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.
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.
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.
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 nevercame 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 letterfrom 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 fromit; 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 thema 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 fibabout 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 killedhim. 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 onecannotgo 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 ifyour 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.
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 stroveto 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 differentbeing! 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. Hereis 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 thephantoms 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 youlook 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.
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.”
“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 hadbeen 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. Wedon’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 andsunken; 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 thepeople 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 theytold 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: myimpulses 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 seeher—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.
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 WEDDINGTRAPPINGS“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 highsocial 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 sellthat!” 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,theywon’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.
WHAT AM I BID?
AN AUCTION SALE OF FUNERAL AND WEDDINGTRAPPINGS
“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 highsocial 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 sellthat!” 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,theywon’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.
1. 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.
2. The original of this book did not have a Table of Contents; one has been added for the reader’s convenience.