Mrs. Tom Colton lived on one of the higher slopes of Rosewater in a charming little double house all brown shingles and big chimneys. Opposite was the paternal mansion on a high terrace, a modern Renaissance structure, painted white and shaded with gigantic palms and acacias. There was a porte-cochère but no balcony.
All the "residences" of this quarter were modern and "artistic," even the cottages; it was only on the lower slopes, close to the nucleus of the town, that the many old-fashioned structures were but occasionally thrown out of tune by a pile of shingles and stone. But all had gardens, and there were several squares whence the streets radiated with as puzzling an irregularity as London's own, but set thick with shade trees tropical and boreal. On the high rim of the hills enclosing the town were many small farms, and all were white with the Leghorn that laid the golden eggs. These looked like a light fall of snow on the sunburned hills, and were as refreshing as the garden trees upon which the hose played night and morning.
As Isabel left her horse at a livery-stable and walked up the wide clean boulevard towards her friend's house, she met no one on the glaring pavements, although here and there a buggy was hitched, and a patient horse stood with his fore feet on the line of grass beside the concrete, his head under a tree, and his eyes fixed expectantly upon the door of the house. Indeed one might walk here at almost any hour of the day and rarely meet another; all the energies were concentrated in Main Street, although it was the town's standing grievance that it was not the county-seat with a court-house that should make the pretensions of St. Peter ridiculous. No small part of those energies in the business district were devoted to humbling the rival, in the matter of commerce. St. Peter retaliated with the accent of a fierce contempt. "Chickenville!" "The Eggopolis!" quoth the local wits, and who shall say that the darts did not quiver and sting, although the more flourishing community never lowered its self-satisfied front? Even the rich banker families were not at the trouble to put on airs. They did not possess a handsome turnout between them, and as for dress there were few that did more than keep themselves cool in summer and warm in winter. It was true that Mr. Boutts possessed a runabout automobile in which he bumped his family to San Francisco occasionally, but he was of the newer gentry and owed his social pre-eminence to his wife and pretty daughter, and to his conversion from the Congregational to the Episcopal Church.
Isabel, of course, was a conspicuous member of the ancient aristocracy, by virtue of her forefathers having owned half the county when the smoke still rose from the wigwam; and although Mrs. James Otis had maintained a haughty aloofness on her husband's ranch in summer, and later in a Rosewater cottage, her neighbors thought none the less of her for that, and Isabel, after school hours, played with their children. Later, even the transgressions of her father, and her unchaperoned trip to Europe, left her position secure. An Otis was an Otis.Noblesse oblige.Aristocracies are aristocracies the world over.
Mrs. Tom saw Isabel coming and opened the door herself; then as lunch would not be ready for an hour, led her up to her large sunny bedroom, where her three children, pretty fragile creatures in spite of their tan, sweet-fed and spoiled, were playing on the floor. Isabel tossed and kissed them, presenting them with a box of toys she had bought in Main Street. Then she sat down with Anabel in the window to have a long talk. But she quickly discovered that Anabel talked with one wing of her brain, so to speak, and her roving gaze beamed constantly at the noisy brood on the floor. Complacency, maternity, happiness, radiated from all her sweet womanly little person, but in half an hour Isabel was casting about for an excuse to leave directly after luncheon, although she had promised to spend the day. As Anabel babbled on, while embroidering a little frock, relating anecdotes of her marvellous children, commenting upon the increasing extortions of the labor class, the iniquities of servants, the mounting of prices in California, and the shocking mania for cards that possessed Rosewater in common with the rest of the world, there stole over Isabel a feeling of intolerable ennui. She had felt it often enough in her sister's uneven domestic atmosphere, and now and again in more regulated interiors, but never had the wings of her spirit beaten so furiously as in this happy home of the most beloved of her friends. The wave ebbed when the nurse came and carried off the protesting trio, and as she sat with Anabel in the beautiful little dining-room panelled and furnished with redwood, highly polished, the table set with silver and crystal, the dainty meal beyond criticism and served by a noiseless Chinaman, she was able to feel grateful that Anabel was as happy in her way as herself in her own, and praised everything with such warmth that the placid little lady waxed radiant. Mrs. Tom was very golden-haired and blue-eyed and pink and white, but none was further removed from insipidity than she. Her features were strong, particularly her mouth and chin, and she had a repose of manner, a squareness of shoulder, and a serenity of expression that gave her an almost solid appearance. It was patent that she was making a success of her life, and Isabel kissed her at parting with a hearty good-will; but only the excessive dignity inherited from her Spanish ancestors arrested a war-whoop as she almost ran down the hill. She had been detained until five o'clock in spite of ingenious excuses, and when she mounted her horse she galloped for the country at such a rate of speed that the drowsy town turned over. When she reached a long and lonely stretch of road she indulged herself in snatches of Spanish songs, and when she was at home she did not go to bed till near midnight, so happy was she in the contemplation of her solitude.
Gwynne found few letters awaiting him; he had not encouraged correspondence, and only his mother, Flora Thangue, and his solicitors knew his address. It had been announced and reiterated in London that he was making a tour of the world. During the first month of his absence Lady Victoria had sent him a large bundle of clippings from newspapers, some acid in comment upon his obvious intention of neglecting his duties as a peer of the realm, his fruitless exposure of a chagrin at an elevation in which he would find more and more consolation as time went on. A few were sympathetic. Others went so far as to indicate a program in which he might serve his country with modesty, if not with the scintillations of the free-lance; and reminded him that peers had risen to the post of prime-minister ere this, of viceroy, lord-lieutenant, governor-general, and ambassador. Then, apparently, they dismissed him. The fiscal question was acute. Dissolution threatened. There were bright particular stars still in both parties, and the press and public had enough to do with sitting in judgment upon their respective rays.
In the two letters from his mother, written at Homburg, there was no news beyond the letting of the properties and a bulletin of her health, which promised an imminent fitness for travel. His solicitors wrote that the income from the two estates was ample to keep the numerous women of the family in comfort, and leave a surplus which should be paid to his mother, according to his directions. This, with the southern ranch and the San Francisco property, should yield her an income of two thousand five hundred pounds a year. The confidential member of the firm hinted that if his lordship found means of increasing her ladyship's income in that land of gold and plenty it would be wise to do so, as her ladyship knew less than nothing of economy and was even more deeply in debt than usual.
He missed Flora's gay letter of gossip, and looked with narrowing lids at the pile of newspapers. None had been sent him before, and he had left not a subscription behind him; but it was evident that his mother and Flora were under the mistaken impression that he would welcome this greeting in his new home. They had accumulated for a month. He recognized the type of the leading dailies, and could guess the names of the numerous illustrated weeklies. Suddenly he took them in his arms and walked quickly over to the stove, his eye roving in search of a match-box. But even as he stooped he rose again, and, blushing for his weakness, carried them back to the table, tore them open with nervous haste. He skimmed the great pages of the dailies from start to finish, telling himself that he must have a breath from home, news from authoritative sources, stated in excellent English; sickened with the knowledge that he was but searching eagerly for a word of himself; sickening more when he found none. Then he fell upon the weeklies, his eye glancing indifferently from the paragraphs and presentments of the royal and the engaged, but scanning every personality. He had had one rival and there was much of him.
Before he had finished the third his struggling pride conquered. He gathered the heap and flung it into a corner, then caught up his hat and struck out for the loneliest part of the ranch. He writhed in the throes of disappointment, jealousy, disgust of self. He attempted consolation by picturing all the other ambitious men he knew exhibiting a similar weakness and vanity when there was no eye to see. His imagination did not rise to marvellous feats—and what if it did not? He had never aspired to be in the same class with other men.
The bitter tide receded only to give place to apprehension. His temperament was mercurial, balanced by a certain languor in the earlier stages of emotion, and there had been little to depress his spirit during those thirty years when all the fairies had danced attendance on him; even defeat had but intoxicated his fighting instinct and given another excuse for flattery and encouragement. During the eleven months since he had left England he had experienced neither encouragement nor flattery. He could not recall having made a profound impression upon any of his casual acquaintances; he certainly had created no sensation. It was true that his rôle had been that of the listener, the student, but he had so long accepted himself as a personality, as the most remarkable of England's younger productions, that he had been deeply mortified more than once at the cavalier treatment of middle-aged business men with no time to waste upon a young Britisher of no possible use to them.
To-day he boldly faced the haunting doubt if he were really a great man; if his success in England, as well as his phenomenal self-confidence, had not been merely the result of an inordinate ambition fed by fortuitous circumstances. He recalled that from childhood his grandfather and his mother had practically decreed that the bright, lovable, mischievous boy was to be a great man; that as he grew older the entire family connection joined the conspiracy. It is easy enough to believe in yourself when the world believes in you, and easy enough to make the world take you at your own valuation when you have a powerful backing, a reasonable amount of cleverness, a sublime audacity, the power of speech, and a happy series of accidents. Were all great men two-thirds accidental or manufactured? He felt inclined to believe it, but while it soothed his torn and throbbing pride, it by no means lessened his apprehension.
Was he not a great man, even so? He felt anything but a great man at the moment. He recalled that he had indulged in few lapses into complacency since his departure incognito from England, and that he had deliberately held self-analysis at bay by incessant travel and a compulsory interest in subjects that did not appeal to him in the least. It was this absence of interest after close upon a year in the country that appalled him as much as his inner visioning. He hated the country. He hated its politics, both parties impartially. He hated all the questions that absorbed the American mind, from graft to negroes. He had sat in the Congressional galleries in Washington, attended political meetings wherever he could obtain admittance, studied the press in even the smaller towns, travelled through the South and relieved himself of whatever abstract sympathy he may have cherished for the colored race, visited the sweat-shops of New York, the meat-packing establishments of Chicago, the factories of New England, every phase of the great civilization he knew of; and while he found much to admire and condemn, both left him evenly indifferent. With all his soul he longed for England. She might have her selfishness and her snobberies, lingering taints in her political system, but she stood at the apex of civilization, and her very faults were interesting; far removed from the brazen crudities of the New World's struggle for wealth and power. And although the blood of reformers was in his veins, and in his secret soul he was an idealist to the point of knight-errantry, the desire for reform had ebbed out of him during his American exile. And he knew the fate of a good many American reformers. There were several in high places at present, cheerfully trimmed down from the statesman to the political ideal. Julia Kaye—clever woman!—had put the matter into an epigram. The American statesman was the superior politician.
And how was he, out of tune with every phase of the country, to find the ghost of an opportunity to lead it? He was no actor. If he had a merit it was sincerity, a contempt for subterfuge as beneath both his powers and the lofty position to which he had been born. Moreover, he was honest; an equally aristocratic failing and drawback.
He recalled a conversation he had held in the smoking-compartment of a Pullman with a sharp young politician, who had become voluble after Gwynne had "stood him" two high-balls.
"It's graft or quit," he had announced. "All this cleaning up in insurance and what not, all this talk of curbing the trusts and the rest of it don't fool yours truly one little bit. It's just the ins trying to get ahead of the outs. It's not the honestest or the best man that gets there in God's own country, but the smartest—every time. Those that are crying the loudest against the grafters are just waiting for a chance to graft good and hard themselves. I am, and I don't care who knows it. Only I don't waste any strength kicking. The labor party works itself up over trusts and capitalists, and most of the capitalists come out of that factory, and are the first to grind those left behind them, under both heels. They know what I know, and what you'll know before you get through, that the only fun in life is to be got out of power and money."
The face as sharp as a razor but by no means dishonest rose before Gwynne. He had been a very decent little chap, and in the two days they had travelled together he had displayed a photograph of his wife and "kids," to whom he seemed even sentimentally devoted. Although Gwynne had parted from the man with satisfaction it was impossible to despise him utterly. Since then he had met many of his kind, more or less honest, able, pettily ambitious, fairly educated, unlearned on every subject except politics and the general business of the country; and all equally unsympathetic. He made no pretence to judge the country on its social or intellectual side, for he had been forced to avoid all groups that might have enlightened him—although he found no difficulty in assuming that well-bred and intellectual people were much the same the world over, and was willing to give the United States the benefit of every doubt. But its obvious side was the one that concerned him and his career. In order to succeed—and without success life would mean less than nothing to him—must he in a measure conform to conditions that were the result of a century of complexities? He recurred to the dry biographical sketches he had received, from certain of his travelling companions, of the most distinguished—and successful!—men in American politics to-day. Their ideals and their zeal for reform had played between horizon and zenith like a flaming sword, so compelling the attention of all that would pause to look that the diminishing effulgence had been even more conspicuous; and now, although the sword was occasionally brandished for form's sake, and was even sharper than before, having learned to cut both ways, it had the rust of tin not of blood on it, and deceived no one. But it had served its purpose—if to be sure it had been needed at all—and its owners were past-masters of success. Had he in him the makings of the mere trimmer and politician, in addition to the miserable vanity that had riven him to-day? And would some measure of great success won on those lines stir the dormant greatness in him?—if there were any greatness to stir. This was the fearful doubt, after all, that beset him. He almost saw with his outer vision his ideals lying in a tumbled heap, as he felt himself on the point of crying aloud that to feel once more that sense of power which had exalted him above mere mortals, and given him an ecstasy of spirit that no other passion could ever excite, he would sacrifice everything, everything!
He paused abruptly and looked about him. He was half-way up the mountain. The great valley, that looked as if it might embrace the State itself, lay before him. North and south the scenery was magnificent, ethereal in the distance, melting everywhere into one of those lovely mists that seem to have extracted the spiritual essence of all the colors. But the very beauty of his new domain added to the sense of unreality, of uneasiness, that had so often possessed him since he had crossed the borders of the State. And it was all on such a colossal scale. There could never be anything friendly, anything possessing, in a land destined for a race of primeval giants. He felt so passionate a longing for the sweet embracing historied landscapes of England that the very violence of the nostalgia drove him homeward with the half-formed intention of taking the first train for New York and the first steamer out of it. Moreover, he was suddenly obsessed with the belief that if he had greatness in him England alone held its magnet.
But it was a long walk to his house, and he reached it late in the afternoon, very tired and very hungry. When he entered his comfortable living-room, redolent of flowers, he received something like a shock of peace, and after he had taken a cold bath, he cursed himself roundly for permitting the mixed blood in his veins to contrive at times the temperament of an artist or of some women. As he sat down to a more than palatable supper, he felt thankful that he had had it out with himself so early in the engagement, and thought it odd if the Anglo-Saxon in him could not drive rough-shod over his weaker outcroppings.
He did not see Isabel again for three weeks. Several days after his arrival he received a note from her, briefly stating that she was starting for Los Angeles to exhibit her prize Favarolles and Leghorns at a "Chicken show," and after that would pay a long deferred visit to her sister. "But I shall not be long," she added, possibly with a flicker of contrition, "only they have been planning things for me for ages and I am always putting them off. I will spend a week—not with them, exactly, but at their disposal, and it will be a relief to have it over."
Gwynne felt himself ill-treated, but shrugged his shoulders with a new philosophy not all doggedness, and easily stretched to embrace the vagaries of woman. And, in truth, he found an abundance of occupation. Ascertaining that Mr. Leslie was away, he spent his time on the ranch, examining its various yields, divisions, possibilities; to say nothing of its books and history. The dairy was now an insignificant affair, experiments having proved disastrous, and his superintendent advised him to let it remain so. The greatest yield was in hay, and cattle raised for the market. The last lessee had come to grief over blood horses, and Gwynne's agents had accepted what remained of the racers and breeders in default of apocryphal cash. Although advised that they could be sold to advantage if haste were not imperative, Gwynne, who had a large balance in the bank, determined to continue the experiment. Many acres of the ranch were profitably let, although by the month only, as pasture both for cows and horses. The orchards always made a handsome yield, and the vegetable garden and strawberry beds needed only proper care to become remunerative. Moreover, several acres had recently been planted with kale, a favorite food of the conquering Leghorn, and there were fine runs on the hills that might be fenced off for sheep—or chickens; but at this point the superintendent always detected something even defiant in his employer's cold indifference, and told his friends that the Englishman was "haughty in spots."
It was all very satisfactory, but in order to bring him a really considerable increase of income he must dismiss his superintendent—who now drew a salary of a hundred and fifty dollars a month, and who did not inspire him with unbounded trust—and become his own manager, an office which would not only make heavy demands upon his time, turning him virtually into a farmer, with little leisure for the reading and practice of law, but no doubt involve the sacrifice of money as well; he did not flatter himself that he could learn to "run" a ranch of nineteen thousand varied acres in a season. His superintendent was a half-breed Mexican, the son of his cook, quick, voluble, and experienced in the ways of the ranch, upon which he had worked since boyhood. Gwynne had called on Mr. Colton at the bank two days after his arrival, and the old gentleman, who had an eye like a gimlet and a mouth like a steel trap, had consigned all "greasers" to subterranean fires, and emphasized the fact that he had hired Carlos Smith by the month only. A better man would demand a year's contract. There were infinite possibilities for "the greaser" to pocket a goodly share of the profits, and "cover up his tracks." And it might be a year or two before a superintendent could be found capable in every way of managing so complicated a ranch.
While he was still revolving the problem he met Mr. Leslie and Tom Colton, who advised him to sell at least half the ranch to small farmers. Properties of four and five acres were in increasing demand in this fertile county, and equally difficult to obtain. He had but the one interview with them, as they were starting the same day to attend to some business in the north, but after revolving the matter in all its bearings for another ten days he made up his mind to accept their advice, consoled his crestfallen superintendent with the promise of constant work, and set forth one afternoon to place his advertisements.
He had visited the town but twice since his arrival, and then in the morning. To-day he saw it characteristically for the first time. The hills that formed a cove of the great valley were bright with their houses and gardens, but very quiet. The long sloping block of Main Street was crowded with wagons, buggies, and horses, that from a distance looked to be a solid mass; and even when he rode into their midst he found some difficulty in forcing his way. Where the dusty vehicles were not moving they were tied to every post, the horses with their front feet on the sidewalk observing the familiar throng with friendly patient eyes. The shops were doing a rushing business, and so, Gwynne inferred, were the banks. As for the saloons, their doors swung with mechanical precision. Most of the farmers wore linen dusters and broad straw hats, but their women had put on all their finery. The girls of the town could be readily distinguished by their crisp muslins and white hats and absence of dust. There were groups of Rosewater girls holding rendezvous with their country cousins everywhere, although for the most part in the drug stores, which, with their tiled floors and ample space, looked like public reception-rooms. There were many knots of men under the broad roof over the pavement, but in spite of the ubiquitous saloon no drunkenness. Nor was there a policeman in sight. Nor a shop for fire-arms. Gone were the old days when a man drank till his brain was fire and his pistol went off by itself. The sting had been extracted from California and she had settled down to practical consideration of her vast resources; and in the comfortable assurance that there was enough for all. Gwynne had not seen a beggar nor a pauper since his arrival.
He placed his advertisements with both the local newspapers, to avoid the ill-will of either, posted others to the San Francisco press, and was riding down Main Street in order to have a closer look at the long hitching-rail lined on either side with another solid mass of horses and vehicles, when he caught sight of Isabel driving a buggy and evidently searching for an empty post. He laid aside his grievance and made his way to her side. She quite beamed with welcome, and they disentangled themselves into a side street, where there were empty posts.
"I only got home at half-past eleven last night," she informed him. "The boat was three hours late in starting, and when I finally made up my mind to come by train the last had gone. So I overslept this morning or I should have gone out to see you. But I meant to telephone you from here and ask you to come out for the first duck-shooting—"
"Duck-shooting!" Gwynne forgot the grievance.
"The season opens to-day—the fifteenth of October. I had meant really to ask you for the first thing this morning. Never mind, we have plenty of time, and you will not have to go home for anything. Just wait here until I do my errands."
He tied his horse next to hers and sat down in the shade on a chair provided by a friendly store-keeper. In less than half an hour she returned, and they started for Old Inn. Isabel had never seemed so charming to him as they rode slowly out of the town and along the dusty road. Smiling and sparkling, she asked him rapid eager questions about his ranch, his plans, his comforts, whom he had met, how he had passed his days and evenings. The truth was she had practically forgotten him, and her conscience smote her. Her week in San Francisco had waxed to a fortnight, for she had enjoyed herself far more than was usual in the company of her relatives. Lyster Stone was one of the most agreeable of men when debts were not more than usually pressing, and as he had just painted a drop curtain and sold a picture for a considerable sum, he had replenished his own elaborate wardrobe, given his wife a new frock, silenced the loudest of his creditors, and thought it worth while to "blow the rest in" on a sister-in-law who seemed to have no taste for matrimony. Moreover, he really liked and admired her, and he liked still more to spend money. When his pockets were full of actual coin he abandoned himself to sheer happiness. Debt had bred philosophy; moreover, his wife relieved him of too depressing a contact with duns, and there were times when his respite was longer than he deserved. If his Paula had a little way of cajoling the amount out of her sister's pocket, why not? He had never refused a friend in need, and, in truth, could see no use for money except to spend it. If all the world did not wag his way, so much the worse for cold-blooded mercenary superfluous beings. So, the two weeks had been a round of dinners at the gay Bohemian restaurants, chafing-dish suppers at his own and other studios, the theatre and opera, and long walks about the brilliant streets at night. It was all the more interesting to Isabel from its odd wild likeness to foreign life. She had heard much of this American "continental" flavor of San Francisco life, only to be tasted by artificial light, and she had given herself up to it with an abandon of which she possessed a sufficient reserve. But one cloud had risen on the blue, and as it emptied itself in a torrent, it was a matter for congratulation that it had tarried the fortnight.
A woman of growing wealth, who affected artists' society, had continued to live in her pretty odd little house, but had recently done it up like a stuffed and scented jeweller's box. The tiny salon was her pride. It was all cherry satin and white lace, the furniture lilliputian, to match the proportions of the room and the lady. She was large-eyed, dark-haired, pretty, and the room set her off admirably. It was here that she invariably received her artist friends, and felt herself at last set in a definite niche, in the city of individualities. One day, in a spasm of generosity, she bade Stone, calling in a mood of unusual depression, to paint it, and sell for his own benefit what, at least, should be a glowing bit of still life. Stone began his work next day, meaning, when the seductive interior was finished, to induce his patron to sit on the doll-like sofa for a portrait, irresistible alike to her vanity and pocket. But she capriciously went off to New York for clothes, and he exhibited the picture in the shop of a dealer where buyers were not infrequent. Thence, indeed, in the course of a few days went a wealthy broker whose sign was three balls. He liked the picture, but bargained that himself should sit on the sofa. His offer was generous. Stone, to do him justice, demurred, for all Bohemia, at least, knew the room. But Mrs. Paula wept at the thought of the lost hundreds, and he succumbed. The result, at the owner's insistence, was exhibited. The lady returned as unexpectedly as she had flown, and was asked at every step if she had "seen her room." Scenting mystery, she went to the gallery; and stood petrified before the faithful presentment of her cherry-colored satin boudoir, the very edge of the sofa accommodating a large gentleman with an eminent nose, a bulging shirt-front—diamond-studded—and knees long severed. He looked like a Hebraic Gulliver in Lilliput, and the unities were in tatters. She stared, stuttered, wept. And then she descended upon Stone.
Gwynne laughed heartily as Isabel related the episode, but they fell into silence after they crossed the bridge and were able to accelerate their pace. He made no effort to break it, although Isabel had never found him more polite. She also thought him vastly improved with his thick coat of tan, and almost picturesque in his khaki riding-clothes and high boots. There were more subtle changes in him which it was too warm and dusty to speculate upon at the moment.
Gwynne had restrained his spontaneous delight in seeing Isabel again. Not only did he have a genuine grievance in her neglect of him, but he had no intention that she should fancy he had need of anything she could give him, beyond superficial companionship and advice. More than once during the past weeks he had caught himself longing so miserably for her sympathy and the support of her strong independent character that it had alarmed him. He realized for the first time what a prop and resource the deep maturity and scornful strength of his mother had been. He must brace and reinforce his character at all points if he persisted in his determination to achieve the colossal task he had set for himself. Woman's sympathy was all very well for some men, or for him in more toward circumstances, but he had looked deeply into himself and been terrified at unsuspected weaknesses. He had set his teeth and determined to fight his fight alone. If he failed, at least he would have the consolation of never having cried out to a woman: "Give me your help! I need you!"
He did not betray the least of this, but his first remark as they rested the horses on the slight hill leading to Isabel's ranch was less irrelevant than it may have seemed to himself.
"I suppose you met all sorts of interesting Johnnies in that beloved San Francisco of yours," he said, abruptly.
"Of course. It will be quite cool in an hour and we can go out. Fortunately I never gave away Uncle Hiram's shooting-togs, and he was quite your height and figure. We'll take tea and sandwiches with us so that we need not hurry home for supper."
She suddenly forgot the ducks and pointed with her whip at the low hills behind her house. The runs were covered with several thousand snow-white, red-combed chickens, and all their little white houses shone in the sun. The effect was by no means inartistic, but Gwynne elevated his nose. He hated the sight of chickens.
"Did you ever see anything more beautiful than that?" asked Isabel, proudly. "They all know me, and I love every one of them."
"I don't doubt there is money in them," said Gwynne, dryly. "But as a pet I should prefer even a cat."
"Oh, I only pet them when they are ill. There is an old feather-bed in the house, and I put them in that when they need nursing at night. That is a device of my own, and much better than going out at twelve o'clock on a cold dark night. By-the-way, I think your idea of selling half or more of Lumalitas admirable. Great tracts of land in this part of the State are out of date, and more bother than they are worth, anywhere. You can invest the money to great advantage in San Francisco; but I think you should devote the rest of the ranch to chickens—"
"No, madam!" Gwynne turned upon her the glittering eye of an animal at bay. Then he laughed. "I have heard that proposition from every man I have met and daily from my superintendent until I managed to suppress him. I won't have a chicken on the ranch. The sight of them not only fills me with ennui, but I have no intention of presenting your comic papers with material. I could write their jokes myself—'Gwynne before and after': Westminster in the background and a hayseed figure in front addressing a constituency of chickens. Stumping the country with eggs in my pockets for the children. Dining the eminent members of my constituency on horse-meat, under the delusion that what is good for chickens is good for votes. 'Leghorn Gwynne.' 'The Member from Chickenville.' No thanks. No weapons that I can withhold."
"This is all on my ranch," said Isabel; "so there is no danger of being peppered. The rest of the marsh is owned by clubs, and as there was no shooting here last year the ducks should be thicker than anywhere else. We should get our fifty apiece in no time."
They were entering a narrow slough, hardly wider than the boat. It cut its zigzag way through the marsh for many miles, and they could follow its course with the eye but a few feet at a time. Gwynne shipped the oars and began to scull, his gun across his knee. Isabel, in front and with her back to him, sat with her own gun ready for a shot. On one side of them was a large piece of marsh-land, on the left, smaller patches, and little islands caught in the long grasping fingers of the tide. Gwynne had attired himself with an ill grace in a pair of his cousin Hiram's rubber boots that completely covered his body below the waist, and an old shooting-coat with capacious pockets. Isabel wore a similar costume, and but for her hair might have been mistaken for a lad. She possessed no interest for Gwynne whatever at the moment. Nor did anything else but the prospect of a new and exciting sport. The October evening was mellow and full of color, the entire reach of the marsh steeped in a golden haze shed from the glory in the west. Even the forests and the lower ridges rising to Tamalpais had something aqueous in their vague outlines, swayed gently in the golden tide. Only the tide lands were green; the very water was yellow. Here and there, but far away, a mast or sail rose above the level surface of the marsh. From the distance came the sound of constant shooting.
Gwynne sculled silently, but with some impatience. They had left the open creek far behind and had not seen a duck. Suddenly Isabel's gun leaped to her shoulder. They rounded a sharp point and the whole surface of the narrow slough between them and the next bend was black with sleeping ducks. Gwynne's knee moved automatically to the seat in front of him, and as the startled birds rose he and Isabel fired to right and left. The scattering shot played havoc, and the second charge brought down at least half as many on the higher wing. Isabel reloaded the guns while Gwynne went for the ducks that had fallen on the land. He fell into several holes himself, and returned covered with mud, but waving his birds in triumph; and once more they stole softly along their winding way. The shot had roused neighboring flocks; several dark clouds had risen simultaneously, but in a few moments they settled again.
"You had better use both guns," whispered Isabel, "and I will do the reloading. We can't do much with these old-fashioned things at best."
Gwynne accepted this act of sacrifice with a matter-of-fact nod, and it was but a moment later that they came upon another flock. He fired with an accuracy of aim that won him an admiring mutter, although to miss would have been almost as noteworthy. But after repeating this experience several times, he shrugged his shoulders and announced himself blasé.
"I'd like something a little more difficult," he said. "Ten minutes of this and we can glut the market."
"All men are children," said Isabel, indulgently. "Tie up the boat and we'll go after widgeon."
They landed and stole softly over the larger reach of marsh-land, Isabel in the lead as she knew every hole. It was ten minutes before she raised her hand and pointed to a wilted but still effective screen. Under cover of this they crawled towards a large pond on which ducks were resting but by no means asleep. Before the guns were shouldered they had taken flight; so few were brought down on the wing that Gwynne's interest revived, and he followed Isabel eagerly towards another pond with a better blind. Here they were more wary and more fortunate, and Isabel took a curious pleasure in watching the manifest bliss of her companion. She had never seen him look really happy before. Upon his return to Capheaton from his triumphant battle on the hustings he had been as impassive as his traditions demanded. On the morning of his engagement he had looked rather silly to her detached eye; and immediately after, tragedy and trouble and infinite vexation had claimed him. But this evening, with his cap pushed back, his nostrils distended, his eyes sparkling, he looked like any other young fellow to whom the present was all. Isabel reflected somewhat cynically that it was the opportunity to kill something that had effected this momentary reconciliation with life. But she was too good a sportswoman not to understand his mood, and when he had waded into the lake and returned flushed and triumphant with his bag, she complimented him so warmly that he laughed aloud in sheer delight.
"We have enough for once," she began, but he would not hear of returning to the boat even for the refreshment of tea, and they went on and on until their feet were as weary as their shoulders under the burden that was Isabel's part to string while her partner enjoyed himself.
"But we must really go," she announced, finally. "We have a long stretch out in the open creek after we leave the slough, and it is not so easy to keep the channel after dark. I have lost track of things and don't remember what time the moon rises. You can come every day if you like; and four in the morning is the best time if you are energetic enough—"
"I would get up at midnight—stay up all night. But I am quite willing to return now—and not for tea. I should like several of these ducks for supper, if your Jap is less haughty than mine."
Their way lay through the middle of the marsh-land. It was not until they reached the slough that she uttered a loud sharp cry. The boat was at least three feet below them and there was nothing at either end but mud.
Isabel stamped both feet in succession and flung her burden to the ground. "Why,whydid I take Mac's word?" she exclaimed, furiously. "He always makes mistakes about the tide—he hasn't an inch of memory left. Why didn't I look at the calendar? Or think? This comes of going off for three weeks instead of staying at home and attending to business. I had a confused idea that this was the 'good week.' Great heavens!"
Gwynne had watched her with considerable interest and curiosity. But he answered, soothingly: "Well, what of it? The tide turns, doesn't it." It happened that he had had no experience of marsh-lands.
"Yes—in six hours."
"Six hours! Well, what of it? It is all in the day's work. Look at it as a jolly adventure." It was his first opportunity to console and he hastened to take advantage of it. "We have tea and sandwiches, warm enough clothing, and the weather is perfection. If we get stiff and chilly we can walk—"
"Walk? In these rubber boots? I am nearly dead already." She had a wild impulse to drop her head on his shoulder and weep; but her pride flew to the front and she shrugged her shoulders and remarked, airily: "I don't really mind anything much except being an idiot. However, I'll make it up to you. I can cook ducks better than Chuma. You make the tea."
Gwynne made a fire out of decayed tule weed and driftwood, then climbed down into the boat and brought up the provisions and utensils intended for an earlier interlude. The tea warmed and stimulated both, and they knelt by the fire and toasted the ducks at the end of the boat-hook, scowling with a preternatural earnestness both were too hungry to observe. Then they fell to, and it is doubtful if either had ever eaten with a keener relish. They were obliged to use their fingers, and, as they had no salt, to shred the ham and wrap it about the morsels of duck, but to such minor matters they gave not a thought, and consumed four teals and every scrap they had brought from home, as well as another pot of tea. Isabel, recalling the injured air of her father, uncle, and brother-in-law when their comfort was rudely disturbed, warmed to Gwynne, who was good-humored and amused. Even the reflection that he had roughed it in far worse straits than this, or that had he the legal right to grumble he might possibly use it, did not alter the pleasant impression he made as he tramped out the fire, washed his hands in the marsh grass, and then stretched himself full length with his pipe. She lit a cigarette, but had not smoked half its length when she sprang to her feet.
"Look!" she said. "We must get into the boat. It is getting damper every moment, and the fog will make us feel as if we were in our graves if we don't sit on something dry."
She had pointed northward, and Gwynne saw a phantom mountain moving along the level surface of the marsh with the quiet plodding motion of a ship under full sail in a light breeze. The curious combination of images fascinated him, and he watched the stealthy silent progress of this night visitor from the tule lands of the north, that looked as if it might have obliterated the world. As he jumped down into the boat he saw before him, on three sides of him, the sparkling night. Then as Isabel laid her hands on his shoulders and he lifted her down, the fog swept over them, and there was nothing to do but sit and watch the glow of pipe and cigarette; even their own outlines were barely visible.
"I fancy it will go home when the moon rises," said Isabel, with a little shiver. "Are you cold?" she asked, solicitously.
"No," replied a tart voice. "Why didn't you let me ask that? You are not my mother. We can make tea at intervals. How long do you suppose the tide has been out?"
"About two hours."
"I am quite comfortable and have never resented any adventure. And this is the appropriate time and place for a certain story. As I remarked before I shall not know you until I have heard it. Pasts are dead walls."
"It is not necessary that you should know me."
"I think otherwise. You are my one friend among eighty millions of aliens, or ought to be. I shall continue to feel a superior sort of acquaintance until you have taken me into your confidence."
There was a movement of the fog that he inferred was a shrug. "Very well," she replied, without a break in her cool even voice. "I suppose I shall enjoy talking about myself. It is not often I have had the opportunity to indulge in a monologue in my family, and you certainly are at my mercy. If you attempt to flee you will be mired like the boat, and I could not pull you out."
He had never felt the least curiosity about the past history or the inner life of a mortal before, and in normal circumstances Isabel's would not have appealed to him. But her instrumentality in changing the whole current of his life had alarmed his masculinity into a resolve to demonstrate his superiority if it came to a contest of wills; given birth to a subtle assumption of proprietorship, indifferent in material things, but pressing towards the guarded chambers of the spirit. Isabel, vaguely uneasy earlier in the day, began to appreciate the advance of an outer and powerful force upon her precious freedom, and resented it. And while she made up her mind that if it came to a silent contest of wills, hers at least should not be conquered, she reflected that the deeper intimacy, certain to ensue if she gave him her confidence, would insure her a firmer and subtler hold upon his destinies.
"Of course I lived two lives before my father's death. My days were sufficiently filled with him, to say nothing of making both ends meet; for even after my uncle's death, I had only a small income until the day of my complete liberty came. I slept soundly enough when I was not following my father about the house with a candle, or about the hills with a lantern. But such a life preyed upon my spirits. I imagined myself both melancholy and bitter and grew unhealthily romantic. But from the conditions of my life I had two escapes—in books and in dreams. My father hated company more and more and I rarely left him for a dance or one of those church festivities where all the young people of my set were sure to meet. I knew that I was regarded as rather a tragic figure, and this enhanced my morbid egoism. I wonder if I shall ever be as really happy again!
"During the year following my father's death I lived out here alone, but with my hands tied by the executors of my uncle's will. I felt myself quite the enchanted princess and put in most of my time dreaming about the prince. I suppose no girl ever had such wild and impossible notions of love. That is to say most girls have, but I had peculiar opportunities for indulgence and elaboration. At the same time I despised or disliked every man I knew or ever had known—with the possible exception of Judge Leslie. Not only had I found all the men of my little personal world weak, or selfish, or tyrannical, but those I knew almost as well were narrow, or commonplace, or uninterested in anything but local politics or making money, or both combined. Not but that Rosewater is the world in little. You never read of any old Italian duchy where there was more jealousy and intrigue; more silent and tense, or open and gnashing struggle for supremacy than is centered in these three banks. They have prevented the town from increasing in size and importance, in spite of its prosperity, through their machinations against one another. If a stranger comes to the town intending to invest his money in some one of the flourishing industries, or to introduce another, the banker to whom he brings a letter, or whom he happens to meet first, terrifies him with tales of the rapacity and dishonorable methods of his rivals; and the other two, who fear that the first will get the stranger's business, warn him that Mr. Colton, for instance, never gave an hour's mercy. The three have made slow, sure, dogged fortunes, but each has prevented the others from becoming millionaires, and Rosewater from taking its proper place as county seat. And they are all afraid of new-comers, new capital, of authority passing out of their hands. They are careful not to charge exorbitant rates of interest, and every farmer and merchant in the county borrows from them; partly from habit, partly because the banks are uncommonly sound. They foreclose without mercy, but that does not frighten their old patrons, who have the perennial optimism of the country. The only capital they have not succeeded in frightening off is that controlled by the great corporations. One or two have wedged their way in and others will follow in time. Doubtless when the younger men get the reins in their hands they will trim with the times, but the older seem to be Biblical if not Christian, and the consequence is that most of the younger have left for a wider field.
"Finally the day came when I could turn my back on California, and I felt sure that I should remain away for ten years at least. I thought that the liberty I had longed for all my life was mine at last. In a conducted tour, I soon discovered, there was little liberty, to say nothing of privacy. Before I had been two days in the train I was made to feel that there was something wrong with a person that showed a disposition to retire into herself. She was either aristocratic, or had something to hide, unless she responded to the confidences natural to people of that class. As there were just eighteen in the party, of course I always had a room partner, and there was not a woman in the entire company that I would have known from choice. However, it was excellent discipline, not unenlightening, and the end came in six weeks. They sailed from Naples and I wandered about by myself. In a way the liberty was intoxicating, but of course the sum of it was lessened by the daily irritations of travel in Europe: the rapacity of the Italians and French, the wretched trains, the hordes of vulgar tourists, mostly of my own nation, the absurd primness, quite foreign to my nature, I was forced to assume when alone with a man who was neither English nor American, the awful fatigues, the ennuis of long rainy days in the second-rate hotels and pensions I had to frequent. Still, I was too young for any unpleasant impression to take root and discourage me, and there was much that was wholly delightful. I spent weeks in a city or even village that took my fancy. But even so it was not long before I realized that my liberty was as far off as ever, because my soul at least was possessed by the image of the prince, the more tormenting and insistent as his outlines were so remarkably vague. In the intervals when novelty ceased to appeal, when my very eyes refused to look at things, I pictured inexpressibly thrilling and romantic futures. Then I would fall into a panic at the passing of youth, for a woman never feels so old again as between eighteen and twenty-five—her first quarter-century.
"And I did not lack opportunities. I met many people, some of them quite charming. But they left me cold.
"Then I lived the student life in Paris, studying art just enough to give me the raison d'être. It was very gay, very irresponsible, very educating to a provincial miss. The restaurants with their sanded floors, and the cosmopolitan mixture of students, generally eccentric to look at, brandishing temperament until the poor thing must have been worn out before its harness of technique was ready—all was a perpetual source of delight to me, and I used to let my mind dwell on Rosewater for the sake of enjoying myself with the more wonder and gratitude.
"But of course in such a life I had to have a companion, I could not long go to students' restaurants alone. I had taken a tiny flat in the Latin Quarter at the top of a house, and overlooking a convent where the nuns were always walking in the garden. Afemme de ménagecooked my breakfast and kept my rooms in order; but although I was quite comfortable and never lonely, I had not been established a fortnight before certain experiences at the restaurants and on the street, which you can imagine for yourself, convinced me that I could not live alone. So I looked hurriedly over the field, and decided that an American girl in my class suggested fewest complications. Moreover, she interested me. She had a pale tense face, rarely spoke to anybody, and worked as if her life depended upon every stroke, although her talent was not conspicuous. It was not easy to approach her, but one day, after I had dined alone in my flat five times in succession, I noticed that she was paler than usual, and that her hands were trembling. Then I felt certain she was in trouble, and it would have been my instinct to help her in any case. I joined her as we left the atelier, and asked her to walk a bit. It was not long before she admitted that her money was practically gone, and that her family would not send her any more; they had never approved of her coming to Paris to study art. They were not at all well off, and as she had a facility in trimming hats they had thought it her duty to contribute more immediately to the support of the family. She had not advanced as rapidly as she had hoped to do, and it would be insupportable humiliation to return.
"Here was my opportunity. I exultingly invited her to share my apartment, told her that my income was quite enough for two, that I was merely studying life, and that her protection would more than compensate me for the little extra outlay. She declined at first, hesitated for a week; but in the end she came. I grew very fond of her, and she interested me more and more. Her real bitterness taught me what a purely youthful symptom mine had been, and she was rather a clever girl, often entertaining. She was about twenty-six, I fancy, and had received a good education at the academy of the Western town in which she had been born. Her grandparents were Italian emigrants, and she had fine black eyes and a beautiful mouth.
"Well, before many months had passed I knew that she was in desperate straits, and she offered to go away, reiterating that she had only intended to take advantage of the temporary haven while she fed her courage and painted something that might sell. I knew that if she left me she would throw herself into the Seine, and I persuaded her to stay. It is not difficult to persuade a stricken woman to remain under a friendly roof. I was full of sympathy for the poor little thing, but I don't deny that I was immensely interested, and fairly palpitated with the thought that I was actually seeing life at first hand. Who the hero of her romance was I never discovered, except that he was of her own race, and married, a fact he had concealed until ready to leave Paris. She told me enough to make me hate all men so violently that the prince took himself off and left me in peace. But I had trouble enough in my household. As time went on Veronica's alternate attacks of melancholy and hysteria were terrible. I sat up night after night to keep her from throwing herself out of the window; at times she seemed to be quite off her head. And then she still loved the wretch, and would maunder by the hour. But it ended, as everything does; and the poor girl died. I have no desire to linger over the climax. If anything was needed to set the final seal upon my disgust with life at first hand it was the mean and sordid details that attend death and burial in Paris. The landlord behaved like the mercenary fiends they all are; I was obliged to call in the assistance of the American consul before I could get the body out of the house, and between all the trouble and fuss poor Veronica's story was published from the house-tops.
"As soon as it was over I left Paris and started to travel slowly through Germany, feeling now a real sense of liberty, inasmuch as I was sure I could be all intellect henceforth, dependent upon nothing so unsatisfactory as human happiness. I never wanted another real contact with life. I would travel, and study, and develop my mind, possibly some latent talent. Many talents are manufactured anyhow, and the world is always hailing them as genius.
"But, of course, in time, and with constant change of scene, to say nothing of youth, the impression faded; the painful experience hovered faintly in the background of the past; the romantic imp in my brain, a little pale and emaciated from its long sojourn in the cellar, resumed the throne. Once more I began to realize that I was human, and to cast about for the mate that must surely be roaming in search of me. It was then that I arrived in Munich.
"I saw him first in the Englischergarten. You remember it, that wonderful imitation of a great stretch of open country, with fields where they make hay, and bits of wild woods, and crooked pathways, and bridges over a branch of the Isar, greenest and loveliest of rivers. And then the little beer-gardens, where the people are always sitting and listening to the band—and beyond the tree-tops, the spires and domes of the beautiful city.
"I was standing by the lake watching the swans when he rode by, and I am bound to say that he made no great impression. I hardly should have noticed him had it not been for his excessively English appearance, and a certain piercing quality in the glance with which he favored me. I should never have given him another thought, but a week later I met him formally. It came about oddly enough.
"That evening in looking through my trunk for a business paper I came upon a letter of introduction given me by a friend I had made in Italy. It was to a Baroness L., of Munich. I had quite forgotten it, and the sight of it inspired me with no desire for the social curiosities. I was infatuated with Munich, and its exteriors satisfied me. It has a large courteous grandly-hospitable air, as if it were the private property of a king, to which, however, all strangers are royally welcome. It is the ideal king's city: life but no bustle; neither business, as we understand the word, nor poverty; a city of infinite leisure and infinite interest, a superb living picture-book, where one is ever amused, interested, both stimulated and soothed. I had been in it three weeks and had almost made up my mind to live there, and dream away the rest of my life. Knote and Moréna, Feinhals and Bender were singing at the Hof Theatre. Mottl was conducting. Lili Marberg's Salome was something to be seen again and again. You forgot the play itself. And Bardou-Müller's Mrs. Alving! I did not sleep for two nights.
"Well, I left the letter on my table, instead of returning it to the portfolio of my trunk, and it exercised a certain insistence. What are letters of introduction for? And should I not see the social life of Europe when the opportunity offered? So I left a card on the baroness. She returned it in the course of a day or two, then wrote, asking me to drink tea with her. I went. There were perhaps fifty people there. I have not the faintest idea who they were or what they looked like. Prestage—that was only one of his names, but it will do—asked immediately to be introduced to me, and we talked in a corner for an hour. Before we had talked for ten minutes I knew that the great gates were swinging open. It is not possible for a woman to define one man's fascination to another, and I hardly know myself why this man so completely turned my head. He was not exactly good-looking, but he had remarkable eyes and a singular tensity of manner, which made me almost breathless at times. He was, moreover, brilliantly educated and accomplished, and the most finished specimen of the man of the world I had met. He was an American of inherited fortune who had spent the greater part of his life in Europe, alternating between Paris and London, although he knew the society of other cities well enough. His contempt for the vulgarity of the huge modern fortunes, and his admiration for Munich, were the first subjects to discover to us the similarity of our tastes.
"We soon discovered others. I think he fell as deeply in love with me as he was capable of doing. He was forty-one and had fairly exhausted his capacity, for he had lived the life of pleasure only; but no doubt I was something new in his experience, and penetrated the ashes like a strong western breeze. I have seen him turn quite white when I suddenly appeared at one of our trysts.
"Of course I lived in a pension. I had no private sitting-room, and he positively refused to sit in the salon a second time. So we used to take interminable walks about Munich, lingering in all the quaint old Gothic corners, along the magnificent stretches of Renaissance; lunching on the terraces of the restaurants under the shade of the green trees, or in quaint little back gardens set in the angle of buildings as mediæval as Rothenburg; the people looking down at us from the narrow windows or the little balconies. We spent hours in the Englischergarten, sitting on the banks of the Isar; often took the train to the beautiful Isarthal and spent the day in the woods; or sailed on one of the lakes with the tumbled glittering peaks of the Alps always in sight. We visited Ludwig's castles together, attended peasants' festivals in the mountains, lunching in some dilapidated old garden of a Gasthaus. And of course we went constantly to the opera. It was positive heaven for a time, and as romantic as the heart of any romantic idiot could wish. I was so happy I could not even think, even when I was alone. I simply sat like one in a trance and gazed into space, vague rose-colored dreams turning the slow wheel of my brain. No one paid any attention to us. Everybody in the pension was studying something; we avoided the American church and consulate and even the Baroness L. We were determined to have our blissful dream unvulgarized by gossip.
"There is no doubt that for a time my young enthusiasm gave him back a flicker of the romance of his own youth, but of course it couldn't last. I hardly know when it was I began to realize that the whole base of his nature was honeycombed with ennui, and that any structure reared upon it might topple at a moment's notice. I had been steeped to the eyes in the present. I had no wish to marry. Marriage was prosaic. Life was a fairy tale, why materialize it? I soon discovered that man's capacity for living on air is limited, and I had almost yielded to his entreaties to cross to England where we could marry without tiresome formalities, when one day—this was perhaps a month after we had met—he was late at a tryst. I lived a lifetime in five minutes. When he arrived he was so apologetic and so charming that if I had been an older woman I should have known that something was wrong. The next day, as it happened, I had to go to bed with influenza, and wrote him that I might not get out for a week. He wrote twice a day and sent me flowers. On the fourth morning I felt so much better that I sent him a note by adinstmanntelling him that I should lunch on the terrace of the Neue Bürse restaurant. He was not awaiting me; nor did he come at all. Later I saw him driving with an astonishingly handsome woman; who looked as if she had been born without crudities or illusions.
"There are no words to express the tortures of jealousy and disgust that I endured that afternoon. But at five came a note stating that he had been out of town on a lonely voyage of discovery, and begging me to come for a cup of chocolate at the Café Luitpold—where we had gone so often to watch the motley crowd. I went, wrath and horror struggling in my heart with the sanguineness of woman. He had never been so charming and so plausible. I let him go on, exulting in the discovery that he was a liar, for I knew that it pushed me a step towards recovery. When he had finished I told him that I had seen him in the Hofgarten. I never shall forget how white he turned. But if he had been an adventurer his mind could not have been more nimble. He recovered himself instantly, admitted the impeachment, insisted that he had just returned when I saw him, had accepted a seat in the lady's carriage as he was entering his hotel—before he had time to go to his room and find my note. I knew that he was lying, but when he changed the subject to impassioned pleading that I would cross to England at once, I was forced to believe that he loved me.
"But I was miserably undecided. Moreover, I could not leave Munich. My quarterly remittance was unaccountably delayed. I told him this. He knew that I would not move without my own money, but he sent off several cables. The reply came that the drafts had gone and must have been lost in the mails. Duplicates would be sent. There was nothing to do but wait.
"I suppose that money enters into all things. It certainly ruled my destiny. The fortnight that ensued I never think of if I can help it. He was desperately bored with Munich, but too polite to leave me alone. I saw him with the woman three or four times. She was an Austrian who did not visit the Baroness L., and she was staying at his hotel. There was no doubt that he still wished to marry me, but I was in even less doubt that his ruined nature would yield more and more to this sort of fascination when my novelty had worn thin. Before my money arrived my mind was made up. I dared not trust myself to the seduction of his manner and voice—he was a past-master in the art of making love. I wrote him that I would not marry a man I could not trust, and fled to Vienna, telling my Munich bankers to keep my letters until I sent for them. For two weeks I travelled madly through Austria and Hungary. Never for a moment was I free of torments. Never before had I actually comprehended what love meant. I hardly ate or slept. I arrived at a place only to leave it. The hotel-keepers thought I was the American tourist overtaken by that final madness they had always anticipated. When the fortnight finished I looked back upon an eternity in purgatory. I surrendered; at least he loved me in his way. He had never ceased to urge our marriage. Who could say that I might not be fascinating enough to hold him? It was worth the trial, and I despised myself for laying down my arms without a struggle.
"I took the Oriental express from Budapest, but during the journey, swift as it was, I underwent certain reactions. I knew that he must have left Munich, that all I could do was to take a letter to his bank and ask that it be forwarded. I wrote the letter as soon as I arrived, but decided to post it; my pride revolted at facing the sharp eye of the person that handled the letters of credit. I had gone to the bank with Prestage more than once.
"As soon as the letter was posted I experienced a certain measure of peace, having done all I could. Nevertheless, to sit still was impossible, and I set out for a walk. It was one of those brilliant clear crisp days with which that high plateau can put even California to the blush. I saw that all the tram-cars were crowded, and that carriage loads of people had flower pieces. I asked if it were a Feiertag and was reminded that it was the 1st of November, All Saints' Day; Munich was on its way to the several cemeteries to decorate the graves. I had seen All Saints' Day in Venice and felt a mild curiosity to compare the Bavarian festival with the Italian. So I walked out to the great Alt Sud Friedhof where so many celebrities are buried, and where I fancied the scene would be most complete. When I arrived at the entrance the frames that had been set up in the outer court were almost denuded of the flower pieces the countrywomen had brought in to sell, but I bought a wreath at the solicitation of a peasant in a picturesque head-dress, and followed the crowd. The cemetery is on three sides of the entrance and enclosed by a high brick wall. I stood a moment at the inner official entrance, hardly knowing which way to turn; but seeing a number of staring people in a corridor on my right that faced one great division of the cemetery, I was turning into it mechanically when a policeman waved me back with the information that the entrance was at the other end. But not until I had seen, stared, and gasped. In an alcove was a figure, almost upright, that, in the first dazed seconds I took to be a wax-work, but immediately knew to be a dead woman. As I almost ran out I recalled that in Bavaria the dead are taken from the house within six hours, and are kept in a public mortuary for three days, or until all danger of premature interment is over.
"I do not think I should mind, particularly, seeing a ghost; I am sure my mental curiosity would get the better of my unwilling flesh; but I have a real horror of the corpse. I tried to forget the grotesque exhibition I had stumbled upon, in the novel and interesting scene about me. The long aisles of the cemetery were filled with well-dressed people, some strolling, others decorating, all apparently enjoying themselves. Almost all of the graves and monuments were bedecked, and presented a most Elysian appearance with the masses of bright flowers, the streamers of wide ribbon, the lighted lanterns, many of them antique and beautiful, above all the tall flambeaux, whose flames looked white and unearthly against the bright atmosphere. Above was a deep-blue sky with those thick low masses of snow-white clouds one sees only in Bavaria.
"But that grotesque little figure with its shrunken yellow face under the pitiless sun glare, its bony old hands, attached I knew, to the string of a distant bell, did not leave my mind for an instant. I walked down every path, I examined every interesting monument, I even went into the other divisions where there are so many statues in the alcove tombs; but all in vain. I felt that I should see that old woman to the end of my days. I could recall the very pattern of the cheap black lace of her cap. There was but one way to rid my mind of the obsession, and that was to return to the corridor, stand in front of every earthen figure, remain there until my mind was satiated, in consequence delivered.
"I set my teeth and went back to the Leichenhalle. Of course there were many to keep me company. I looked long and unflinchingly at two gentlemen in evening clothes, an old maid dressed for once on earth as a bride, a young woman and her infant. The coffins lay on an inclined plane and the edges were so concealed by a mass of flowers and greenery that the ghastly company looked as if half rising to hold a reception.
"And then I stood for I do not know how long before the alcove next to the old woman beside the exit, not knowing whether I were turned to stone or sitting by the Rosewater marsh indulging in some wild morbid flight of imagination.
"For there he was. For a second I did not fully recognize him, he was so yellow, his lower jaw had so hideously retreated, completely altering the slightly cynical expression of the mouth. The bright gay sunlight searched out every line carved by too much living, the little wrinkles about the eyes, the weakness of the handsome polished hands. He looked unspeakably aged and hideous. I had never dreamed that a brilliant mind could leave so miserable a shell behind it, that the body was such a mean poverty-stricken thing, a thing to be thrust out of sight as soon as it had fulfilled its work of balking and ruining the soul. I had never looked at Veronica after her death, and only once at my father, who had not horrified me, for here the undertaker has arts unknown, apparently, in Bavaria.
"My love died without a gasp. I shrank and curdled with horror that I had loved that hideous clay. What he had aroused in me was merely the response of youth to the masculine magnet, a trifle more specialized than I had heretofore encountered; the inevitable fever when infection appears. All personal feeling vanished out of me so completely that even while I stood there I felt the same pity for him that I had for the others, the helpless dead so mercilessly exposed to the vulgar indifferent crowd. If I could have hurried him into the privacy of the grave I would have exerted every effort, but before the laws of the country I was powerless. As I was leaving the cemetery I discovered that I still carried the wreath. I went back and added it to the bank of greenery which his valet no doubt had provided.
"When I returned to my pension I sent for the man and learned that he and the Consul-General of the United States had done all that the authorities had left in their hands. The body was to be shipped to New York within the month. He had died of Bright's disease. It had declared itself a day or two after I left. After ten days of intermittent suffering, during which the valet had felt no apprehension, he had died suddenly.
"I left Munich the same day. If I have failed to give you any adequate impression of my agonies, it will be next to impossible to describe my subsequent states of mind. Indeed I have little remembrance of my mental condition during the weeks of travel in Switzerland and Italy that followed. I was deliberately living up on the surface of my nature, indifferent to what was awaiting recognition below, although I knew it to be nothing unwelcome. Then, finally, I felt the time had come when I could draw aside the black curtain which I had hung for decency's sake between my consciousness and my depths, and tell the new guest to come forth. The guest was the liberty I had waited for all my life. I felt indescribably free, light, strong. The tyranny of love, even while it was but the love idea, that had shackled me for so many years, narrowing my interests, warping my imagination, clouding the future, was dissipated at last. I had paid the tribute to my youth and sex. I felt really alive for the first time, existing in the actual not in the dream world. There are women and women; and quite enough of the fine old domestic order to keep the world going; but there is a vast and increasing number that are never really alive and worth anything to themselves or life until they have worked through that necessary madness, buried it, and settled down to those infinite interests upon which matrimony, happy or otherwise, bolts a thousand doors. Some day I will tell you my theory of what such women are really born for, but you have had enough for one night and the story is finished."