the Nina Randolphs he knew he could conjure any but
the one that had danced his promise out of memory. There were times
when he hated himself and hated her. Then he told himself that this
phase was inevitable, and that later on, when the better part of their
natures were free to assert themselves, they would find each other.

A week after his interview with Mr. Randolph, he found himself in South
Park a little after eleven at night. He had dined on Rincon Hill, and
purposed spending the night at the Oriental Hotel; he rarely returned to
the Presidio after an evening's entertainment.

He had avoided the other men, and started to walk into town. Almost
mechanically he turned into South Park, and halted before the tall
silent house which seemed such a contemptible barrier between himself
and the woman he wanted. His eyes, travelling downward, noted that a
basement window had been carelessly left open. He could enter the house
without let--and the opportunity availed him nothing. He wished that he
were a savage, with the traditions and conventions of a savage, and that
the woman he loved dwelt in a tent on the plain.

Lights glimmered here and there in the houses of South Park, but the
Randolphs' was blank; everybody, apparently, was at rest. To stand there
and gaze at her window was bootless; and he cursed himself for a
sentimental ass.

He walked up the semi-circle and returned. This time he moved suddenly
forward, lifting his head. It seemed to him that a sound--an odd
sound--came from the bedroom above the parlour, a room he knew to be
Mrs. Randolph's.

At first the sound, owing to the superior masonry of the walls, was
muffled; but, gradually, Thorpe's hearing, naturally acute, and
abnormally sensitive at the moment, distinguished the oral evidence of a
scuffle, then the half-stifled notes of angry and excited voices. He
listened a moment longer. The sounds increased in volume. There was a
sudden sharp note, quickly hushed. Thorpe hesitated no longer. If the
house of a man whose guest he had been were invaded by thieves, and
perhaps murderers, it was clearly his duty to render assistance, apart
from more personal reasons.

He took out his pistol, cocked it, then vaulted through the window, and
groping his way to a door opened it and found himself in the kitchen
entry. A taper burned in a cup of oil; and guided by the feeble light he
ran rapidly up the stair.

He opened the door at the head, paused a a moment and listened intently.
The house teemed with muffled sounds; but they fell from above, and
through closed doors, and from one room. Suddenly the hand that held the
pistol fell to his side. The colour dropped from his face, and he drew
back. Was he close upon the Randolph skeleton? Had he not better steal
out as he had come, refusing to consider what the strange sounds
proceeding from the room of that strange woman might mean? There were no
signs of burglars anywhere. A taper burned in this hall, likewise, and
on the table beside it was a gold card-receiver. There had been a heavy
rainfall during the evening, but there was no trace of muddy boots on
the red velvet carpet.

Then, as he hesitated, there rang out a shriek, so loud, so piercing, so
furious, that Thorpe, animated only by the instinct to give help where
help was wanted, dashed down the hall and up the stair three steps at a
time. Before he reached the top, there was another shriek, this time
abrupt, as if cut short by a man's hand. He reached Mrs. Randolph's room
and flung open the door. But he did not cross the threshold.

The room flared with light. The bedding was torn into strips and
scattered about. Every fragile thing the room contained was in ruins and
littered the carpet. And in their midst, held down by Mr. Randolph and
his servant, Cochrane, was a struggling, gurgling, biting thing which
Thorpe guessed rather than knew was the mother of Nina Randolph. Her
weak evil face was swollen and purple, its brutality, so decently
cloaked in normal conditions, bulging from every muscle. Her ragged hair
hung in scant locks about her protruding eyes. Over her mouth was the
broad hand of the man, Cochrane. Mrs. Rinehardt, her face flushed and
her dress in disorder, stood by the mantel crying and wringing her
hands.

Thorpe's brain received the picture in one enduring flash. He was dimly
conscious of a cry from unseen lips, and the vanishing train of a
woman's gown. And then Mr. Randolph looked up. He relaxed his hold and
got to his feet. His face was ghastly, and covered with great globes of
sweat.

"Thorpe!" he gasped. "You! Oh, go! go!"

Thorpe closed the door, his fascinated gaze returning for a second to
the Thing on the floor. It no longer struggled. It had become suddenly
quiet, and was laughing and muttering to itself.

He left the house, and walked out of the park and city, and toward the
Presidio. It was a long walk, over sand drifts and rocks, and through
thickets whose paths he had forgotten. The cold stars gave little light,
for the wind drove a wrack aslant them; and when the colder dawn came,
greying everything, the flowers that looked so brilliant in the
sunlight, the heavy drooping trees, the sky above, he found himself
climbing a high sand hill, with no apparent purpose but to get to the
top; a cut about its base would have shortened the journey. He reached
the summit, and saw the grey swinging ocean, the brown forts in their
last sleep.

He sat down, and traced figures on the sand with his stick. Chaos had
been in him; but the tide had fallen, and his thoughts were shaping
themselves coherently. Nina Randolph was the daughter of a madwoman, and
the seeds were in her. Her strange moods, her tragic despair, her hints
of an approaching fate, her attitude to himself, were legible at last.
And Miss Hathaway knew, and had tried to warn him. Doubtless others
knew, but the secret had been well kept.

He was filled with bitterness and dull disgust, and his heart and brain
were leaden. The mad are loathsome things; and the vision of Nina,
foaming and hideous and shrieking, rose again and again.

That passed; but he saw her without illusion, without idealisation. She
had been the one woman whose faults were entrancing, whose genuine
temperament would have atoned for as many more. She seemed now a very
ordinary, bright, moody, erratic, seductive young person who was making
the most of life before she disappeared into a padded cell. He wondered
why he had not preferred Miss Hathaway, or Mrs. Earle, or Miss
McDermott. He had not, and concluded that her first influence had been
her only one, and that his imagination had done the rest.

The sunrise gun boomed from the Presidio. The colours of dawn were on
horizon and water. He rose and walked rapidly over the hills and levels;
and when he reached his room, he went to bed and slept.




XVI


At two o'clock, just after Thorpe had breakfasted, Mr. Randolph's card
was brought to him, and he went at once into the general sitting-room.
No one but Mr. Randolph occupied it at the moment. He was sitting
listlessly on the edge of a chair, staring out of the window. Commonly
the triggest of men, his face to-day was unshaven, and he looked as if
he had not been out of his clothes for forty-eight hours. And he looked
as if he had been picked up in the arms of Time, and flung across the
unseen gulf into the greyness and feebleness of age.

As he rose mechanically, Thorpe took his hand in a strong clasp,
forgetting himself for the moment.

Mr. Randolph did not return the pressure. He withdrew his hand
hurriedly, and sat down.

"An explanation is due you," he said, and even his voice was changed.
"You have stumbled upon an unhappy family secret."

Thorpe explained how he had come to enter the house.

"I supposed that it was something of the sort, or rather Cochrane did;
he found the window and lower door open. It was a kind and friendly act.
I appreciate the motive." He paused a moment, then went on, "As I said
just now, an explanation is due you, if explanation is necessary. As you
know, I had recognised that as Nina's right--to speak when she saw fit.
That is the reason I did not explain the other day--I usually manage to
have her in the country at such times," he added, irrelevantly.

"Such attacks are always more or less unexpected, I suppose." Thorpe
hardly knew what to say.

Mr. Randolph fumbled at his hat, "More or less."

"Were any other members of her family--similarly afflicted?"

"Her father and mother were well-conducted people. I know nothing of any
further antecedents."

"It sometimes skips a generation," said Thorpe, musingly.

Mr. Randolph brought his hand close above his eyes, and pressed his lips
together. He opened his mouth twice, as if to speak, before he
articulated, "Sometimes, not always."

Thorpe rose abruptly and walked to the window, then returned, and stood
before Mr. Randolph.

"And Nina?" he demanded, peremptorily. "What of her?"

Mr. Randolph pressed his hand convulsively against his face.

Thorpe turned white; his knees shook. He went out and returned with some
brandy. "Here," he said. "Let us drink this and brace up and have it
out. We are not children."

Mr. Randolph drank the brandy. Then he replied, "She is on the way. In a
few years she will be as you saw her mother last night; no power on
earth can save her. I would give my wretched failure of a life, I would
burn at the stake--but I can do nothing."

"Perhaps I can. I intend to marry her."

"No! No! She, who is stronger than I, would never have permitted it. She
told me that this morning. For the matter of that I am her ambassador
to-day. She charged me to make it clear to you that she expected you to
stand by your part of the compact. She is immovable; I know her."

"Tell her that I will take no messages at second hand, not even from
you. Unless she sees and comes to an understanding with me, I shall
consider myself engaged to her, and shall announce it."

"Do you mean to say that you would marry her, knowing what you do?"

"I would rather I had known it when I first came. I should have avoided
her, or left the place. But I gave her my word, voluntarily, that
nothing, no matter what, should interfere with my determination to
marry her, and nothing shall."

"You _are_ an Englishman!" said Mr. Randolph, bitterly. "I wish I were
as good a one; but I am not. My record is clean enough, I suppose; but I
am a weak man in some respects, and I started out all wrong. I wish to
God that everything were straight, Thorpe; I would rather you married
her than any man I have ever known."

"Thank you. Will you arrange an interview for me?"

Mr. Randolph fidgeted, "I tell you what I think, Thorpe; you had
better wait a little. She is in no mood to listen to reason, nor
for love-making--take my word for that. I have never seen her in so
black a mood. But women are naturally buoyant, and she particularly so.
Go and take your trip through the State. Let it last--say two months,
and then appear unexpectedly at Redwoods. I do not give you any
encouragement,--in all conscience you ought not to want any; but I think
that under the circumstances I suggest your final interview will at
least not be an unpleasant one. Nina lives an out of door life there
and is with the other girls most of the time."

"Very well. I don't know but that I prefer it that way. Meanwhile, will
you tell her all that I have said?--except that I would rather I had
known it sooner."

Mr. Randolph rose and gathered up his hat and gloves. "I will tell her,"
he said. "Good-bye. You are badly broken up, but you may be thankful
that you are in your shoes, not mine."




XVII


Doña Prudencia had sent Thorpe a pressing invitation to be a guest at
Casa Grande during the festivities celebrating the nineteenth birthday
of her son. The day after his interview with Mr. Randolph, in company
with Don Tiburcio Castro, Captain Brotherton and his wife, Doña
Eustaquia, Mrs. Polk, and a half-dozen other native Californians, he
took passage on a steamboat bound for Santa Barbara. The journey lasted
four days, and was very uncomfortable; but the happy careless Spanish
people were always entertaining, and the girls demanded the constant
attentions of the Englishman. Thorpe had little time for thought and
wished for none. When not playing squire to the women, he listened to
Don Tiburcio's anecdotes of Old California, or discussed the future of
the territory with Captain Brotherton, who was living a life of peace
and plenty on a rancho, but nevertheless took an unfailing interest in
the country his gallantry had helped to capture and hold.

The ship rode to anchor in the Santa Barbara channel before an animated
scene. The adobe walls of Casa Grande had a new coat of white, the tiles
a new coat of red; so had the great towers and arches and roof of the
Mission, jutting before the green of its hills, a mile beyond. The
houses about the fort looked fresh and gay. Many horses, richly
caparisoned, pranced in the open court of Casa Grande, or pawed the
ground by neighbouring trees. Caballeros, in their rich native costumes,
were sauntering about, smoking cigaritos. On the corridors of the great
and lesser houses were the women, brilliantly dressed, their heads
draped with the reboso or mantilla, manipulating the inevitable fan.

Indians in bright calico garments stood on the beach, awaiting the
luggage of the guests. Between them and the houses was a large booth,
defiantly flaunting the colours of Mexico. Far to the left was a rude
street, flanked on either side by a row of cheap wooden houses, the ugly
beginning of an American town.

"It is all like a scene out of a picture-book," said Thorpe. "Can San
Francisco--awful San Francisco!--be in the same territory? It looks like
Arcadia."

"Si, is pretty," said Mrs. Polk, with a pensive sigh. "But no all the
same like before, señor. Not the same spirit, for all know that their
country is gone for ever, and that by and by the Americanos live in all
the towns, so that the Spanish towns will be no more--and in a few
years. But they like to meet and try to think is the same, and forget."

The passengers were landed in boats. The young heir, a tall lad with a
handsome indolent face, and a half-dozen of his guests, came down to
the shore to welcome the newcomers.

"Very good look, that boy," said Doña Eustaquia. "I not have seen him
for some years, so uncomfortable this treep. But he have the face weak,
like the father. Never I like Reinaldo Iturbi y Moncada; but I wish he
not have been kill by Diego Estenega. Then, how different is
California!"

As the boat touched the sands young Reinaldo came forward with a
charming grace to help the ladies to land, and was kissed by each, with
effusion. Indeed, there was so much kissing, and such an immediate high
shrill chattering, such a profusion of "_queridas_," and "_mijitas_,"
and "_mi amigas_," that Thorpe, after exchanging a few words with his
host, made haste to the house.

Doña Prudencia, clad in the richest of black satins, with a train a yard
long and a comb six inches high, came forward to the edge of the
corridor to greet him. She looked very pretty and plump and
consequential.

"So good you are to come, Señor Torp," she said softly, giving him her
little hand with a gesture which drew down his lips at once.

"I shall never forget how good you have been to ask me," he said,
enthusiastically. "This picture alone was worth coming to California
for."

"Ay! You shall see more than theese, Señor Torp. It ees an honour to
receive you in the _casa_ of the Iturbi y Moncadas. It ees yours, señor,
burn it if you will. Command my servants like they are your own."

Thorpe, by this time, knew something of the peculiar phrasing of native
Californian hospitality, and merely bowed and murmured acknowledgments.

The other guests came up at the moment, and there was another Spanish
chorus, an agitated wave along the three-sided corridor. Thorpe glanced
curiously about him. The black-eyed women were undulating and coquetting
for the benefit of the new men, while throwing kisses and rapturous
exclamations to Doña Eustaquia and the girls in her charge. Thorpe
looked over more than one big fan. Suddenly his attention was attracted
by a woman on the opposite corridor. She had risen, and was looking
intently at Doña Eustaquia, who as yet had not glanced across the court.
She was a very beautiful woman, the most beautiful woman Thorpe had
seen in California, and her face was vaguely familiar. She looked very
Spanish, but her hair was gold and her eyes were as green as the spring
foliage. Then there was a sharp feminine shriek behind him; he was
thrust aside, and Doña Eustaquia ran past him, crying, "Chonita!
Chonita!" The beautiful stranger met her half way, and they embraced
and kissed each other on either cheek some fifteen times.

"Que! Que! Que!" the women of his party were exclaiming, and then
followed a deluge of words of which he could separate only "Chonita
Estenega." They, in turn, ran forward, and were received with a manner
so polished that it was almost cold. Thorpe had recognised her. He had
met her at a court ball in Austria, where, as the wife of the Mexican
minister, she had been the most admired woman in the palace.

"Is Don Diego Estenega here?" he asked Prudencia. "I met him a number of
times in Vienna, and should like to meet him again."

Prudencia drew up her small important person with an expression of
conscious virtue that did not confine itself to her face, but made her
very gown swell and rustle.

"Si!" she said. "He ees here--for the firs' time in mos' twenty years,
señor. You never hear? He killing my husban'. But I forgive him because
ees in the fight and no can help. Reinaldo attack, and Diego mus'
defend, of course. Still, he _kill_ him, and I am the wife. But bime by
I forgive, for that ees my religion. And I love Chonita. So she come to
the old house, the firs' time in so many years, for the birfday de my
son. Diego is horseback now, but come back soon. You no like go to your
room? So dirt that treep, no? Reinaldo!" Her son came forward at once.
"Show the Señor Torp to his room, no? and the other gentlemens."

Thorpe followed young Iturbi y Moncada down the corridor and into a
small room. The floor was bare, the furniture prison-like; but he had
heard of the simplicity of the adobe mansions of Californian grandees.

Reinaldo jerked open the upper drawer of the bureau, disclosing several
rows of large goldpieces.

"At your service, señor," he said with a bow. "I beg that you will use
it all."

Thorpe reddened to his hair. He hardly knew whether to be angry or not.
Did these haughty grandees take him for a pauper? However, he merely
bowed and thanked the youth somewhat drily, and at the same moment
Captain Brotherton entered the room.

"The hospitality of the Californian!" he cried, taking in the situation
at a glance. "Reinaldo, I see the new generation has forgotten nothing,
despite the Americans."

"No, señor," said the young man, proudly. "What ours is, is our guests.
That is right always, no? But perhaps the gentleman no like, perhaps he
no have the custom in his country."

"We have not, I regret to say, Don Reinaldo. We are a tight-fisted
practical race. But I can the more deeply appreciate your hospitality;
and, believe me, I do appreciate it."

"And you will use it--all, señor?"

Thorpe hesitated the fraction of a moment, then replied with some
difficulty, "Certainly, señor. I will use it with the greatest
pleasure."

"Many thanks, señor. _Hasta luego!_" And he left the room.

"What an extraordinary custom!" exclaimed Thorpe. "I can't use that
man's money."

"Oh, you must! He'd be terribly cut up if you did not--think you flouted
him."

"Well, I'll gamble with him, and let him win it back. I suppose he
gambles."

"Rather. Before he is forty the Americans will have had his last acre,
and he inherits four hundred thousand. They have not even the soil in
which to plant a business instinct, these Californians. I am glad you
have come in time. They are worth seeing, and their like will never be
seen again."

"I should think they were worth seeing. What did Doña Prudencia mean by
saying that Diego Estenega killed her husband?"

"There was a fight to the death between them, and it was one or the
other. Chonita, to the surprise of everybody, and to the horror of
some--including the clergy--married Estenega at once, and went with him
to Mexico. The old gentleman was in a towering rage, but forgave them
later and visited them several times. He had large sums of money
invested in Mexico which he left to Chonita. His Californian estates he
left to young Reinaldo, whom he idolised. Estenega had had great hopes
and plans in connection with this country which were dashed by Iturbi y
Moncada's death. However, it was as well, for he is now one of the
wealthiest and most powerful men in the Mexican government, and has been
ambassador or minister abroad several times. But my wife will tell you
the whole story when you come to visit us. Perhaps she will read it to
you, for she has made a novel out of it, which may or may not be
published after the death of all concerned. Here is your trunk. I'll
leave you to clean up."




XVIII


Thorpe dressed for dinner, pocketed a roll of the gold with a wry face,
and went to the _sala_, a long room opening on the middle corridor.
Prudencia, in a red-satin gown, so thick that it stood out about her as
if hooped, and flashing jewels on a great deal of white skin, her hair
piled high and surmounted with a diamond comb, sat in the middle of the
room talking volubly to her sister-in-law, who stood by the mantel
looking sadly about her. Chonita had lost little of her beauty. She had
had but two children; and vanity had kept the lines of her figure, the
gliding grace of her walk, unchanged. She had known, during the twenty
years of her married life, the great joys and the great disappointments,
the exaltation and the terrified recognition of mortal weakness and
limitations, inseparable to two such natures. But, on the whole, she was
happy, and she and her husband were very nearly one.

"No, no, my Chonita!" Prudencia was exclaiming in her own tongue. "Why
shouldst thou be sad? It is nearly twenty years; one cannot remember so
long. Thou hast thine own house, far more elegant than this, I am told:
why shouldst thou feel sad to come back? Thou art wealthy, and hast a
devoted husband,--_ay de mi_, my Reinaldo! (but I could have had
others),--and art as beautiful as ever, although I do not agree with
some that thou hast not grown a day older. Thou hast the expression of
years, if not its lines and grey hairs. I need not have grown stout; but
I have no vanity, and walking is such trouble, and I love _dulces_.
Besides, we do not carry our flesh into the next world; so Reinaldo, who
hated fat women--Ay, Señor Torp, pardon me, no? I not did see you. I
wish mooch to present you to my sister-in-law--Doña Chonita Iturbi y
Moncada de Estenega, Señor Torp of Eengland, _mijita_."

Chonita came forward and held out her hand, smiling. "I remember meeting
you in Austria," she said. "It was so warm that night in the palace, I
remember, it made me talk of California to you. My husband is very glad
to think that he shall meet you again."

"I am glad you come to cheer her up, Señor Torp," said Prudencia. "She
feel blue because coming to the old house once more."

Thorpe looked at Chonita with the quick sympathy of the Englishman for
terra ego, and Chonita flashed her acknowledgment. "Yes, I am a little
sad," she said; "not only because it is the first time in so many years,
but because it is probably for the last time in my life. My husband does
not care for California. Here he is."

Estenega entered with several other men, and, recognising Thorpe at
once, greeted him with a warmth that was more cosmopolitan than
Californian, but none the less sincere. He showed the wear and tear of
years. Ambitions, scheming, hard work had left their furrows, and the
grey was in his hair. But his nervous vitality was undiminished, and
his air of command even more pronounced than in the old days. He
carried Thorpe off to discuss the growing complications between the
North and South; and the conversation was resumed after dinner,
despite the attractions of the _sala_; for news of the great world came
infrequently to California, and the stranger who had recently lived in
the midst of affairs was a welcome acquisition. Thorpe spent the greater
part of the night in the billiard-room with Reinaldo, and got rid of his
gold.




XIX


At sunrise he was awakened by the booming of cannon and the ringing of
bells. He sprang out of bed, thinking that the United States was firing
on the Mexican flag, then remembered that it was the birthday of the
young heir, and turned in again.

Two hours later, he was shaken out of his morning nap by Estenega.

"How would you like a dip before breakfast? They are all up at mass,
and Brotherton and I are going down to a very good cove I know of."

"Get out, and I'll be with you in ten minutes."

Santa Barbara looked like a necropolis when he emerged. Every soul in
the town, with the exception of himself, Estenega, Brotherton, and the
servants preparing the birthday breakfast, was on his knees in the
Mission mumbling aves for young Reinaldo. The three men walked down to
the bright-blue channel motionless under a bright-blue sky. The air was
warm; the waves were warm; the fruit was ripening on the walls. The
poppies were opening their deep yellow lips, breathing forth the languor
of the land. The palms were tall and green. The spiked cactus had burst
into blood-red flower.

"This is not America," said Thorpe. "It is Italy or Spain or Greece. It
is another atmosphere, physical as well as mental. One could lie on the
sands all day and think of nothing."

"California has a physical quality which the Americans and all the
other races that will eventually pour into her can never change," said
Estenega. "She will never cease to protest that she was made for love
and wine and to enfold with content in the mere fact of existence, to
delight the eye, the soul, and the body, to inspire poetry and romance,
and that the introduction of the commercial element is an indignity. I
used to think differently when California and my own ambitions seemed
identical; but San Francisco gave me a nightmare."

"On the ranches it is much the same as ever," said Captain Brotherton,
"and will remain so long beyond our time. You will return with us, Mr.
Thorpe? Estenega and Chonita go too."

And Thorpe gratefully accepted.

As they returned, they saw the great company streaming down from the
Mission, a mass of colour. Few were on foot. No Californian walked a
mile, if he had a horse to ride.

Thorpe hastened to his room to make his morning toilet. When he left it,
the court and corridors were crowded with the brilliantly plumaged men
and women. Reinaldo, in blue silk, was strutting about among the girls,
as proud and happy as a girl dressed for her first party. There was no
question in his mind who was the most important young man in California
that morning. He was the head and front of California's wealthiest
and haughtiest family, the scion of the only aristocracy that great
territory would ever know. The Americans he regarded as a mere
incident,--a brusque unpolished breed whose existence he rarely
recalled. The Jews, up in the town, he considered with more favour; his
fond mamma was inclined to be close-fisted with growing sons.

The tables had been set about the three corridors, as not only the
neighbours were bidden to the breakfast, but many from distant ranchos.
The poor were fed in the open beyond, on pigs roasted whole, and many
dulces. The Presidio band played the patriotic and sentimental airs of
Mexico.

Thorpe sat between Prudencia (who appeared to have marked him for her
own) and Doña Eustaquia. Chonita was opposite, between two of her old
admirers.

"It is the same, yet not the same--like the old time," said Doña
Eustaquia, with a sigh.

"It is not the same at all," said Chonita. "It is a theatre, and we are
performing--for Mr. Thorpe's benefit."

"No is theatre at all," said Prudencia, disapprovingly. "All is
exactamente the same. Few years older, no more; but no one detail
differente. And next year the same, and every year,--one, two, three
hundred years what coming."

Chonita shrugged her shoulders, and did not condescend to answer,
although every Californian within earshot, except Doña Eustaquia,
assured her that Prudencia was right.

To Thorpe, who had no fond reminiscences, it all seemed natural
and surpassingly picturesque. The highly seasoned dishes held hot
controversy with his English stomach; and he found it hard to catch the
meaning of the pretty broken-English wafted to him from prettier lips;
but he was deeply thankful that for the moment his personal life could
have no voice in so incongruous a setting.

After breakfast, the party went at once to a large arena near the
pleasure-grounds of Casa Grande, and sat upon the raised seats about the
ring, while Reinaldo and other young caballeros exhibited their skill
and prowess against the pugnacious bull.

After siesta the people danced their national jigs in the court of Casa
Grande, while the men and women of the aristocracy lounged over the
railing of the corridors and encouraged them with handfuls of silver
coins.

Thorpe, Estenega, and Captain Brotherton, in the ugly garb of a wider
civilisation, stood apart.

"They are an anachronism," said the Englishman, "and will never be able
to hold their own, namely, their vast possessions, against the
sharp-witted American."

"Not ten years," said Estenega. "The sharpers are crouching like
buzzards on the edge of every town. Up there in the village they have
wares to tempt the Californians,--fashions and ornaments that cannot be
bought otherwise without a trip to San Francisco. As there is little
ready money, the Californians--who make their purchases by the
wholesale, and would disdain to buy less than a 'piece' of silk or
satin--mortgage small ranchos at an incredible rate of interest, against
the next hide yield. Then the squatters have come, imperturbable and
patient, knowing that when their case is tried, it will be before an
American judge. When my father-in-law asked me whether I would prefer at
his death his Mexican investments or half of his Californian leagues, I
chose the former unhesitatingly: although he reckoned his landed estates
at twice the value of the other. But I had no wish to come back here to
live, and could trust no one else to look after my interests. Eustaquia
is all right, for she has Brotherton. I notice the Californian women are
marrying Americans wherever they can."

"And the matches are rather successful," said Brotherton, laughing.
"Unfortunately, the American girls won't marry Californians, or the
problem would be easily solved."

The day finished with a dance in the sala; and later, in Reinaldo's
room, Thorpe lost the last of his host's gold and a roll of his own. The
game was monté, and the young Californians grew so excited that Thorpe
momentarily expected to see the flash of knives. They shouted and swore;
and Reinaldo even wept with rage, and vowed that Thorpe was his only
friend on earth. However, the night ended peacefully. When the young
men had become so laden with mescal that they could no longer see their
cards, they embraced affectionately and went to bed.




XX


The next day there were races, and in the evening another dance, on the
day following a _rodeo_ and _merienda_.

"How long do they keep this thing up without breaking down?" asked
Thorpe, on the evening of the sixth day, and after another race where
the women had screamed themselves hoarse, and one man had stabbed
another. All were now fraternal and enthusiastic in a _cascarone_
frolic.

"They are made of elastic, as far as pleasure is concerned," replied
Estenega. "If they had to work six hours out of twenty-four, they would
be haggard, and weak in the knees."

Thorpe entered the sala. The furniture, with the exception of the
tables, had been removed; and men and women, with the abandon of
children, were breaking eggshells, filled with cologne, tinsel, and
flour, on the back of each other's heads. Black hair was flowing to the
floor; white teeth were set behind arch tense lips; black eyes were
snapping; nostrils were dilating. Even Doña Eustaquia and Chonita had
joined in the romp. Prudencia, alone, ever mindful of her dignity,
stood in a corner, the back of her head protected by the wall. She
raised her fan to Thorpe, and he made his way to her under a shower of
_cascarones_. The cologne ran down his neck, and made a paste of flour
and tinsel on his head.

"Ay, señor!" exclaimed the châtelaine of Casa Grande, as he bowed before
her. "No is unbecome at all. How you like the way we make the fun?"

Thorpe assured her that life was unmitigated amusement for the first
time.

"No? You no laughing at us, señor?"

"It has been my good fortune to laugh with you for six days."

"Si: I theenk you like. I watching you." Prudencia gave her head a
coquettish toss. She was still a very pretty woman, despite her flesh.

"Oh, now you flatter me awfully. Why should you watch your most
insignificant guest?"

"You no are the more--how you call him?--eens--_bueno! no importa_. You
are the more honour guest I have. Si you like California, Señor Torp,
why you no living here?"

"Oh--I--" He had heard that question before, in different circumstances.
He was standing with his back to the wall. The brilliant picture before
him became the mise-en-scène of an opera, the babble of voices its
chorus. To his reversed vision, it crowded backward and cohered. And
upon its shifting front, upon the wall of light and laughter and beauty,
was projected the tragic figure of Nina Randolph.

Thorpe felt that his dark face was visibly paling. A small angry fist
seemed to strike his heart, and all his being ached with sudden pity and
longing.

A soft hand brushed his. He turned with a start and looked down into the
coquettish eyes of his hostess. He noted mechanically that she had a
very determined mouth, and that her colour was higher than usual.

"I beg pardon?" he stammered.

"Why you no stay here?" whispered Prudencia.

"Well, I may, you know; my plans are very unsettled."

"You ever been marry, señor?"

"No, señora."

"I have; and I love the husband, before; but so many years that ees
now. You think ees possiblee keep on love when the other have been
dead twenty years?"

"I think so."

"Ay! So I theenk once. But no was intend, I theenk, to live 'lone
alway."

"Then why have you never married again, dear señora!" Thorpe found the
conversation very tiresome.

"Ay! The men here--all are alike the one to the other. Never I marry
another Californian."

"Ah!"

"No!"

His restless eyes suddenly encountered hers. He felt the blood climb
to his hair, his breath come short. His hands desperately sought his
pockets.

"I am sure, if you went to San Francisco, you would be overwhelmed with
offers--from Americans. This room is frightfully warm, don't you think
so, señora? Shall I open the door? Ah, what a nuisance! here comes Don
Adan Menendez to talk to you, and two other admirers are in his wake. I
must release you for the moment. _Hasta luego_, dear señora!"

He made his way rapidly down the room, and out of the house.

"Great heaven!" he thought. "It is well the week is over. Good God, what
a travesty!" and he laughed aloud.

He passed through the screaming crowd, which also had its _cascarones_,
and walked rapidly and aimlessly up the valley until the white placid
walls of the Mission were so close that he could count its arches. He
sat down on a rock, and pressed his hands against his head.

He resented the quiet and beauty of the night, the repose of the
Mission, the dark-blue spangled sky, the soft sobbing of the ocean. If
Queen Mab and her train had come down to dance on the brink of hell, the
antithesis could not have jarred more hatefully than the night upon his
thoughts. He felt a desire to strike something, and hit the rock with
his fist. He dug his heel into the ground, then thought of the flour and
tinsel on his hair, and laughed aloud. After a time he put his face into
his hands and wept. The sobs convulsed him, straining his muscles; the
tears seemed wrung from some inner frozen fountain.

The storm passed. Calmer, he sat and thought. His love for Nina
Randolph, during this interval of quiescence, had lost nothing of its
iron. Idealised, she came back to him. Or, rather, he told himself he
looked through the husk that the hideous circumstances of her life had
bundled into shape, to the soul which spoke to his own. He worshipped
her courage. He forgot himself and suffered with her. He hated himself
for not having guessed the truth at once, and borne her burden. True,
she had lied to him; but the lie was pardonable, and he attached no
significance to it. If she had loved him less, she would have confessed
the truth, indifferently. Others knew.

Her moods passed in review, with keen allurement. He wondered that he
had ever wished her a woman of even and tangible temperament. The
thought of her variety intoxicated him. The very equilibrium of the
world might be disturbed, but he would have her.

The horror of her impending fate jibbered at him. He set his teeth, and
compelled his mind to practical deduction. Her mother was only insane at
intervals; there was no reason why the daughter should be affected in
a dissimilar manner. Why, indeed, should not her attacks be far less
frequent, if she were happy and her life were alternately peaceful and
diversified? He would have the best advice in Europe, and guard her
unremittingly.

His impulse was to return to her at once. He cogitated until dawn, then
concluded to take her father's advice in part; he would remain away a
month, then come down upon her unexpectedly. But he went to his room
and wrote her a letter, begging for a word in return.




XXI


Early in the forenoon he started northward with the Brothertons
and Estenegas. Reinaldo kissed him on both cheeks, much to his
embarrassment; but Prudencia accepted his farewells with chilling
dignity, and did not invite him to return.

The Rancho de los Pinos was some ten miles from Monterey. Behind the
house was a pine forest whose outposts were scattered along the edge of
the Pacific; facing it were some eight thousand acres of rolling land,
cut with willowed creeks, studded with groves of oaks, dazzling, at this
season, with the gold of June. Thousands of cattle wandered about in
languid content; the air lay soft and heavy on unquiet pulses.

The Brothertons and their guests "horse-backed" in the morning, but
spent the greater part of the day in the hammocks swung across the long
cool corridors. After supper, they rambled through the woods, sometimes
as far as the ocean, where they sat on the rocks until midnight. The
conversation rarely wandered from politics; for it was the summer
of 1860, and the approaching national earthquake rumbled loudly.
Nevertheless, life on the Rancho de los Pinos was less in touch with the
world than any part of the strange new land which Thorpe had visited;
and he hardly felt an impulse to speed the lagging moments. Doña
Eustaquia, who had been one of the very pulses of the old régime, still
beat with loud and undiminished vigour; but Chonita was very restful,
and the country enfolded one with a large sleepy content. He received
nothing from Nina Randolph, but her father wrote once or twice saying
that she was well, but taking little interest in the summer gaieties.

On the first of July, he took the boat from Monterey to San José. There
he was the guest of Don Tiburcio Castro for a few days, and attended a
bull fight, a race at which the men bet the very clothes off their
backs, a religious festival, and three balls; then took the stage which
passed Redwoods on its way to San Francisco. It was a ride of thirty
miles under a blistering sun, through dust twelve inches deep which the
heavy hoofs of the horses and the wheels of the lumbering coach tossed
ten feet in the air, half smothering the inside passengers, and coating
those on top within and without. Thorpe had secured the seat by the
driver, thinking to forget the physical discomforts in the scenery. But
the tame prettiness of the valley was obliterated by the shifting wall
of dust about the stage; and Thorpe closed his eyes, and resigned
himself to misery. Even the driver would not talk, beyond observing
that it was "the goldarndest hottest day he'd ever knowed, and that was
saying a darned sight, _you_ bet!" It was late in the afternoon when
the stage pulled up at the "hotel" of a little village.

"That there's Redwoods," said the driver, pointing with his whip toward
a mass of trees on rising ground. "Evenin'. I wish I wuz you."

The hotel seemed principally saloon; but the proprietor, who was chewing
vigorously, told Thorpe he guessed he could accommodate him, and led
him to a small room whose very walls were crackling with the heat.
Thorpe distinctly saw the fleas jumping on the bare boards, and
shuddered.

"Can I have a bath?" he asked.

"A what?"

"A bath."

"Oh!--we don't pronounce it that way in these parts. And bath-tubs is a
luxury you'll have to go to 'Frisco for, I guess."

"Hav'n't you any sort of a tub you could bring me? I have a call to pay,
and I must clean up."

"Perhaps the ole woman'd let you have one of her wash-tubs. I'll ask
her."

"Do. And I should like supper as soon after as possible."

The old woman contributed the tub. It leaked, and it was redolent of
coarse soap and the indigo that escapes from overalls. Thorpe got rid
of his dust; but the smells, and the hot room, and the cloud of dust
that sprang back from his clothes as he shook them out of the window,
improved neither his aching head nor his temper. To make matters worse,
the steak for his supper was fried, the potatoes were swimming in
grease, the butter was rancid, and the piecrust hung down with its own
weight. He ate what little of this typical repast he could in a close
low room, crowded with men in their shirt-sleeves, who expectorated
freely, mopped their faces and necks with their napkins, and smelt. The
flies swarmed, a million strong, and invaded the very plates; a previous
battalion lay, gasping or dead, on the tables, some overcome by the
heat, others by the sharp assaults of angry napkins. When Thorpe left
the room, he had half made up his mind not to call on Nina Randolph that
evening; he felt in anything but a loverlike mood. Moreover, such an
introduction to a reunion was grotesque; but after he had smoked his
cigar in the open air, he felt better, concluded not to be a romantic
ass, and started for the house.

He climbed the dusty road toward the two tall redwoods (the only ones
in the valley) that gave her home its name, then turned into a long
cool avenue. Beside it ran a creek, dry already, its sides thick with
fragrant shrubs. So closely planted was the avenue that he did not catch
a glimpse of the house until he came suddenly upon it; then he paused a
moment, regarding it with pleasure. It looked like a fairy castle, so
light and delicate and mediæval of structure was it. The yellow plaster
of its walls, the vivid bloom of the terrace on which it stood, were
plainly visible in the moonlight. The dark mountains, covered with their
redwood forests, seemed almost directly behind, although they were
twenty miles away. Thorpe was glad he had come. The hideous afternoon
and evening slipped out of his thought.

The front doors were open. Cochrane was walking up and down the hall,
his hands clasped behind him, his head bent. He looked like a man who
was listlessly awaiting a summons.

Light streamed from open windows to the verandah on the right of the
house. Thorpe, conceiving that Nina was there, determined to look upon
her for a moment unobserved. He skirted the house, and heard Nina's
voice. To command a view of the interior, he must reach the verandah.
He mounted the steps softly, but other sounds rose high above his
footfalls as he walked toward the window. A peal of coarse laughter
burst forth. The light swept obliquely across the verandah; he stood
in the shadows just beyond it, and looked into the room.

Nina sat in a corner, her elbows on her knees, her eyes fixed on
the floor. Her black dress was destitute of any feminine device.
Mrs. Randolph and Mrs. Reinhardt sat on opposite sides of a table.
Between them was a steaming bowl of punch. There were two unopened
brandy-bottles on the table. The faces of both women were flushed,
and their hair was disordered.

"Tha't a fool, Nina," remarked Mrs. Randolph, in a remarkably steady
tone. "Coom and 'ave a glass. My word! it's good."

Nina made no reply.

"Such nonsense," wheedlingly. "It's the best a iver made, and the Lord
knows a've made mony. Coom and try just one glass."

"I am sitting here to test my strength. I shall not touch it."

Mrs. Randolph laughed, coarsely and loudly. "Tha't a fool. Tha doon't
knoo what tha't talking aboot. It strikes me a 've 'eard thot before.
Coom. Tha mought as well give in, fust as last."

Nina made no reply.

Mrs. Randolph's evil eyes sparkled. She filled an empty glass with the
punch, and walked steadily over to where her daughter sat. Nina sprang
from her chair, overturning it, thrusting out her hands in a gesture
eloquent with terror, and attempted to reach the door. Mrs. Randolph was
too quick for her; with a dexterous swoop, she possessed herself of the
girl's small hands and pressed the goblet to her nostrils. Nina gave a
quick gasp, and, throwing back her head, staggered slightly, the glass
still against her face. Outside Thorpe reeled for a moment as if he too
were drunk. The blood pounded in his ears; his fingers drew inward,
rigid, in their desire to get about the throat of some one, he did not
much care whom.

Nina wrenched one hand free, snatched the goblet and held it with
crooked elbow, staring at her mother. Mrs. Randolph laughed. Mrs.
Reinhardt held her breath in drunken awe at the tragedy in the girl's
face. Nina brought the goblet half way to her lips, her eyes moving to
its warm brown surface with devouring greed. Then she flung it at her
mother's breast, and sank once more to her chair, covering her face with
her hands.

Mrs. Randolph, cursing, returned to the table and consoled herself with
a brimming glass. Outside, the man's imagination played him an ugly
trick. A picture flashed upon it, vivid as one snatched from the dark by
the blaze of lightning. A struggling distorted foaming thing was on the
floor, held down by the strong arms of two men, and the face of the
thing was not the face of Mrs. Randolph. She stood apart, looking down
upon her perfected work with a low continuous ripple of contented
laughter. The vision passed. Thorpe leaped from the verandah and
wandered aimlessly about the grounds. He cursed audibly and repeatedly,
not caring whether he might be overheard or not. He felt as if every
nerve in his body were a separate devil. He hated the thought of the
next day's sunlight, and wondered if it would shine on a murderer or a
suicide; he felt capable of crime of the blackest variety.

Fascinated, he returned to the verandah. Mrs. Randolph had fallen
forward on the table. The man Cochrane entered and took her by the
shoulders. She flung out her arm and struck him.

"Give oop! Give oop!" she muttered. But he jerked her backward, and half
dragged, half carried her from the room. Mrs. Reinhardt staggered after,
slamming the door behind her. Then Nina rose and came forward, and
leaned her finger-tips heavily on the table.

"Come in," she said; and Thorpe entered.

They faced each other in silence. For a moment Thorpe was conscious only
of the change in her. Her cheeks were sunken and without colour; her
eyes patched about with black. The features were so controlled that they
were almost expressionless.

"Sit down," she said. "I will tell you the story."

He took the chair Mrs. Reinhardt had occupied, Nina her mother's. She
pressed her knuckles against her cheeks, and began speaking rapidly, but
without excitement.

"My father's home in Yorkshire was near the town of Keighley, which is a
few miles from Haworth, the village where the Brontës lived. He and
Branwell Brontë were great friends, and used to meet at the Lord Rodney
Inn in Keighley, as Haworth is an almost inaccessible place. They were
both very brilliant young men; and many other young men used to drop in
on Saturday evenings to hear them talk politics. Of course the night
ended in a bout, which usually lasted over Sunday. My mother was
bar-maid at that inn. She made up her mind to marry my father. It is
said that at that time she was handsome. She had an insatiable thirst
for liquor, but was clever enough to keep my father from suspecting it.
Once my father--who cared little for drink, beyond the conviviality of
it--and Brontë went on a prolonged spree, the result of a bet. When he
came to himself, he found that he had married her before the registrar.
He belonged to one of the oldest families in the county. He had married
a woman who could neither read nor write, and who talked at all times as
she does now when she is drunk. Nevertheless, he determined to stand by
her, because he thought he deserved his fate, and because he thought she
loved him. But he left the country. To introduce her to his people and
friends was more than he was equal to. To bury himself with her on his
estate, denying himself all society but hers, was equally unthinkable,
to say nothing of the fact that he was ashamed to introduce her to the
servants. He wished to go away and be forgotten, begin life over in a
new land where social conditions were as the builders made them. He came
to California. She was furious. She had married him for the position she
had fancied such a marriage would give her: she wanted to be a lady. Her
mind was somewhat diverted by travel, and she kept her peace until she
reached San Francisco--Yerba Buena, it was called then. It was a tiny
place: a few adobe houses about the plaza, and a warehouse or two at the
docks. Then there was a frightful scene between the two. My father
learned why she had married him, and that she had instigated the wager
which led to the spree which enabled her to accomplish her purpose. She
ordered him to take her back to England at once, threatening to punish
him if he did not. He refused, and she went on a prolonged drinking
bout. This was shortly before my birth. They were the guests of Mr.
Leese, a German who had married a native Californian and settled in the
country. These people were very kind; but it was horribly mortifying for
my father. He built her a house as quickly as possible, in order to hide
her in it. I forgot to say that he had brought over Cochrane, who took
charge of his household affairs. At the end of a year there was another
scene, in which my father made her understand that he would never return
to England; and that, were it not for me, he would turn her out of the
house and let her go to the devil as fast as she liked. It was the
mistake of his life that he did not, both for himself and for me. He
should have taken or sent me back to England, and left her with a
subsistence in the new country. But he is a very proud man. He feared
that she would follow him home, and publish the story. There is no
getting away from a woman like that.

"She was forced to accept the position; but she hated him mortally, and
no less than he hated her. She had threatened again to make him rue his
refusal to return to England, but refused to explain her meaning. This
is what she did. He idolised me. She put whisky in my baby food until I
would not drink or eat anything that was not flavoured with it. She was
very cunning: she habituated my system to it gradually, so that it never
upset me. She also gave it to me for every ailment. My father suspected
nothing. There were depths of depravity that neither his imagination nor
his observation plumbed. When I was about thirteen, he left us in
charge of Cochrane--who had more influence over my mother than any
one--and went off to the Crimean war, rejoining his old regiment. The
necessity to get away from her for a time overrode his paternal
instinct--everything. Moreover, he wanted to fight somebody. He
distinguished himself. Just after his return, he discovered what my
mother had made of me. His rage was awful; he beat her like a navvy. For
once she was cowed. I went off my head altogether. When I came to, he
was crouching in a corner as if some one had flung him there, sobbing
and gasping. It was awful--awful! Then he sent me to the Hathaways to
study with the girls. They knew, and promised to keep me away from her,
and to see that I had nothing to drink. My mother sent me a bottle of
whisky every week in my clean clothes. I did not tell him, for I wanted
it. He found that out, too, and then debated whether he had not better
send me away from the country. But he knew that the cry was in my blood,
and that if I went to his people in England the chances were I would
disgrace him. Then he made his second mistake: he did not throw her
out. He ordered her to go, and she laughed in his face and asked him how
he would like to read every morning in the _Golden Era_ that James
Randolph's wife had spent the night in the calaboose. Now, only two or
three people besides the Hathaways and Shropshires even suspected it, so
carefully had Cochrane watched her.

"He sent me to boarding-school. She kept me in money, and I got what I
wanted, although my father's pride was in me, and I never took enough to
betray my secret. It was not until I had finished school that I really
gave way to the appetite. My father, closely as he watched me, did not
suspect for a long time. He was very busy,--he threw himself heart and
soul into the development of the city,--and when the appetite mastered
me, I either feigned illness or went to the country. At last he found it
out. There have been many bitter hours in my life, but that was
incomparably the bitterest. I had always loved him devotedly. When he
went down on his knees and begged me to stop, of course I swore that I
would. I kept my promise for six months, she doing all she could to
entice me the while. Then I yielded. After that, after another interview
with my father, I restrained the intolerable craving for another six
months. Then it went on irregularly. I don't know that I began to think
much, to look into the future, until about a year ago--it was when I
first saw her as you saw her that night. Then I aged suddenly. My moral
sense awakened, my sense of personal responsibility. I loathed myself.
I looked upon what I had become with horror. I struggled fiercely,--but
with indifferent success,--although, I must add, there were weeks at a
time when I never thought of it; for I have the _joie de vivre_, and
there are many distractions in society. Then you came. For a time I
was happy and excited, and the thing was in abeyance. I touched
nothing: that was my only chance. I fought it under,--after that first
night,--and the desire did not come again until I drank the mescal at
Don Tiburcio's _merienda_. But I had known that it would come back
sooner or later, and was determined not to marry you, nor to let myself
fall seriously in love with you. But after that first night out on
the strawberry patches I knew that I loved you, and, as I am not a
light-minded person, irrevocably. But I made up my mind to enjoy that
week, and look no farther. You know the rest. What I have suffered
since perhaps you can divine, if you love me. If you don't, it doesn't
matter." Her monotonous calm left her suddenly. She brought her fist
down on the table. "This room is full of the smell of it!" she cried.
"And I want it! I want it!"

She pushed back her chair. "Come," she said, "let us go outside."

She ran out to the verandah. He followed, and she grasped his arm. "Let
us go for a ride," she said. "I shall go off my head, if I keep still
another moment. I want motion. Are you tired?"

"No, I am not tired."

She led the way to the stables. The men in charge had gone to bed. She
and Thorpe saddled two strong mustangs, rode rapidly down the avenue
and out into the high road. For some time they followed the stage-route,
then struck into a side road leading to the mountains. Nina did not
speak, nor did Thorpe. He was thankful for the respite. Once he touched
his cheek mechanically, wondering if it had fallen into wrinkles.

They rode at a break-neck pace. The night had become very dark: a great
ocean of fog had swept in from the Pacific, blotting out mountains and
stars. The mustangs moderated their pace as they began to ascend the
foot-hills. The long rush through the valley had quickened Thorpe's
blood without calming his brain. He did not speak. There seemed to be
a thousand words struggling in his brain, but they would not combine
properly. He could have cursed them free, but although he was too bitter
and excited to have tenderness or pity for the woman beside him, he
considered her in a half blind way; she was the one woman on earth who
had ever sent him utterly beside himself. They ascended, two black spots
of shifting outline in the fog, for an hour or more. Neither below nor
above could an object be seen, not a sound came to them. It was unreal,
and ghostly, and portentous. Then, almost abruptly, they emerged, the
mustangs trotting on to the flat summit of a hill. Nina sprang to the
ground.

"Tie the horses," she said; and Thorpe led them to a tree some yards
away.

Nina stood with her back to him, her hands hanging listlessly at her
sides, looking downward. Thorpe, after he had tethered the horses,
paused also.

The world below was gone. In its place was a vast ocean of frothy
milk-white fog. On each side, melting into the horizon in front, until
it washed the slopes of the Contra Costa range, lay this illimitable
ocean pillowed lightly on sleeping millions. Now calm and peaceful, now
distorted in frozen wrath, it was so shadowy, so unreal, that a puff of
wind might have blown it to the stars. Out of it rose the hill-tops,
bare weather-beaten islands. Against them the sea had hurled itself,
then clung, powerless to retreat. Upon some it had cast its spray half
way to the crest, over others it rushed in mighty motionless torrents;
here and there it but half concealed the jagged points of ugly rocks.
Beating against solitary reefs were huge, still, angry breakers,
sounding no roar. A terrible death-arrested storm was there in
mid-ocean,--a storm which appalled by its very silent wrath. On one of
the highest and barest of the crags an old building looked, in that
sunless light, like a castle in ruin. Above, the cold blue sky was
thickly set with shivering stars. The grinning moon hung low.

There was not a sound; not a living creature was awake but themselves.
They might have been in the shadowy hereafter, with all space about
them; in the twilight of eternity. Where they rested, the air was clear
as a polar noon; not a stray wreath of that idle froth floated about
them.

"I came here," said Nina, turning to Thorpe, "because I knew it would be
like this. It will be easier to hear what you think of me, than it would
have been down there."

He brought his hands down on her shoulders, gripping them as if
possessed of the instinct to hurt.

"Once or twice I could have killed you as you spoke," he said. "I shall
marry you and cure you, or go to hell with you. As I feel now, it does
not matter much which."

And then he caught her in his arms and kissed her, with the desire which
was consuming him.

"But even you cannot conquer me," she said to him an hour later. "I
shall not marry you until I have conquered myself. I believe now that I
can. I got your letter. I very nearly knew that you would say what you
have done, after I told you the truth. I won't marry you, knowing that,
in spite of your love, which I do not doubt, at the bottom of your
intelligence, you despise me. I have always felt that if I could make
a year's successful fight, I should never fall again. There may be
no reason for this belief; but we are more or less controlled by
imagination. There is no doubt in my mind on this point. If I win
alone, you will respect me again, and love me better."

"I do not despise you. I hardly know what I felt for you five weeks ago.
But I have only sympathy for you now--and love! You must let me do the
fighting. It will knit us the more closely--"

"It would wear me out, kill me, knowing that you were watching my
struggles, no matter how lovingly. Besides, I know myself; my moods are
unbearable at such times. I cannot control my temper. Before the year
was over, we should have bickered our love into ruins. We could not
begin over again. If you will do as I wish, I believe we can be happy.
It is not long to wait--we are both young. Cannot you see that I am
right?"

"I don't want to leave you, not for a day again!"

"And I don't want you to go! But I know that it is our only chance. If
you marry me now, you will hate me before the year is over; and, what is
worse, I shall hate you. The steamer sails to-morrow. Will you go?"

He hesitated, and argued, a long while; but finally he said: "I will
go."

"Don't go all the way back to England. I should like to think you were
in America; that would help me."

"I will stay in New Orleans, and write by every steamer."

"Oh, do, do! And if I do not write as regularly, you will understand.
There will be times when I simply cannot write. But promise that, no
matter what you hear, you will not lose faith in me."

"I promise." Involuntarily his mouth curled into a grin. The ghosts of a
respectable company of extorted promises capered across his brain, as
small irreverent ghosts have a habit of doing in great moments. But his
mouth was close upon hers, and she did not see it.

An hour later she pointed outward. Far away, above the Eastern
mountains, was a line of flame. The sun rose slowly. It smiled down upon
the phantom ocean and flung bubbles of a thousand hues to the very feet
of the mortals on the heights.

Then slowly, softly, the ocean moved. It quivered as if a mighty hand
struck it from its foundations, swayed, rose, fled back to the sea that
had given it birth.

A moment more and the world was visible again, awake, and awaiting them.




BOOK II




I


Mr. Randolph owned a large ranch in Lake County which was managed by an
agent. A mile distant from the farm-house in which the agent lived with
the "hands" was a cottage, built several years since at Nina's request.
As Lake County was then difficult of access, Mr. Randolph seldom visited
his ranch, his wife never; but once a year Nina took a party of girl
friends to the cottage, usually in mid-summer. This year she went alone.
Immediately after Thorpe's departure she told her father of the
conditional engagement into which she had entered.

"And I wish to spend this year alone," she added. "Not only because I
want to get away from my mother, but because I believe that nothing will
help me more than entire change of associations. And solitude has no
terrors for me. I simply cannot go on in the old routine. I am bored to
death with the meaninglessness of it. That has come suddenly: probably
because I have come to want so much more."

"But wouldn't you rather travel, Nina?" Mr. Randolph was deeply anxious;
he hardly knew whether to approve her plan or not. A year's solitude
would drive him to madness.

"No, I want to live with myself. If I rushed from one distraction to
another I should not feel sure of myself at the end. I have thought and
thought; and, besides, I want to see and live Europe with Dudley Thorpe
alone. I feel positive that my plan is the right one. Only keep my
mother away."

"I will tell her plainly that if she follows you, I'll shut her up in
the Home of the Inebriates; and this time I'll keep my word. What excuse
shall you give people?"

"You can tell them of my engagement, and say that as we have agreed it
shall last a year, I have my own reasons for spending the interval by
myself. Their comments mean nothing to me."

"Shall you see no one?"

"Molly will come occasionally, and you,--no one else. I shall fish and
hunt and sail and ride and read and study music. Perhaps you will send
me a little piano?"

"Of course I will."

"I shall live out of doors mostly. I love that sort of life better than
any; I like trees better than most people."

"Very well. If you change your mind, you have only to return. I will
send to New York for all the new books and music. Cochrane will go ahead
and put things in order. I will also send Atkins to look after the
horses; and he and his wife will sleep in the house and look after you
generally. I hope to God the experiment will prove a success. I think
you are wise not to marry until the fight is over."




II


The cottage was on the side of a hill over-looking one of the larger
lakes. Beyond were other lakes, behind and in front the pine-covered
mountains. The place was very wild; it was doubtful if civilisation
would ever make it much less so. The cottage was dainty and comfortable.
Nina sailed a little cat-boat during the cooler hours of the day; and
she was a good shot. She wrote a few lines or pages every night to
Thorpe; but it was several days before she opened a book. She roamed
through the dark forests while it was hot, and in the evenings. She had
for California that curious compound of hatred and adoration which it
inspires in all highly strung people who know it well. It filled her
with vague angry longings, inspired her at times with a fierce desire to
flee from it, and finally; but it satisfied her soul. At times, a vast
brooding peace seemed lying low over all the land. At others, she
fancied she could hear mocking laughter. More than once she hung out of
the window half the night, expecting that California would lift up her
voice and speak, so tremendous is the personality of that strange land.
She longed passionately for Thorpe.

The weeks passed, and, to her astonishment, the poison in her blood made
no sign. Three months, and there had not been so much as a skirmish with
the enemy. She felt singularly well; so happy at times that she wondered
at herself, for the year seemed very long. Thorpe wrote by every
steamer, such letters as she had hoped and expected to get. Some of his
vital personality seemed to emanate from them; and she chose to believe
that it stood guard and warned off the enemy.

She was swinging in her hammock on the verandah one hot afternoon, when
a wagon lumbered to the foot of the hill, and her father and Molly
Shropshire emerged from the cloud of dust that surrounded it. She
tumbled out of the hammock, and ran down to meet them, her loose hair
flying.

"She looks about ten," thought Mr. Randolph, as she rushed into his
arms; "and beautiful for the first time in her life."

"We thought that you had had as much solitude as was good for you at one
time," said Miss Shropshire, in her hard metallic voice, which, however,
rang very true. "I am going to stay a month, whether I am wanted or
not."

"We have an addition to our family," said Mr. Randolph, as he sat
fanning himself on the piazza. "Your cousin has arrived."

"My what? What cousin?"

"Your mother, it seems, has a brother. If I ever knew of his existence,
I had forgotten it. But it seems that I have had the honour of educating
his son and of transforming him into a sort of pseudo-gentleman."

"He is not half bad, indeed," said Miss Shropshire.

"He is the sort of man who inspires me with a desire to lift my boot
every time he opens his mouth. But I must confess that his appearance is
fairly creditable. The obsolete term 'genteel' describes him better than
any other. He has got Yorkshire off his back, has studied hard,--he is
a doctor with highly creditable certificates and diplomas,--and dresses
very well. His manners are suave, entirely too suave: I felt disposed to
warn the bank; and his hands are so soft that they give me a 'turn' as
the old women say. He has reddish hair, a pale grey shifty eye, a snub
nose, and a hollow laugh. There you have your cousin--Dr. Richard
Clough, aged twenty-eight or thereabouts. In my days, he probably wore
clogs. At present his natty little feet are irreproachably shod, and he
makes no more noise than a cat. I feel an irrepressible desire for a
caricature of him."

Nina laughed heartily. "Poor papa! And you thought you had had the last
of the Cloughs. I hope he is not quartered on you."

"He is, but is looking about for an opening. To do him justice, I don't
think he is a sponge. He seems to have saved something. He wanted to
come up here and pay his _devoirs_ to you, but I evaded the honour. I
have a personal suspicion which may, of course, be wide of the mark,
that the object of his visit to California is more matrimonial than
professional; if that is the case, he might cause you a great deal of
annoyance: there is a very ugly look about his mouth."

Mr. Randolph remained several days; they were very happy days for him.
It was impossible to see Nina as she was at that period, to catch the
overflow of her spirits, without sharing her belief in the sure
happiness of the future.

Miss Shropshire fell in easily with all of Nina's pursuits. There was
much of Nina Randolph that she could never understand; but she was as
faithful as a dog in her few friendships and, with her vigorous sensible
mind, she was a companion who never bored. She was several years older
than Nina. Their fathers had been acquaintances in the island which had
the honour of incubating the United States.

"I approve of your engagement," said Miss Shropshire, in her downright
way. "I know if I don't you will hate me, so I have brought myself to
the proper frame of mind. He is selfish; but he certainly grows on one,
and no one could help respecting a man with that jaw."

But Nina would not discuss Thorpe even with Molly Shropshire. When she
felt obliged to unburden her mind, she went up and talked to the pines.

The girls returned home one morning from a stiff sail on the lake to be
greeted by the sight of a boot projecting beyond the edge of one of the
hammocks, and the perfume of excellent tobacco.

"What on earth!" exclaimed Miss Shropshire. "Have we a visitor? a man?"

Nina frowned. "I suspect that it is my cousin. Papa wrote the other day
that Richard had heard of a practice for sale in Napa, and had come up
to look into it. I suppose it was to be expected that he would come
here, whether he was invited or not."

As the girls ascended the hill, the occupant of the hammock rose and
flung away his cigar. He was a dapper little man, and walked down the
steep path with a jaunty ease which so strikingly escaped vulgarity as
to suggest the danger.

"Dear Cousin Nina!" he exclaimed. "Miss Shropshire, you will tell
her that I am Richard? Will you pardon me for taking two great
liberties,--first, coming here, and then, taking possession of your
hammock and smoking? The first I _couldn't_ help. The last--well, I
have been waiting two hours."

"I am glad you have made yourself at home," said Nina, perfunctorily;
she had conceived a violent dislike for him. "Your trip must have been
very tiresome."

"It was, indeed. This California is all very well to look at, but for
travelling comforts--my word! However, I am not regretting. I cannot
tell you how much I have wanted--"

"You must be very hungry. There is the first dinner-bell. Are you dusty?
Would you like to clean up? Go to papa's room--that one.

"Detestable man!" she said, as he disappeared. "I don't believe
particularly in presentiments, but I felt as if my evil genius were
bearing down upon me. And such a smirk! He looks like a little
shop-keeper."

"I think he cultivates that grin to conceal the natural expression of
his mouth--which is by no means unlike a wolf's. But he is a harmless
little man enough, I have no doubt. I've been hasty and mistaken too
often; only it's a bore, having to entertain him."

But Dr. Clough assumed the burdens of entertaining. He talked so
agreeably during dinner, told Nina so much of London that she wished to
know, betrayed such an exemplary knowledge of current literature, that
her aversion was routed for the hour, and she impulsively invited him to
remain a day or two. He accepted promptly, played a nimble game of
croquet after supper, then took them for a sail on the lake. He had a
thin well-trained tenor voice which blended fairly well with Miss
Shropshire's metallic soprano; and the two excited the envy of the frogs
and the night-birds. He was evidently a man quick to take a hint, for he
treated Nina exactly as he treated Molly: he was merely a traveller in a
strange land, delighted to find himself in the company of two charming
women.

"Upon my word," said Molly, that night, "I rather like the little man.
He's not half bad."

"I don't know," said Nina. "I'm sorry I asked him to stay. I'll be glad
to see him go."

The next day he organised a picnic, and made them sit at their ease
while he cooked and did all the work. They spent the day in a grove of
laurels, and sailed home in the dusk. It was on the following day that
Nina twice caught him looking at her in a peculiarly searching manner.
Each time she experienced a slight chill and faintness, for which she
was at a loss to account. She reddened with anger and terror, and he
shifted his eyes quickly. When he left, the next morning, she drew a
long sigh of relief, then, without warning, began to sob hysterically.

"There is something about that man!" she announced to the alarmed Miss
Shropshire. "What is it? Do you suppose he is a mesmerist? He gave me
the most dreadful feeling at times. Oh, I wish Dudley were here!"

"Why don't you send for him?"

"I don't know! I don't know! I wish the year were over!"

"It is your own will that makes it a year. I don't see any sense in it,
myself. I believe this climate, and being away from everything, has set
you up. Why not send for him, and live here for some months longer? He
is your natural protector, anyhow. What's a man good for?"

"Oh, I feel as if I must! Wait till to-morrow. That man has made me
nervous; I may feel quite placid to-morrow, and I ought to wait. It is
only right to wait."

And the next day she was herself again, and dismissed the evil spell of
Dr. Clough with a contemptuous shrug. Nor would she send for Thorpe.

"I may cut it down to eight months," she said. "But I must wait that
long."




III


A week later Miss Shropshire returned to San Francisco. Nina was not
sorry to be alone again. She drifted back into her communion with the
inanimate things about her, into the exaltation of spirit, impossible in
human companionship, and lived for Thorpe's letters.

One day she received a letter from Dr. Clough.

     "DEAR COUSIN NINA," it ran. "I am to have the practice in Napa, but
     not for two or three months, unfortunately, for I look forward to
     meeting you again. Those few days with you and Miss Molly were
     delightful to the lonely wanderer, who has never known a home."
     ("Not since he wore clogs," thought Nina.) "Perhaps some day I
     shall make substantial acknowledgment of my gratitude. This is a
     world of vicissitudes, as we all know. Remember this--will you,
     Nina?--when you need me _I am there._ There are crises in life when
     a true friend, a relative whose interests merge with one's own, is
     not to be despised. Don't destroy this letter. Put it by. It is
     sincere.

                    "Your faithful and obd't servant,
                         "RICHARD CLOUGH."

Nina tossed the letter impatiently on the table, then caught it up again
and re-read the last pages.

"That sounds as if it were written _avec intention_," she thought. "Can
papa be embarrassed? But what good could this scrubby little man do me,
if he were? Most likely it is the first gun of the siege. Thank Heaven
the guns must be fired through the post for a while."

December was come, but it was still very warm. The lake was hard and
still and blue. The glare was merciless.

Nina, followed by a servant bearing cushions, climbed wearily up the
hill to the forest. Once or twice she paused and caught at a tree for
support.

"If I ever get into the forest, I believe I'll stay there until this
weather is over," she thought. "It has completely demoralised me."

The servant arranged the cushions in a hammock between two pines whose
arms locked high above,--a green fragrant roof the sun could not
penetrate. Nina made herself comfortable, and re-read Thorpe's last
letter, received the day before. It was a very impatient letter. He
wanted her, and life in the South was a bore after the novelty had worn
off.

She lay thinking of him, and listening to the drowsy murmur of forest
life about her. Squirrels were chattering softly, somewhere in the
arbours above those slender grey pillars. A confused hum rose from the
ground; from far came the roar of a torrent. She could see the blue lake
with its ring of white sand, the bluer sky above, and turned her back:
the sight brought heat into those cool depths. Above her rose the dim
green aisles, the countless columns of the forest. She was very tired
and languid. She placed Thorpe's letter under her cheek and slept; and
in her sleep she dreamed.

She was still in the forest: every lineament of it was familiar. For a
time there were none of the changes of dreams. Then from the base of
every pine something lifted slowly and coiled about the tree,--something
long and green and horridly beautiful. It lifted itself to the very
branches, then detached itself a little and waved a foot of its upper
length to and fro, its glittering eyes regarding her with sleepy
malice. The squirrels had hidden in their caves; not a sound came from
the earth; the waters had hushed their voice. Nothing moved in that
awful silence but the languid heads of the snakes.

Then came a sudden brisk step; her cousin entered. He did not notice the
sleeper, but went to each constrictor in turn and stroked it lovingly.
Once he caught a coil close to his breast and laughed. The small
malignant eyes above moved to his, their expression changing to
friendliness, albeit shot with contempt. To Nina's agonised sense the
scene lasted for hours, during which Clough fondled the reptiles with
increasing ardour.

But at last the scene changed, and abruptly. She was on the mountain
above the fog-ocean, close to the stars. Thorpe's arms were strong about
her. It had seemed to her in the past five months that she had never
really ceased to feel the strength of his embrace, to hear the loud
beating of his heart on her own. This time he withdrew one arm and,
thrusting his fingers among her heartstrings, pulled them gently.
Something vibrated throughout her. She had been happy before, but that
soft vibration filled her with a new and inexplicable gladness. She
asked him what it meant. He murmured something she could not understand,
and smote the chords again. Her being seemed filled with music.

She awoke. The woods were dark. She tried to recall the ugly prelude to
her dream, but it had passed. She put her hands against her shoulders,
fancying she must encounter the arms that had held her, for their
pressure lingered. Then she drew her brows together, and craned her neck
with an expression of wonder. But several moments passed before she
understood. She was very ignorant of many things, and her experience up
to the present had been exceptional.

But she was a woman, and in time she understood.

Her first mental response was a wild unreasoning terror, that of the
woman who is in sore straits, far from the man who should protect her
and evoke the hasty sanction of the law. But the mood passed. She was
sure of Thorpe, and she had all the arrogance of wealth. He would
hasten at her summons, and they would live in this solitude for a year
or more; no one beyond the necessary confidants need ever know.

The maternal instinct had awakened in her dream. She folded herself
suddenly in her own arms. Her imagination flew to the future. Every
imaginative woman who loves the man that becomes her husband must have
one enduring regret: that in a third or more of his life she had no
part; he grew to manhood knowing nothing of her little share in the
scheme of things, met her when two at least of his personalities were
coffined in the yesterday that is the most vivid of all the memories.
And if his child be a boy, she may fancy it the incarnation of her
husband's lost boyhood and youth, and thus complete the circle of her
manifold desire.

And then Nina knew what had scotched the monster of heredity; she could
see the tiny hands at its throat. She lay and marvelled until the
servants, alarmed, came to look for her. The world took on a new and
wonderful aspect; she was the most wonderful thing in it.




IV


After supper she went into the sitting-room and wrote to Thorpe. As she
finished and left the desk, her eye fell on Richard Clough's letter,
which lay, open, on the table. The same chill horror caught her as when
she had encountered his searching eyes on the last day of his visit, and
she understood its meaning. He knew; there was the key to his verbiage.

She dropped upon a chair, feeling faint and ill. Like many women, she
had firm trust in her intuitions. If they had seemed baseless before,
they rested on a firm enough foundation now. She was in this man's
power; and the man was an adventurer and a Clough. Would he tell her
father? Or worse--her mother! She pictured her father's grief; his rage
against Thorpe. It would be more than she could endure. When Thorpe
came, it would not matter so much. And if her father were not told, it
was doubtful if he would ever suspect: he was very busy, and hated the
trip from San Francisco to Lake County. After Thorpe's arrival, it was
hardly likely that he would visit her.

A few moments' reflection convinced her that Clough would keep her
secret. His was the mind of subtle methods. He would make use of his
power over her in ways beyond her imagining.

Terror possessed her, and she called loudly upon Thorpe. With the sound
of his name, her confidence returned. He would be with her in something
under three months. Meanwhile, she could defy Clough. Later, he would
meet more than his match.

The next day she wrote to Molly Shropshire, telling her the truth and
giving her many commissions. Miss Shropshire's reply was characteristic:

    "I have bought everything, and start for the cottage on Tuesday.
    It is fortunate that I have two married sisters; I can be of much
    assistance to you. I have helped on several wardrobes of this sort,
    and acquired much lore of which you appear to be painfully ignorant.
    I am coming with my large trunk; for I shall not leave you again."

The momentous subject was not broached for some hours after her arrival.
Then--they were seated before the fire in the sitting-room, and the
first rain of winter was pelting the roof--Miss Shropshire opened her
mouth and spoke with vicious emphasis.

"I hate men. There is not one I'd lift my finger to do a service for. My
sisters are supposed to have good husbands. One--Fred Lester--is a
grown-up baby, full of whims and petty vanities and blatant selfishness,
who has to be 'managed.' Tom Manning is as surly as a bear with a sore
head when his dinner disappoints him; and when things go wrong in the
office there is no living in the house with him. My brother's life is
notorious, and his wife, what with patience and tears, looks like a pan
of skim-milk. Catch me ever marrying! Not if Adonis came down and staked
a claim about a mountain of gold quartz. As for Dudley Thorpe!" her
voice rose to the pitch of fury. "What is a man's love good for, if it
can't think of the woman first? Aren't they our natural protectors?
Aren't they supposed to think for us,--take all the responsibilities of
life off our shoulders? This sort of thing is in keeping with the
character, isn't it? Why don't you hate him? You ought to. _I'd_ murder
him--"

Nina plunged across the rug, and pressed both hands against Miss
Shropshire's mouth, her eyes blazing with passion.

"Don't you dare speak of him like that again! If you do, it will be the
last time you will ever speak to me. I understand him--as well as if he
were literally a part of myself. I'll never explain to you nor to any
one, but _I know_. And there is nothing in me that does not respond to
him. Now, do you understand? Will you say another word?"

"Oh, very well. Don't stifle me!" Miss Shropshire released herself.
"Have it that way, if it suits you best. I didn't come here to quarrel
with you."

Nina resumed her seat. After a few moments she said: "There is another
thing: Richard Clough knows." And she told Miss Shropshire of his
letter.

"Um, well, I don't know but that that will be as good an arrangement as
any. Some one must attend you, and a relative--"

"What! Do you think I'd have that reptile near me?"

"Now, Nina, look at the matter like a sensible woman. We shall have to
get a doctor from Napa. If it storms, he may be days getting here. If he
has a wife, she'll want to know where he has been, and will worm it out
of him. If he hasn't, he'll let it out some night when he has his feet
on the table in his favourite saloon, and is outside his eighth glass of
punch. It will be to Richard's interest to keep the matter quiet--you
can make it his interest: I don't fancy he's above pocketing a couple of
thousands. And he'll not dare annoy you after Dudley Thorpe is here.
I'll do Dudley Thorpe this much justice: he could whip most men, and he
wouldn't stop to think about it, either. Don't let us discuss the matter
any further now. Just turn it over in your mind. I am sure you will come
to the conclusion that I am right. If you ignore Richard, there's no
knowing what he may do."




V


The next day Miss Shropshire cut out many small garments, Nina watching
her with ecstatic eyes. Both were expert needlewomen,--most Californian
girls were in those days of the infrequent and inferior dressmaker,--and
in the weeks that came they fashioned many dainty and elegant garments.
Nina no longer went to the forest, rarely on the lake. Miss Shropshire
could hardly persuade her to go out once a day for a walk, so enthralled
was she by that bewildering mass of fine linen and lace. She was prouder
of her tucks than she had ever been of a semi-circle of admirers, four
deep; and when she had finished her first yoke she wept with delight.

Miss Shropshire often watched her curiously, half-comprehending. She
abominated babies. Her home was with one of her married sisters, and a
new baby meant the splitting of ear-drums, the foolish prattle and
attenuated vocabulary of the female parent, and the systematic
irritations of the inefficient nurse-maid. Why a woman should look as if
heaven had opened its gates because she was going to have a baby, passed
her comprehension, particularly in the embarrassing circumstances.

Nina was alone when Thorpe's next letter arrived.

    "I am starting for Cuba," it began. "My brother Harold has joined
    me; and as his chest is in a bad way, he thinks of settling in a hot
    country. I have suggested California; but he is infatuated with the
    idea of Cuba. You will forgive me for leaving the United States for
    a short period, will you not, dearest? I can do you no particular
    good by remaining here, and I am bored to extinction. If you would
    but give me the word, I should start for California on the next
    steamer; but as you hold me to the original compact, perhaps
    you will give me a little latitude. The talk here is war, war,
    war,--never a variation by any possible chance. My sympathies are
    with the South, and if they fight I hope they'll win; but as I have
    no personal interest in the matter I feel like a man condemned
    to a long course of one highly seasoned dish, with no prospect of
    variety. Address as usual; your letters will be forwarded, unless I
    return in a few weeks, as I think I shall."

Then followed several closely written pages which advised her of the
unalterable state of his affections.

Nina put the letter down, and stared before her with a wide
introspective gaze. When Miss Shropshire entered, she handed her the
first two pages. The older girl shut her lips.

"I don't like it," she said. "It means delay, and every week is
precious. It looks--" She paused.

"Unlucky; I have been wondering. I have a queer helpless feeling, as if
I were tangled in a net, and even Dudley, with all his love and will,
could not get me out. I suppose there is something in fate. I feel very
insignificant."

"Come, come, you are not to get morbid. Nobody's life is a straight
line. You must expect hard knots, and rough by-ways, and malaria, and
all the rest of it. Don't borrow trouble. You are sure of him, anyhow."

"Sometimes I hate California. One might as well be on Mars. It's
thousands of miles from New Orleans, and New Orleans is hundreds of
miles from Cuba. And now that everything is getting so upset, who knows
if he'll ever get my letters? I wish I'd started straight for New
Orleans the moment I knew. I am utterly at the mercy of circumstances."

"Well, thank Heaven you're rich," said Miss Shropshire, bluntly. "Just
fancy if you were some poor little wretch deserted by the man, and with
no prospect but the county hospital; then you might be blue."

"Oh, I suppose it might be worse!" replied Nina.

The next day her buoyant spirits were risen again, and she resolved to
accept the immediate arrangement of her destiny with philosophy; peace
and happiness would be hers eventually. She could not violate the most
jealous of social laws and expect all the good fairies to attend the
birth of her child. But she longed by day for the luxury of the night,
when she could cry, and beg Thorpe under her breath to come to her.

When the next steamer arrived it brought her no letter from Thorpe. But
this was to be expected. Another steamer arrived; it brought nothing.
She turned very grey.

"Make a close calculation," she said to Miss Shropshire. "You know how
long it takes to go to Cuba and back. Has there been time?"

"Yes, there has been time."

It was the middle of February, the end of a mild and beautiful winter.
Little rain had fallen. Nature seemed to Nina more caressing than ever.
The sun rarely veiled his face with a passing cloud. She worked with
feverish persistence, keeping up her spirits as best she could. There
was a bare chance that the next steamer would bring Thorpe.

Her father had paid her another visit, and gone away unsuspicious. He
had, in fact, talked of nothing but the approaching rebellion of the
Southern States, and the possible effect on the progress of the country.
It was not likely that he would come again, for he had embarked on two
new business enterprises, and he allowed himself to believe that Nina
had passed the danger point.

The third steamer arrived. It brought neither Thorpe nor a letter. Then
Nina gave way. For twenty-four hours she wept and sobbed, paying no
attention to expostulations and threats. Miss Shropshire was seriously
alarmed; for the first time she fully realised the proportions of the
responsibility she had assumed. She longed for advice. She even
contemplated sending for Mr. Randolph; for with all her dogged strength
of character she was but a woman, and an unmarried one. Finally she
wrote to Clough, who had arrived in Napa a fortnight before. She could
not bring herself to betray Nina's confidence; but Clough already knew.
Then she went to her room, and cursed Thorpe roundly and aloud. After
that she felt calmer, and returned to Nina.

"I can't think he is dead," said Nina, abruptly, speaking coherently for
the first time. "If he were, I should know it. I should _see_ him." Miss
Shropshire shivered, and cast an apprehensive glance into the dark
corners of the room. "But he is ill; that is the only explanation. You
don't doubt him?" turning fiercely to her friend.

"No; I can't say that I do. No--" with some reluctance, "decidedly not.
He's not that sort. Like most men, he will probably cool off in time;
but he's no weathercock, and one could hardly help believing in his
honesty."

Nina kissed her with passionate gratitude. "I couldn't stand having you
doubt him," she said. "I never have, not for a moment; but--oh--what
does it matter what is the reason? He hasn't come, and I haven't heard
from him. That is enough!"

"There will be one more steamer. There is just time."

"He won't come. I _feel_ that everything is going wrong. One way and
another, my life is going to ruin--"

"Nonsense, you are merely overwrought and despondent--"

"That is not all. And I know myself. Listen--if my baby dies, and he
does not come, I shall go down lower than I have ever been, and I shall
stay there. I'd never rise again, nor want to--"

"Then, for Heaven's sake, don't do your best to kill it! Brace up. I
believe that a good deal of what you say is true. Some people are strong
for the pleasure of giving other people a chance to add to the
platitudes of the world; but you are not that sort. So take care of
yourself."

"Very well; put me to bed. I will do what I can."

She did not rise the next day, and, when Clough came, consented,
listlessly, to see him. In this interview he made no impression on her
whatever; he might have been an automaton. Her brain realised no man but
the one for whom her weary heart ached.

She made an effort on the following day, and embroidered, and listened
while Miss Shropshire read aloud to her. The effort was renewed daily;
and every hour she fought with her instinct to succumb to despair.
Physically, she was very tired. She longed for the care and tenderness
which would have been hers in happier circumstances.




VI


Miss Shropshire took the precaution to ask Clough to come to the cottage
a day or two before the next steamer was due, and to be prepared to
remain. The steamer arrived, and with it nothing of interest to Nina
Randolph.

She was very ill. Even Clough, who was inimitable in a sick room, looked
grey and anxious. But it passed; and the time came when the housekeeper,
who had had many babies in her time, placed a little girl in Nina's
arms.

Nina, who had been lying with closed eyes, exhausted and wretched,
turned her face toward the unfamiliar weight, and looked wonderingly
into the face of the child. For a moment she hardly realised its
significance, vivid as had been her imaginings. The baby's colour was
fair and agreeable, and its large blue eyes moved slowly about with an
expression of sober inquiry.

Nina glanced hastily outward. She was alone for the moment. Miss
Shropshire had gone to her well-earned rest, and Dr. Clough was in the
dining-room, attended by Mrs. Atkins. Nina drew the baby closer, and
kissed it. For the moment she held Dudley Thorpe in her arms,--for she
could not grasp their separateness,--and peace returned. Thorpe was ill,
of course; but he was hardy and young, and would recover. The rapture of
young motherhood possessed her. She kissed the baby many times, softly,
fearing that it might break, then drew back and gazed at it with rapt
adoration. Once she met its wise solemn eyes, and the first soul of
Dudley Thorpe looked from their depths. She moved it with trembling
care, and laid its head on her breast.

She gave no thought to the time when the world must know; the world no
longer existed for her. Dudley Thorpe was her husband, and his child was
in her arms,--an actual tangible beautiful certainty; all the rest that
went to make up life was nebulæ.

It was a very good baby, and gave little trouble; consequently Nina was
permitted to hold it most of the time. She felt no desire to rise from
the bed, to take an active part in life again. She would have liked to
remain there until Thorpe came and sat beside her. She spoke little,
excepting to the child, and perhaps those hours, despite the great want,
were the happiest of her life.

"What are some women made of?" demanded Miss Shropshire of Dr. Clough.
"What is she going to do with that baby? That's what I want to know. It
may be months before Dudley Thorpe gets here, and it certainly won't be
long before Mr. Randolph comes up again. I don't believe she has given a
thought to the consequences--and I have always thought her an unusually
bright and level-headed woman."

"I see nothing to do but let matters take their course." He hesitated a
moment, then gave Miss Shropshire a swift tentative glance, shifting his
eyes hastily. "Would you--you believe in my disinterestedness, do you
not, Miss Molly?"

"I do, indeed. You have been a real friend. I'm sure I don't know what I
should have done without you."

"Then--if Mr. Thorpe does not return, when she has become convinced
that he does not mean to return, will you help me to make her understand
that I am only too willing to marry her and adopt her child?"

Miss Shropshire stared, then shook her head. "You don't know Nina. It
would be years before she got over her infatuation for Dudley Thorpe, if
ever; and by that time everybody would know. Besides, I don't share your
distrust of Thorpe. He is selfish, and is probably travelling beyond the
reach of mails; but he is the soul of honour: no one could doubt that."

"He may be dead."

"We should have heard by this time; and it would not help you if he
were. Most likely it would kill her."

"We don't die so easily."

"The thing to consider now is that baby. It's a dear little thing, and
looks less like putty than most babies; I can actually see a resemblance
to Thorpe. But, all the same, its presence is decidedly embarrassing."

The baby solved the problem. It died when it was ten days old. Even Miss
Shropshire, who scorned the emotions, shuddered and burst into tears at
the awful agony in Nina's eyes. Nina did not cry, nor did she speak.
When the child was dressed for its coffin, the housekeeper brought it to
the bedside. Nina raised herself on her elbow, and gave it a long
devouring glance. It looked like marble rather than wax, and its
likeness to Dudley Thorpe was startling. The contours of infancy had
disappeared in its brief severe illness, and the strong bold outlines of
the man who had called it into being were reproduced in little. The dark
hair fell over its forehead in the same way, the mouth had the same
arch.

Miss Shropshire entered the room, and Nina spoke for the first time
since the baby had given its sharp cry of warning.

"Take it up into the forest, and bury it between the two pines where my
hammock was." And then she turned her back and stared at the wall.

Shortly after, Mr. Randolph was informed that Nina had had a brief but
severe attack of rheumatic fever, and he paid her a hurried visit. He
wondered at the change in her, but did not suspect the truth.

"She is pining for Thorpe, I suppose," he said to Miss Shropshire. "I
cannot understand his silence; and now God knows when we'll hear from
him, unless he managed to get North before April 19th. Something has
happened, I am afraid. Poor child, she was not born under a lucky star!
Is she all right otherwise?"

"Yes, it looks as if she were cured. But when she goes to San Francisco,
she had better stay with me for a time. I don't think her mother's
society would be the best thing for her while she is so despondent."

"By all means. And that detestable Clough?"

"He is really a first-rate doctor, and has been devotion itself."

"Very well: I shall send him a handsome cheque. But if he has any
matrimonial designs, let him look out. Don't imagine I am blind. A man
does not neglect a fresh practice for cousinly affection. I cannot
suppose for a moment that she would tolerate him, but when a woman is
listless and despondent, and thinks that all her prospects of happiness
are over, there's no telling what she will do; particularly if the
besieger has the tenacity of a bull dog. I'd rather see her in her
coffin than married to Richard Clough."

Miss Shropshire was very anxious to return to San Francisco. She loved
Nina Randolph; but she had immured herself in the cause of friendship
long enough, and thought that her afflicted friend would be quite as
well off where distractions were more abundant. When she suggested
return, Nina acquiesced indifferently, and Mrs. Atkins packed the trunks
with a hearty good-will. Dr. Clough brought a hack, at great expense,
from Napa, and packed her into it as if she were a baby. As it drove
off, she looked through the window up to the forest where her baby lay.
She had not been strong enough to climb to the grave. She knew that she
should never see it.




BOOK III




I


When Thorpe left New Orleans his plan was to return on the next steamer
but one, then to go North to New York or Boston,--he had friends in both
cities,--and amuse himself in new fields until he was permitted to
return to California. He sought distraction, for although he was
reasonably sure of Nina's power to conquer herself, and intended to
marry her whether she did or not, separation and time deepened his
passion for her, and he only found peace of mind in filling his hours to
the brim. It is doubtful if he would have consented to remain the year
out were it not that he wished to admire her as much as she longed to
have him. Her pride and confidence in herself would invigorate the
happiness of both.

He left orders in New Orleans to have his mail held over until his
return. Harold was very ill on the voyage. Almost immediately upon
landing in Havana his health began to mend, and he declared himself
ready to kiss the soil, as he could not bestow a similar mark of favour
on the climate. He announced his intention of sending for his affianced
and spending the rest of his life in the West Indies. Thorpe did not
take him too seriously, but seeing that there was no prospect of getting
away for some time, and believing that Cuba would offer himself
entertainment for several months, he sent to New Orleans for his mail,
and wrote to Nina announcing his present plans. Whether the letters
never left the Havana post-office, or whether the mail sack was lost
overboard later, or ignored in the excitement at New Orleans, no one
will ever know. Nor does it matter; they were never received, and that
is all that concerns this tale. Thorpe and Harold started inland
immediately, and finally determined to go to Jamaica and San Domingo
before returning to Havana. He knew it was worse than folly to trust
letters to the wretched inland post-offices, and he had told Nina in his
letter of explanation not to expect another for some time. He should be
in New Orleans on the first of May, and, meanwhile, he kept a diary for
her future entertainment.

While exploring the mountain forests in the central part of Hayti, their
guide was murdered, and they were two months finding their way to San
Domingo. They were months of excitement, adventure, and more than one
hair-breadth escape. Thorpe would have been in his element had it been
possible to communicate with Nina, and could he have been sure of
getting out of the West Indies before the rainy season began. They came
unexpectedly upon San Domingo; and he learned that war had broken out in
the United States during April. They made what haste they could to
Havana, Harold as eager to return to civilisation as his brother; for
vermin and land-crabs had tempered his enthusiasm, and he had acquired a
violent dislike for the negro. At Havana, Thorpe found no letters
awaiting him. He also learned from an American resident that postal
communication had ceased between the North and South on May 31st. He
wondered blankly at his stupidity in not going North while there was
yet time, but like many others, he had heard so much talk of war that he
had ceased to believe in its certainty. He could only hope that his
letter had reached Nina, but knew that it was more than doubtful. The
Southern ports were in a state of blockade. He and his brother ran it in
a little boat rowed by themselves. In New Orleans he read the packet of
letters from Nina, that awaited him.




II


The great change in Nina Randolph's appearance and manner induced no
small amount of gossip in San Francisco. Women are quick to scent the
sin that society loves best to discuss, and there were many that
suspected the truth: her long retirement had prepared them for an
interesting sequel. Nina guessed that she was dividing with the war the
honours of attention in a small but law-making circle, but was quite
indifferent. She rarely went down to the parlour when people called, but
sat in her bedroom staring out at the bay; the Lester house was on the
summit of Clay Street hill.

Her father was deeply anxious, full of gloomy forebodings. He believed
Thorpe to be dead, and shook with horror when he thought of what the
consequences might be.

"Wouldn't you like a change?" he asked her one day. "How would you like
go to New York? Molly and Mrs. Lester could go with you."

Nina shook her head, colouring faintly.

"I see. You are afraid of missing Thorpe. I wish there were some way of
finding out--"

She turned to him with eager eyes. "Would you go, papa,--to New Orleans?
I haven't dared to ask it. Go and see what is the matter."

"My child, I could not get there. The ports are blockaded; if I
attempted the folly of getting to New Orleans by land, I should probably
be shot as a spy. It is for those reasons that he will have great
difficulty in getting here, as he did not have the forethought to leave
the South in time."

To this Nina made no reply, and as she would not talk to him, he left
her.

That evening Miss Shropshire came into Nina's room, and spoke twice
before she was answered. The room was dark.

"Look here, Nina!" she said peremptorily. "You've got to brace up.
People are talking. I know it!"

"Are they? What does it matter? I have no more use for them. I may as
well tell you I have come to the conclusion that Dudley Thorpe ceased to
care for me, and that is the reason of his silence. He has gone back to
England."

"I don't believe it. You're growing morbid. Women frequently do after
that sort of experience. I remember Beatrix sat in one position for
nearly a month, staring at the floor: wouldn't even brush her teeth. You
have too much brains for that sort of thing."

"I believe it. I have made up my mind. He is in England. He wrote me
once that if it were not that I had asked him not to leave the country,
he would run over, he was so tired of America. He went, and stayed."

"Well, then, go out in the world and flirt as you used to. Don't let any
man bowl you over like this; and, for Heaven's sake, don't mope any
more!"

"I hate the thought of every man in San Francisco. When I knew them, I
was an entirely different woman. I couldn't adapt myself to them if I
wanted to--which I don't."

"But there are always new ones--"

"Oh, don't! Haven't you imagination enough to guess what this last year
has made of me? If I got as far as a ball-room I'd stand up in the
middle of the floor and shriek out that since I was there last my heart
had lived and been broken, that I had lost a husband and buried a
baby--"

"Then, for Heaven's sake, stay at home! But I think," with deep meaning,
"that you had better try a change of some sort, Nina. If you don't want
to risk going East, why not visit some of the Spanish people in Southern
California?"

"I shall stay here."

It was during the next night that Nina left her bed suddenly, flung
herself into a chair, and pressed her elbows hard upon her knees. She
had barely slept for three nights. Her nerves were in a highly irritable
state. If any one had entered she would not have been able to control
her temper. Black depression possessed her; the irritability of her
nerves alternated with the sensation of dropping through space; and her
relaxed body cried for stimulant.

She twisted her hands together, her face convulsed. "Why should I
fight?" she argued aloud. "In that, at least, I should find temporary
oblivion. And what else have I left? Down deep, ever since I got his
last letter, I have known that I should never see him again. It is my
destiny: that is the beginning and the end of it. This is the second
time I have wanted it since the baby died. I _beat_ it out of me the
first time. I hoped--hoped--and if he were here I should win. If I could
be happy, and go away with him, it would not come again: I know--_I
know_. He could have got me some word by this. He is not dead. There is
only one other explanation. Men are all alike, they say. Why should I
struggle? For what? What have I to live for? I am the most wretched
woman on earth."

But she did struggle. The dawn found her sitting there still, her
muscles almost rigid. Her love for Thorpe had undergone no change; it
took the fight into its own hands. And it seemed to her that she could
hear her soul beg for its rights; its voice rose above the persistent
clamour of her body.

She went to bed and slept for a few hours; but when she awoke the desire
in her nerves was madder than ever. Every part of her cried out for
stimulant. She had no love for the taste of liquor; the demand came from
her nerve-centres. But still she fought on, materialising the monster,
fancying that she held it by the throat, that she cut its limbs off, its
heart out; but it shook itself together with magnificent vitality, and
laughed in her face.

Days passed. The clamour in her body strove to raise itself above the
despairing cry in her soul. But still, mechanically, without hope, she
lifted her ear to the higher cry, knowing that if she fell now she
should never rise again in her earthly life, nor speak with Dudley
Thorpe, should he, perhaps, return.

She invoked the image of her baby, the glory of the few days she had
known it. But a bitter tide of resentment overwhelmed the memory of that
brief exaltation. If she was to be saved, why had not the baby been
spared? Those who shared her secret had attempted to console her by
assuring her that its death was a mercy for all concerned. She had not
answered them; but her grief was cut with contempt for their lack of
vision. The baby might have cost her her social position, but it would
have stood between her soul and perdition. It had been taken--by One who
was supposed to know the needs of all His creatures. Therefore it was
only reasonable to assume that He wished her to be destroyed.

She thought of nothing else, but cunningly pretended to be absorbed in
her books.

There came a night when her nerves shrieked until her brain surged with
the din of them, and her hands clutched at the air, her eyes hardened
and expanded with greed, her lips were forced apart by her panting
breath. She jerked the stopper out of a bottle of cologne and swallowed
a quarter of the contents, then flung her wraps about her, stole
downstairs and out of the house, found a carriage, and was driven to
South Park.




III


Two weeks later she sat huddled over the fire in the library. Her face
was yellow; her eyes were sunken and dull; her hands trembled. She
looked thirty-five.

In her lap lay a letter from Dudley Thorpe. He and his brother, at the
risk of their lives, had got through the lines and reached New York. The
excitement, fatigue, and exposure had nearly killed Harold, who was in a
hospital in a precarious condition. Thorpe could not leave him. He
implored her to come on to New York at once; and he had never written a
more tender and passionate letter.

Cochrane opened the door, and announced that Dr. Clough had called.

"Tell him to come here," she said.

Dr. Clough wore his usual jaunty air, and he made no comment on her
appearance; he had come straight from Miss Shropshire.

"Sit down," said Nina, curtly, interrupting his demonstrations. "You
come at the right moment. I was about to send for you."

"My dear cousin Nina! I hope there is no--"

"Let me talk, please. Do you wish to marry me?"

Clough caught his breath. He flushed, despite his nerve. "Of course I
do," he stammered. "What a question! Certainly there never was a woman
so original. It is like you to settle matters in your own way."

"Don't delude yourself for a moment that I even like you. Of all the men
I have ever known, the sort of person I take you to be has my most
unmitigated contempt. It is for that reason I marry you. I must marry
some one at once to keep myself from ruining the life of Dudley Thorpe.
I choose you, because, in the first place, I am so vile a thing that no
punishment is severe enough for me; and, in the second, Fate has
acquitted herself so brilliantly in regard to my humble self that I feel
a certain satisfaction in giving her all she wants."

"My dear Nina, you are morbid." He spoke pleasantly, but he turned away
his eyes.

"Possibly; it would be somewhat remarkable if I were not. Do you still
wish to marry me?"

"Certainly. I do not take your rather uncomplimentary utterances
seriously. In your present frame of mind--"

"It is the only frame of mind I shall ever be in. You will have an
unpleasant domestic life; but you will have all the money you want.
Don't flatter yourself for a moment that you will either control or cure
me. You will be no more in my house than a well-paid butler--after my
father has been induced to accept you, which will not be in a hurry.
Meanwhile, you will probably beat me: you are quite capable of it; but
you may save yourself the exertion."

"I shall not beat you, Nina, dear." He spoke softly, with an assumption
of masculine indulgence; but his small pointed teeth moved suddenly
apart.

"You will understand, of course, that this engagement must not get to my
father's ears. He would lock me up before he would permit me to marry
you. He has all the contempt of the gentleman for the cad, of the real
man for the bundle of petty imitations: and you are his pet aversion. On
the tenth, he is obliged to go to San José to attend an important
law-suit. He will be detained not less than three days. We shall marry
on the eleventh--at Mrs. Lester's. I shall not tell my mother, for I
will not give her the pleasure of conspiring against my father. I
suppose that I shall break my father's heart; but I don't know that I
care. He might have saved me, if he had been stronger, and I am no
longer capable of loving any one--"

"Suppose Mr. Thorpe should come out here after you, anyhow, married or
not."

"He will do nothing of the sort. One reason you would be incapable of
understanding, should I attempt to explain; the other is, that he will
no longer want me after I have been the wife of a person of your sort."

"My word, Nina, you are rather rough on a fellow; but give me a kiss,
and I'll overlook it."

She lifted her face, and let him kiss her, then struck him so violent a
blow that the little man staggered.

"Now go," she said, "and don't let me see you again until the eleventh.
If you have anything to say, you can write it to Molly Shropshire."

When he had gone, she drew her hand across her lips, then looked closely
at it as if expecting to see a stain. Then she shuddered, and huddled
closer to the fire, and in a few moments threw Dudley Thorpe's letter on
the coals.




IV


"Well, some women _are_ remarkable!" exclaimed Miss Shropshire to her
sister, Mrs. Lester. "The idea of her having a wedding dress,--white
satin, train, and all. She even fussed over at least twenty pairs of
slippers, and I was almost afraid to bring home that bridal veil for
fear it wouldn't suit her."

"I suppose she thinks that weddings, white satin ones, at least, only
come once in a lifetime." Mrs. Lester was a tired little woman, quite
subservient to her strong-minded sister. The wedding was to take
place in her back parlour at an hour when Mr. Lester, occupied and
unsuspecting, would be away from home. She did not approve of the plot;
but her opinion, much less her consent, had not been asked.

"I'd like to thoroughly understand Nina Randolph, just for once," said
Miss Shropshire, meditatively. "It would be interesting, to say the
least."

The night before the wedding she went into Nina's room, and found her
standing before the mirror arrayed in her bridal finery,--veil, gloves,
slippers, all. She had regained her natural hues; but her eyes were
still sunken, her face pinched and hard. She was almost plain.

"Nina! Why on earth have you put on those things? Don't you know it's
bad luck?"

Nina laughed.

Miss Shropshire exclaimed, "_Umburufen!_" and rapped loudly three times
on the top of a chair. "There! I hope that will do some good. I know
what you are thinking--you are so unlucky, anyhow. But why tempt fate?"
She hesitated a moment. "It is not too late. Put it off for six months,
and then see how you feel about it. You are morbid now. You don't know
what changes time might--"

"No earthly power can prevent me from marrying Richard Clough
to-morrow."

"Very well, I shall stand by you, of course. That goes without saying.
But I believe you are making a terrible mistake. I would rather you
married almost any one else. There are several gentlemen that would be
ready and willing."

"I don't wish to marry a gentleman."

       *       *       *       *       *

The next afternoon Nina, Mrs. Lester, and Miss Shropshire were in the
back parlour awaiting the arrival of Clough, his best man, and the
clergyman, when there was a sudden furious pull at the bell of the front
door. Nina sprang to her feet. For the first time in many weeks
animation sprang to her eyes.

"It is my father!" she said. "Close the folding-doors. Molly, I rely on
you! Do you understand? Send him away, and as quickly as possible. Tell
a servant to watch outside, and take the others round the back way."

Before she had finished speaking, Mr. Randolph's voice was heard in the
hall, demanding his daughter. The servants had been given orders to deny
the fact of Miss Randolph's presence in the house to any one but Dr.
Clough. Nevertheless, Mr. Randolph brushed past the woman that opened
the door, and entered the front parlour. Miss Shropshire joined him at
once. Every word of the duologue that followed could be heard on the
other side of the folding-doors.

"Why, Mr. Randolph!" exclaimed Miss Shropshire, easily. "Why this
unexpected honour? I thought you were in San José."

"Is my daughter here?" He was evidently much excited, and endeavouring
to control himself.

"Nina? No. Why? Is she not at Redwoods? She was to go down yesterday."

"She is not at Redwoods. I have received private and reliable
information that she is to marry Richard Clough this afternoon, and I
have reason to think that she is in this house."

"What? Nina going to marry that horrid little man? I don't believe it!"
Miss Shropshire was a woman of thorough and uncompromising methods.

"Is Nina in this house or not?"

"Mr. Randolph! Of course she is not. I would have nothing to do with
such an affair."

Mr. Randolph swallowed a curse, and strode up and down the room several
times. Then he paused and confronted her once more.

"Molly," he said, "I appeal to you as a woman. If you have any
friendship for Nina, give her up to me and save her from ruin, or tell
me where she is. It is not yet too late. I will risk everything and take
her abroad. She is ruining her own life and Thorpe's and mine by a
mistaken sense of duty to him, and contempt for herself: I know her so
well that I feel sure that is the reason for this act she contemplates
to-day. I will take her to Thorpe. He could reclaim her. Clough--you can
perhaps imagine how Clough will treat her! Picture the life she must
lead with that man, and give her up to me. And, if you have any heart,
keep my own from breaking. She is all that I have. You know what my home
is; I have lived in hell for twenty-four years for this girl's sake. I
have kept a monster in my house that Nina should have no family scandal
to reproach me with. And all to what purpose if she marries a cad and a
brute? I would have endured the torments of the past twenty-five years,
multiplied tenfold, to have secured her happiness. If she marries
Richard Clough, it will kill me."

"She is not here," replied Miss Shropshire.

Mr. Randolph trembled from head to foot. "My God!" he cried, "have you
women no heart? Are all women, I wonder, like those I have known? My
wife, a demon who nursed her baby on brandy! My daughter, repaying the
devotion of years with blackest ingratitude! And you--" He fell, rather
than dropped to his knees, and caught her dress in his hands.

"Molly," he prayed, "give her to me. Save her from becoming one of the
outcast of the earth. For that is what this marriage will mean to her."

Miss Shropshire set her teeth. "Nina is not here," she said.

Mr. Randolph stumbled to his feet, and rushed from the house. He walked
rapidly down the hill toward Old Trinity in Pine Street, the church Nina
attended, his dislocated mind endeavouring to suggest that he wait for
her there. His agitation was so marked that several people turned and
looked after him in surprise. He reached the church. A carriage
approached, passed. Its occupants were Richard Clough, a well-known
gambler named Bell, and a man who carried the unmistakable cut of a
parson.

Mr. Randolph rushed to the middle of the street, ordering the driver
to stop. The window of the carriage was open. He caught Clough by the
shoulder.

"Are you on your way to marry my daughter?" he demanded.

"My dear Uncle James," replied the young man, airily, "you are all
wrong. I am on my way to marry--it is true; but the unfortunate lady
is Miss McCullum."

Mr. Randolph turned to the gambler, and implored him, as a man of
honour, to tell him the truth.

Bell replied: "As a man of honour, I dare not."

Mr. Randolph appealed to the clergyman, but met only a solemn scowl, and
mechanically dropped back, with the sensation of having lost the
good-will of all men. A moment later the carriage was rattling up the
street at double speed, and he cursed his stupidity in not forcing an
entrance, or hanging on behind. There was no other carriage in sight.




V


The days were very long to Dudley Thorpe. The invalid recovered slowly,
and demanded much of his time. Before an answer to his letter could be
expected, Harold was sufficiently mended to be removed to the house
of a friend on Long Island. He declared his intention of sailing for
California as soon as he could obtain the doctor's permission to travel.
The lady to whom he was betrothed came over from England and married
him; and Thorpe had little to do but to think.

He bitterly reproached himself that he had asked Nina to come to New
York, instead of trusting to his brother's recuperative powers, and
starting at once for California. He dared not go now, lest he pass her.
But he was beset by doubts, and some of them were nightmares. She would
come if her child had lived, and she had weathered her year. If she had
not! He knew what she had suffered during that year, would have guessed
without the aid of the few letters she had written after letters from
him had ceased to reach California. Exposure and shame might have come
to her since. If he could have been sure that she believed in him, he
would have feared little; but it was not to be expected that she had
received a letter he had sent her from the West Indies. The telegraph
has averted many a tragedy, but there was none across the United States.
With all his will and health and wealth and love, he had been as
powerless to help her in the time of her great trouble, was as powerless
to help her now, as if he were in the bottom of a Haytian swamp. All
that was fine in him, and there was much, was thoroughly roused. He not
only longed for her and for his child, but he vowed to devote the rest
of his life to her happiness. It seemed to him incredible that he could
have committed such a series of mistakes; that no man who loved a woman
with the passion of his life had ever so consistently done the wrong
thing. But mistakes are not isolated acts, to be plucked out of life and
viewed as an art student views his first model, in which he finds
only a few bald lines; even when the pressure of many details is not
overwhelming it often clouds the mental vision. Years after, Thorpe
accepted the fact that the great links in that year's chain of events
were connected by hundreds of tiny links as true of form; but not then.

One day a budget of mail got through the lines, and in it was a letter
for him. It was from Nina, and was dated shortly after the last he had
found awaiting him when he arrived from Cuba.

     I don't know where you are, if you will ever get this; but I must
     write to you. The baby is dead. It was a little girl. It is buried
     in the forest.

                    NINA.

The steamer by which he expected her arrived a few days later. It
brought him the following letter:

     I was married yesterday. My name is Mrs. Richard Clough. My husband
     is the son of a Haworth cobbler. I received your letter.

                    NINA RANDOLPH CLOUGH.




VI


Mr. and Mrs. Harold Thorpe sailed on the next steamer for California.
Dudley Thorpe worked his way South, offered his services to the
Confederacy, fought bitterly and brilliantly, when he was not in
hospital with a bullet in him, rose to the rank of colonel, and made
a name for himself which travelled to California and to England. At
the close of the war, he returned home and entered Parliament. He
became known as a hard worker, a member of almost bitter honesty,
and a forcible and magnetic speaker. Socially he was, first, a lion,
afterward, a steady favourite. Altogether he was regarded as a success
by his fellow-men.

It was some years before he heard from his brother. Harold was delighted
with the infinite variety of California; his health was remarkably good;
and he had settled for life. Only his first letter contained a reference
to Nina Randolph. She had lived in Napa for a time, then gone to
Redwoods. She never came to San Francisco; therefore he had been unable
to call, had never even seen her. All Thorpe's other friends had been
very kind to himself and his wife.

Thorpe long before this had understood. The rage and disgust of the
first months had worn themselves out, given place to his intimate
knowledge of her. Had he returned to California it would have been too
late to do her any good, and would have destroyed the dear memory of
her he now possessed. He still loved her. For many months the pain of
it had been unbearable. It was unbearable no longer, but he doubted if
he should ever love another woman. The very soul of him had gone out to
her, and if it had returned he was not conscious of it. As the years
passed, there were long stretches when she did not enter his thought,
when memory folded itself thickly about her and slept. Time deals kindly
with the wounds of men. And he was a man of active life, keenly
interested in the welfare of his country. But he married no other woman.

It was something under ten years since he had left California, when he
received a letter from his sister-in-law stating that his brother was
dead, and begging him to come out and settle her affairs, and take her
home. She had neither father nor brother; and he went at once, although
he had no desire to see California again.

There were rails between New York and San Francisco by this time, and he
found the latter a large flourishing and hideous city. The changes were
so great, the few acquaintances he met during the first days of his
visit looked so much older, that his experience of ten years before
became suddenly blurred of outline. He was not quite forty; but he felt
like an old man groping in his memory for an episode of early youth. The
eidolon of Nina Randolph haunted him, but with ever-evading lineaments.
He did not know whether to feel thankful or disappointed.

He devoted himself to his sister-in-law's affairs for a week, then,
finding a Sunday afternoon on his hands, started, almost reluctantly,
to call on Mrs. McLane.

South Park was unchanged.

He stood for a moment, catching his breath. The city had grown around
and away from it; streets had multiplied, bristling with the ugliest
varieties of modern architecture; but South Park, stately, dark, solemn,
had not changed by so much as a lighter coat of paint. His eyes moved
swiftly to the Randolph house. Its shutters were closed. The dust of
summer was thick upon them. He stood for fully five minutes staring at
it, regardless of curious eyes. Something awoke and hungered within him.

"My vanished youth, I suppose," he thought sadly. "I certainly have no
wish to see her, poor thing! But she was very sweet."

He walked slowly round the crescent on the left, and rang the bell at
Mrs. McLane's door. As the butler admitted him he noted with relief that
the house had been refurnished. A buzz of voices came from the parlour.
The man lifted a portière, and Mrs. McLane, with an exclamation of
delight, came forward, with both hands outstretched. Her face was
unchanged, but she would powder her hair no more. It was white.

"Thorpe!" she exclaimed. "It is not possible? How long have you been
here? A week! Mon Dieu! And you come only now! But I suppose I am
fortunate to be remembered at all."

Thorpe assured her that she had been in his thoughts since the hour of
his arrival, but that he wished to be free of the ugly worries of
business before venturing into her distracting presence.

"I don't forgive you, although I give you a dinner on Thursday. Will
that suit you? Poor little Mrs. Harold! We have all been attention
itself to her for your sake. Come here and sit by me; but you may speak
to your other old friends."

Two of the "Macs" were there; the other was dead, he was told later.
Both were married, and one was dressed with the splendours of Paris.
Mrs. Earle was as little changed as Mrs. McLane, and her still flashing
eyes challenged him at once. Guadalupe Hathaway was unmarried and had
grown stout; but she was as handsome as of old.

They all received him with flattering warmth, "treated him much better
than he deserved," Mrs. McLane remarked, "considering he had never
written one of them a line;" and he felt the past growing sharp of
outline. There were several very smart young ladies present, two of whom
he remembered as awkward little girls. The very names of the others were
unknown to him. They knew of him, however, and one of them affected to
disapprove of him sharply because he had "fought against the flag." Mrs.
McLane took up the cudgels for her South, and party feeling ran high.

Nina Randolph's name was not mentioned. He wondered if she were dead.
Not so much as a glance was directed toward the most momentous episode
of his life. Doubtless they had forgotten that he had once been somewhat
attentive to her. But his memory was breaking in the middle and
marshalling its forces at the farther end; the events of the intervening
ten years were now a confused mass of shadows. Mrs. Earle sang a Mexican
love-song, and he turned the leaves for her. When he told Guadalupe
Hathaway that he was glad to find her unchanged, she replied:--

"I am fat, and you know it. And as I don't mind in the least, you need
not fib about it. You have a few grey hairs and lines; but you've worn
better than our men, who are burnt out with trade winds and money
grubbing."

He remained an hour. When he left the house, he walked rapidly out of
the Park, casting but one hasty glance to the right, crossed the city
and went straight to the house of Molly Shropshire's sister. It also was
unchanged, a square ugly brown house on a corner over-looking the blue
bay and the wild bright hills beyond. The houses that had sprung up
about it were cheap and fresh, and bulging with bow-windows.

"Yes," the maid told him, "Miss Shropshire still lived there, and was at
home." The room into which she showed him was dark, and had the musty
smell of the unpopular front parlour. A white marble slab on the centre
table gleamed with funereal significance. Thorpe drew up the blinds, and
let in the sun. He was unable to decide if the room had been refurnished
since the one occasion upon which he had entered it before; but it had
an old-fashioned and dingy appearance.

He heard a woman's gown rustle down the stair, and his nerves shook.
When Miss Shropshire entered, she did not detect his effort at
composure. She had accepted the flesh of time, and her hair was
beginning to turn; but she shook hands in her old hearty decided
fashion.

"I heard yesterday that you were here," she said. "Take that armchair. I
rather hoped you'd come. We used to quarrel; but, after all, you are an
Englishman, and I can never forget that I was born over there, although
I don't remember so much as the climate."

"Will you tell me the whole story? I did not intend to come to see you,
to mention her name. But it has come back, and I must know all that
there is to know--from the very date of my leaving up to now. Of course,
she wrote me that you were in her confidence."

She told the story of a year which had been as big with import for one
woman as for a nation. "Mr. Randolph died six months after the wedding,"
she concluded, wondering if some men were made of stone. "It killed
him. He did not see her again until he was on his death-bed. Then he
forgave her. Any one would, poor thing. He left his money in trust, so
that she has a large income, and is in no danger of losing it. She lives
with her mother at Redwoods. Clough died some years ago--of drink. It
was in his blood, I suppose, for almost from the day he set foot in
Redwoods he was a sot."

"And Nina?"

"Don't try to see her," said Miss Shropshire, bluntly. "You would only
be horrified,--you wouldn't recognise her if you met her on the street.
She is breaking, fortunately. I saw her the other day, for the first
time in two years, and she told me she was very ill."

"Have you deserted her?"

"Don't put it that way! I shall always love Nina Randolph, and I am
often sick with pity. But she never comes here, and one _cannot_ go to
Redwoods. It is said that the orgies there beggar description. Even the
Hathaways, who are their nearest neighbours, never enter the gates. It
is terrible! And if your letter had come six days earlier, it would all
have been different. But she was born to bad luck."

Thorpe rose. "Thank you," he said. "Are your sisters well? I shall be
here only a few days longer, but I shall try to call again."

She laid her hand on his arm. She had a sudden access of vision. "Don't
try to see Nina," she said, impressively.

"God forbid!" he said.




VII


He slept not at all that night. He had thought that his days of
poignant emotion were over, that he had worn out the last of it on the
blood-soaked fields of Virginia, on nights between days when Death rose
with the sun; but up from their long sleep misery and love rose with the
vigour of their youth, and claimed him. And the love was for a woman who
no longer existed, whose sodden brain doubtless held no memory of him,
or remembered only to curse him. He strove to imagine her as she must
be. She rose before him in successive images of what she had been: from
the night he had met her to the morning of their last interview on the
mountain,--a series of images sometimes painful, always beautiful. Then
his imagination created her as she must have been during the months of
her solitude in the midst of a wild and beautiful country, when in her
letters she had sent him so generous and so exquisite a measure of
herself; then the last months, when he would have been half mad with
love and pity if he had known. Nor was that all: it seemed to him in the
torments of that night that he realised for the first time what he had
lost, what poignant, enduring, and varied happiness might have been his
during the past ten years. Instead, he had had excitement, honours, and
mental activity; he had not been happy for an hour. And the possibility
of such happiness, of union with the one woman whom he was capable
of passionately loving with soul and mind and body, was as dead as
his youth, buried with the soul of a woman whose face he would not
recognise. She was above ground, this woman, and a different being! He
repeated the fact aloud; but it was the one fact his imagination would
not grasp and present to his mental vision. It realised her suffering,
her morbid despair, her attitude to herself, to the world, and to him,
when she had decided to marry Clough; but the hideous metamorphosis of
body and spirit was outside its limitations.

In the morning he asked his sister-in-law if she would leave California
at the end of the week. She was a methodical and slow-moving little
person, and demurred for a time, but finally consented to make ready.
Her business affairs--which consisted of several unsold ranches--could
be left in the hands of an agent; there was little more that her
brother-in-law could do.

Harold's remains had been temporarily placed in the receiving vault on
Lone Mountain. Thorpe went out to the cemetery in the afternoon to make
the final arrangements for removing them to England.

Lone Mountain can be seen from any part of San Francisco; scarcely a
house but has a window from which one may receive his daily hint that
even Californians are mortal. Here is none of the illusion of the
cemetery of the flat, with its thickly planted trees and shrubbery,
where the children are taken to walk when they are good, and to wonder
at the glimpses of pretty little white houses and big white slates with
black letters. The shining tombs and vaults and monuments, tier above
tier, towering at the end of the city, flaunt in one's face the
remorselessness and the greed of death. In winter, the paths are running
brooks; one imagines that the very dead are soaked. In summer, the dusty
trees and shrubs accentuate the marble pride of dead and living men.
Behind, higher still, rises a bare brown mountain with a cross on its
summit,--Calvary it is called; and on stormy nights, or on days when the
fog is writhing in from the ocean, blurring even that high sharp peak,
one fancies the trembling outlines of a figure on the cross.

To-day the tombs were scarcely visible within the fine white mist which
had been creeping in from the Pacific since morning and had made a
beautiful ghost-land of the entire city. The cross on Calvary looked
huge and misshapen, the marbles like the phantoms of those below. The
mist dripped heavily from the trees, the walks were wet. It is doubtful
if there is so gloomy, so disturbing, so fascinating a burying-ground on
earth as the Lone Mountain of San Francisco.

The sexton's house was near the gates. Thorpe completed his business,
and started for the carriage which had brought him. He paused for a
moment in the middle of the broad road and looked up. In the gently
moving mist the shafts seemed to leave their dead, and crawl through the
groves, as if to some ghoulish tryst. Thorpe thought that it would be a
good place for a man, if lost, to go mad in. But, like all the curious
phases of California, it interested him, and in a moment he sauntered
slowly upward. His own mood was not hilarious, and although he had no
wish to join the cold hearts about him, he liked their company for the
moment.

Some one approached him from above. It was a woman, and she picked her
way carefully down the steep hill-side. She loomed oddly through the
mist, her outlines shifting. As she passed Thorpe, he gave her the
cursory glance of man to unbeautiful woman. She was short and stout; her
face was dark and large, her hair grizzled about the temples, her
expression sullen and dejected, her attire rich. She lifted her eyes,
and stopped short.

"Dudley!" she said; and Thorpe recognised her voice.

He made no attempt to answer her. He was hardly conscious of anything
but the wish that he had left California that morning.

"You did not recognise me?" she said, with a laugh he did not remember.

"No."

He stared at her, trying to conjure up the woman who had haunted him
during the night. She had gone. There was a dim flash in the eyes, a
broken echo in the voice of this woman, which gave him the impression of
looking upon the faded daguerreotype of one long dead, or upon a bundle
of old letters.

Her face dropped under his gaze. "I had hoped never to see you again,"
she muttered. "But I don't know that I care much. It is long since I
have thought of you. I care for one thing only,--nothing else matters.
Still, I have a flicker of pride left: I would rather you should not
have seen me an ugly old sot. I believe I was very pretty once; but I
have forgotten."

Thorpe strove to speak, to say something to comfort the poor creature in
her mortification; but he could only stare dumbly at her, while
something strove to reach out of himself into that hideous tomb and
clasp the stupefied soul which was no less his than in the brief day
when they had been happy together. As long as that body lived on, it
carried his other part. And after? He wondered if he could feel more
alone then than now, did it take incalculable years for his soul to find
hers.

She looked up and regarded him sullenly. "You are unchanged," she said.
"Life has prospered with you, I suppose. I haven't read the papers nor
heard your name mentioned for years; but I read all I could find about
you during the war; and you look as if you had had few cares. Are you
married?"

"No."

"You have been true to me, I suppose." And again she laughed.

"Yes, I suppose that is the reason. At least I have cared to marry no
other woman."

"Hm!" she said. "Well, the best thing you can do is to forget me. I'm
sorry if I hurt your pride, but I don't feel even flattered by your
constancy. I have neither heart nor vanity left; I am nothing but an
appetite,--an appetite that means a long sight more to me than you ever
did. To-morrow, I shall have forgotten your existence again. Once or
twice a year, when I am sober,--comparatively,--I come here to visit my
father's tomb. Why, I can hardly say, unless it is that I find a certain
satisfaction in contemplating my own niche. I am an unconscionable time
dying."

"Are you dying?"

"I'm gone to pieces in every part of me. My mother threw me downstairs
the other day, and that didn't mend matters."

"Come," he said. "I have no desire to prolong this interview. There is a
private carriage at the gate. Is it yours? Then, if you will permit me,
I will see you to it."

She walked beside him without speaking again. He helped her into her
carriage, lifted his hat without raising his eyes, then dismissed his
carriage, and walked the miles between the burying-ground and his hotel.




VIII


Four days later he received a note from Miss Hathaway:--

     "Nina Randolph is dying; I have just seen her doctor, who is also
     ours. I do not know if this will interest you. She is at Redwoods."

An hour later Thorpe was in the train. He had not stopped to deliberate.
Nothing could alter the fact that Nina Randolph was his, and eternally.
He responded to the summons as instinctively as if she had been his
wife for the past ten years. Nor did he shrink from the death-bed scene;
hell itself could not be worse than the condition of his mind had been
during the past four days.

There was no trap for hire at the station; he walked the mile to the
house. It was a pale-blue blazing day. The May sun shone with the
intolerable Californian glare. The roads were already dusty. But when he
reached the avenue at Redwoods, the temperature changed at once. The
trees grew close together, and the creek, full to the top, cooled the
air; it was racing merrily along, several fine salmon on its surface. He
experienced a momentary desire to spear them. Suddenly he returned to
the gates; he had carried into the avenue a sense of something changed.
He looked down the road sharply,--the road up which he had come the last
time he had visited Redwoods, choking on a lumbering stage. Then he
looked up the wooded valley, and back again. It was some moments before
he realised wherein lay the change that had disturbed his introspective
vision; one of the great redwoods that had stood by the bridge where
the creek curved just beyond the entrance to the grounds, was gone. He
wondered what had happened to it, and retraced his steps.

The house, the pretty little toy castle with its yellow-plastered
brown-trimmed walls, looked the same; he had but an indistinct memory of
it. Involuntarily, his gaze travelled to the mountains; they were a mass
of blurred redwoods in a dark-blue mist. But they were serene and
beautiful; so was all nature about him.

He rang the bell. Cochrane opened the door. The man had aged; but his
face was as stolid as ever.

"Mr. Thorpe, sir?" he said.

"Yes; I wish to see Miss--Mrs. Clough."

"She won't live the day out, sir."

"Show me up to her room. I shall stay here. Is any one else with her?"

"No, sir; Mrs. Randolph has been no good these two days, and the maid
that has been looking out for Miss Nina is asleep. I've been giving her
her medicine. We don't like strange nurses here. Times are changed, and
everybody knows now; but we keep to ourselves as much as possible.
There've been times when we've had company--too much; but I made up my
mind they should die alone. You can go up, though."

"Thanks. You can go to sleep, if you wish."

Cochrane led him down the hall with its beautiful inlaid floor,
scratched and dull, up the wide stair with its faded velvet carpet, and
opened the door of a large front room.

"The drops on the table are to be given every hour, sir; the next at
twenty minutes to two." He closed the door and went away.

The curtains of the room were wide apart. The sun flaunted itself upon
the old carpet, the handsome old-fashioned furniture. Thorpe went
straight to the windows, and drew the curtains together, then walked
slowly to the bed.

Nina lay with her eyes open, watching him intently. Her face was pallid
and sunken; but she looked less unlike her old self. She took his hand
and pressed it feebly.

"I am sorry I spoke so roughly the other day," she said. "But I was not
quite myself. I have touched nothing since; I couldn't, after seeing
you. It is that that is killing me; but don't let it worry you. I am
very glad."

Thorpe sat down beside her and chafed her hands gently. They were cold.

"It was a beautiful little baby," she said, abruptly. "And it looked so
much like you that it was almost ridiculous."

"I was a brute to have left you, whether you wished it or not. It is no
excuse to say that the consequences never entered my head, I was half
mad that morning; and after what you had told me, I think I was glad to
get away for a time."

"We both did what we believed to be best, and ruined--well, my life, and
your best chance of happiness, perhaps. It is often so, I notice. Too
much happiness is not a good thing for the world, I suppose. It is only
the people of moderate desires and capacities that seem to get what
they want. But it was a great pity; we could have been very happy. Did
you care much?"

He showed her his own soul then, naked and tormented,--as it had been
from the hour he had received her letters upon his return from the West
Indies until Time had done its work upon him,--and as it was now and
must be for long months to come. Of the intervening years he gave no
account; he had forgotten them. She listened with her head eagerly
lifted, her vision piercing his. He made the story short. When he had
finished, her head fell back. She gave a long sigh. Was it of content?
She made no other comment. She was past conventions; her emotions were
already dead. And she was at last in that stage of development wherein
one accepts the facts of life with little or no personal application.

"It didn't surprise me when you came in," she said, after a moment. "I
felt that you would come--My life has been terrible, terrible! Do you
realise that! Have they told you? No woman has ever fallen lower than I
have done. I am sorry, for your sake; I can't repent in the ordinary
way. I have an account to square with God, if I ever meet Him and He
presumes to judge me. If you will forgive me, that is all that I care
about."

"I forgive you! Good God, I wonder you don't hate me!"

"I did for a time, not because I blamed you, but because I hated
everybody and everything. There were intervals of terrible retrospect
and regret; but I made them as infrequent as I could, and finally I
stifled them altogether. I grew out of touch with every memory of a life
when I was comparatively innocent and happy. I strove to make myself so
evil that I could not distinguish an echo if one tried to make itself
heard; and I succeeded. Now, all that has fallen from me,--in the last
few hours, since I have had relief from physical torments,--for I could
not drink after I saw you, and I had to pay the penalty. It is not odd,
I suppose, that I should suddenly revert: my impulses originally were
all toward good, my mental impulses; the appetite was always a purely
physical thing; and when Death approaches, he stretches out a long hand
and brushes aside the rubbish of life, letting the soul's flower see the
light again for a few moments. Give me the drops. Now that you are here,
I want to live as long as I can."

He lifted her head, and gave her the medicine. She lay back suddenly,
pinioning his arm.

"Let it stay there," she said.

"Are you sure, Nina, that your case is so bad?" he asked. "Couldn't you
make an effort, and let me take you to England?"

She shook her head with a cynical smile. "My machinery is like a
dilapidated old engine that has been eaten up with rust, and battered by
stones for twenty years. There isn't a bit of me that isn't in pieces."

She closed her eyes, and slept for a half hour. He put both arms about
her and his head beside hers.

"Dudley," she said, finally.

"Well?"

"I had not thought of the baby for God knows how many years. It was no
memory for me. But since the other day I have been haunted by that poor
little grave in the big forest--"

"Would you like to have it brought down to Lone Mountain?"

She hesitated a moment, then shook her head.

"No," she said. "In the vault with my mother and--and--_him_? Oh, no!
no!"

"If I build a little vault for you and her will you sign a paper giving
me--certain rights?"

Her face illuminated for the first time. "Oh, yes!" she said. "Oh, yes!
Then I think I could sleep in peace."

Thorpe rang for Cochrane and the gardener, wrote the paper, and had it
duly witnessed. It took but a few moments, and they were alone again.

"I wonder if I shall see _her_--and you again, or if my unlucky star
sets in this world to rise in the next? Well, I shall know soon.

"I am going, I think," she said a few moments later. "Would you mind
kissing me? Death has already taken the sin out of my body, and down
deep is something that never was wholly blackened. That is yours. Take
it."

It was an hour before she died, and during that hour he kissed her many
times.




A FRAGMENT


It was some twelve years later that Thorpe received a copy of a San
Francisco newspaper, in which the following article was heavily
marked:--

     WHAT AM I BID?

     AN AUCTION SALE OF FUNERAL AND WEDDING TRAPPINGS

     "What am I offered?"

     "Oh, don't sell that!" said one or two bidders.

     The auctioneer held up a large walnut case. It contained a funeral
     wreath of preserved flowers.

     "Well, I've sold coffins at auction in my time, so I guess I can
     stand this," replied the auctioneer. "What am I offered?"

     He disposed of it, with three other funeral mementos, very cheap,
     for the bidding was dispirited. It was at the sale yesterday, in a
     Montgomery Street auction-room, of the personal effects, jewelry,
     silverware, and household bric-a-brac of a once very wealthy San
     Francisco family. The head of the family was a pioneer, a citizen
     of wealth and high social and commercial standing. It was he who,
     in early days, projected South Park. There was no family in the
     city whose society was more sought after, or which entertained
     better, than that of James Randolph.

     "What am I offered for this lot?"

     He referred to the lot catalogued as "No. 107," and described as
     "Wedding-dress, shoes, etc."

     "Don't sell _that_!" The very old-clo' man remonstrated this time.

     It seemed worse than the sale of the funeral wreath. The dress was
     heavy white satin--had been, that is; it was yellowed with time.
     The tiny shoes had evidently been worn but once.

     "What am I offered? Make a bid, gentlemen. I offer the lot. What am
     I offered?"

     "One dollar."

     "One dollar I am offered for the lot--wedding-dress, shoes, etc.
     One dollar for the lot. Come gentlemen, bid up."

     Not an old-clo' man in the room bid, and the outsider who bid the
     dollar had the happiness to see it knocked down to him.

     "What am I bid for this photograph album? Bid up, gentlemen. Here's
     a chance to get a fine collection of photographs of distinguished
     citizens, their wives, and daughters."

     A gentleman standing on the edge of the crowd quietly bid in the
     album. When it was handed to him, he opened it, took out his own
     and the photographs of several ladies, dressed in the fashion of
     twenty years ago, and tossed the album, with the other photographs,
     in the stove, remarking: "Well, _they_ won't go to the junk-shop."

     "What am I offered, gentlemen, for this? There is just seventeen
     dollars' worth of gold in it. Bid up."

     The auctioneer held up an engraved gold medal. It was a Crimean war
     medal which its owner was once proud to wear. There was a time in
     his life when no money could have purchased it. He had risked his
     life for the honour of wearing it; and after his death it was
     offered for old gold.

     "Twenty dollars."

     "Twenty dollars; twenty, twenty, twenty! Mind your bid, gentlemen.
     Seventeen dollars for the gold, and three for the honour. Twenty,
     tw-en-ty, and going, going, gone! Seventeen dollars for the gold,
     and three for the honour."

     In this way an ebony writing-desk, with the dead citizen's private
     letters, was sold to a hand-me-down shop-keeper. A tin box with
     private papers went to a junk-dealer; and different lots of
     classical music, some worn, some marked with the givers' names,
     some with verses written on the pages, were sold to second-hand
     dealers. "What am I bid?" The sale went rapidly on. Sometimes an
     old family friend would bid in an article as a souvenir. But the
     junk-dealers, second-hand men, and hand-me-down shop-keepers took
     in most of the goods.

     The above articles were the contents of a chest, and were the
     personal effects of Mrs. Richard Clough, the late daughter of the
     late James Randolph, of San Francisco. She had evidently carefully
     packed them away at some time before her death; and the chest had
     been mislaid or overlooked, until it made its way, intact, and
     twelve years after, into the hands of the public.

And that was the last that Dudley Thorpe heard of Nina Randolph in this
world.




       *       *       *       *       *




Transcriber's note:

Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise,
every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and
intent.