There had been no stormier night during the winter. Isabel's old house creaked and rattled and groaned like a ship in a whole gale, and the wind sent great waves of rain along the veranda. A northern window had been blown in and hastily patched. Although but nine o'clock the sky was as black as midnight. For several days there had been merely a quiet steady fall, but during the afternoon the northern rain belt had sent down another great storm and it had been rising ever since.
Isabel, unable to go out, had washed her hair, and was still sitting on the hearth-rug, drying it, when she heard a shout outside, then the slam of a door at the back of the house, and voices in the kitchen. She was too warm and comfortable to be interested. If it were a tramp he was welcome to the shelter of the house; if a burglar there were two men to dispose of him, and her jewels were in a safe-deposit box in San Francisco. She loved a storm and had given herself up to one of those moods of pure delight in the present moment, although she had been in anything but a good-humor of late, and solitude had palled. But a raging storm, the sense of the absolute dominance of nature and the littleness of man, always exalted her. She knew that the old house was secure on its foundations, and, but that she loved comfort and warmth, she would have liked to be out on the marsh in a boat; tense with the difficulties of keeping the channel and avoiding the shoals and mud-banks obliterated by the risen waters. It amused her to imagine herself out there, while dwelling pleasurably, in a doubled consciousness, upon the warm red tints of her room. Her dreams were barely disturbed by the unknown interloper, but they were shattered a moment later by Gwynne's voice and rapid step in the hall.
She had intended to greet him with a cool hauteur after his neglect of nearly a month, but she could not rise in time; and, enveloped in a mass of hair, spread over a yard of the floor, it was impossible to be dignified. So she resolved to be charming.
"I had to come in the back way like a tramp and leave my oil-skins in the kitchen," he announced, abruptly, as he entered. "Don't get up. I have always wanted to see your hair down. So did Jimmy, I remember. Did he?"
"Certainly not. Neither would you if you had not chosen such an extraordinary time to call. I am delighted to see you once more after all these years, but—what on earth possessed you?" His eyes were glittering, although he had dropped his lids, and he did not sit down, but moved restlessly about the room.
"Your mother is much better," said Isabel, tentatively.
"Oh yes, and she is looking forward to her motor trip, and telephoned this morning that her room was a mass of flowers. I fancy she is a bit touched by so much kindness, for she has not been half decent to any one but the Trennahans."
"Does she say anything about returning to England? She had it in mind—just after the earthquake."
"She has made one or two casual allusions to her return, but she never plans far ahead—does what takes her fancy at the moment. But this life will never suit her. I imagine she will go before long. London is in her blood. Now that she can live properly—will have all she can, or ought to want, when the building is paying, there is no object in her remaining here."
"How goes the building?"
"How can anything go in this infernal weather? The old shanties are down, and the contractor had a sort of tent erected and has done some work on the foundations. I should have come directly to California if I had had any idea of the money to be made by selling off my superfluous land and putting up that building. It might be finished, by this time. Why didn't you tell me?"
"I am only remodelling my own brain on business lines by slow degrees, and no echo of this building fever reached me in Europe. You will remember that I did write, while you were wandering about America, that Mr. Colton suggested it for both of us. If I did not dwell on the subject it was because I had a feminine horror of the mortgage—and no idea that you were so keen on making money."
"I am thinking principally of my mother. When a woman has always had the world I doubt if she can live long out of it. San Francisco is all very well for the young and adventurous, and for those with a strong sense of the picturesque, but I can imagine that to a woman of her age and experience——Do you know—" he burst out. "I don't know where I am. What an extraordinary thing heredity is! I doubt if most people, although they would call that a platitude, realize that heredity is anything more than a telling word. There are times when I am sitting at my stove, surrounded by all those typical American men, who seldom mention a subject but politics and farming—for I tabû chickens—or the intensely local interests, more or less affected by politics,—there are times when I actually feel the nameless ambitious young fellow—not born in a log-cabin, perhaps, but next door to it—and endowed with that keen compact pioneer determination to stride straight to my goal, whether it is the White House or—well—the Presidency of a Trust Company. I forget—good God!—Arethose years behind me in England? I have caught myself wishing that I had kept a scrap-book like other idiots. It escapes my memory altogether at times, that I have but to take a steamer out of New York to reach the top of civilization again in less than a week."
"Perhaps it suggests itself when you remember that with the income you can command before long, life in England will be more worth while."
"That was as nasty a one as you ever gave me! No one knows better than yourself what brought me to America, and that those conditions cannot be altered by money. Could I not have had Julia Kaye's fortune? You need not be nasty again! You forget that not only was I in love with her—or thought I was—but could have given her the equivalent. She would be the last to claim that she was to pay too high a price, even with me thrown in. If you don't beg my pardon I'll leave the house."
"I beg your pardon," said Isabel, hastily. She was thrilled with curiosity; she had never seen him so nearly excited, with the exception of one memorable and painful moment. She fancied that she could see one of the barriers between them sway.
"It may be that this sudden prospect of wealth, or rather of a goodish income that would enable me to keep up a decent establishment in town, and a bit of a place somewhere in the hunting country, has upset my equilibrium, but it occurred to me this morning as I was splashing through the mud—I had to go out to the ranch—in fact it came over me with such a rush that I felt like Don Quixote, and every landmark looked like a windmill—what is England to-day but the very apex of civilization? The Mecca, the reward, of every man and woman with the breeding and the intelligence to appreciate it? The best of everything goes there, you have but to turn round to help yourself to an infinite variety—to be found piecemeal everywhere else on earth. And the very best is mine, by inheritance and personal effort. Why in thunder am I out here on this ragged edge of civilization struggling with almost primitive conditions?—elemental badness, sure enough! What is my object? Merely to bring about a set of conditions that exists in England to-day. I have them there. Why am I wading into filth up to my knees, for the sake of an alien race, when they are mine already?"
"But you had too full a measure. That was the reason you emptied the cup and turned your back. You wanted hard work—to use your gifts."
"What does it all amount to? Suppose I insidiously work up a reform movement in this State, and am shot into Congress over the head of the machine? Suppose my gifts are as extraordinary as I have been led to suppose—ordinarily a man feels damned commonplace—and by force of those gifts I hold my own against the formidable organizations I shall encounter there at every turn? Suppose this reform spirit in the United States grows and strengthens, and I come along in time to benefit by it, and am landed in Washington—even in the White House? What of it? I had a thousand times rather be prime-minister in England—in other words the real head of eleven million square miles of the earth's surface, dictator to a good part of the world, for that matter. Your public men are servants—or ought to be, according to your Constitution. In England we render service by courtesy, and rule the roost. In this country every man in public life is not only at the mercy of his constituents, but in daily terror of having his head cut off by the man above him. Even the President has to be a politician above all things."
"You used to talk in England—as if you were not wholly swayed by personal ambition."
"It is not so difficult over there to conceive high and mighty ideals—fool yourself, if you like. But I'll be hanged if I can see myself baring my breast for poisoned arrows, with a seraphic smile on my lips, over here! It is all so crude! I want to be a main instrument in reform as much as ever—Oh yes! But I am not sure that one motive is not to make the life and the game more tolerable. And the everlasting machine! There won't be a day, inside or out of it, that I won't run up against every damnable meanness that human nature is capable of. I must handle these men, placate them—or get out. History has not yet failed to repeat itself. If I succeed, in favoring conditions, in forming a new party, I may end as a boss myself! Exalted ideal! Inspiring thought! Better go home and live like a gentleman. I could have some sort of a career, and I have seen enough in this country to drive me towards the conclusion that there are worse things in life than curbing one's youthful ambitions a bit."
He was still striding up and down the room, his expressive hands as restless as his feet. The color was in his face and his eyes were blazing. There was a curious magnetism about him that Isabel had never been sensible of before, although she had heard much of it in England. It was as if his spirit were fully awake; at other times he appeared to live with his cool critical brain only, while his inner self, with its intense slow passions, slept. She wisely made no comment, and after shoving the books violently about the table he went on:
"You may argue that if public men were elected directly by the people and the President held office for one term of ten or fifteen years only, that a long stride would be made towards the millennium. But it is doubtful if even then, forty or fifty different tribes—for that is what your State and territory lines effect—could be managed without machinery, and machinery develops the lowest attributes in human nature. I saw enough of that in the few rotten boroughs we have left in England, but my imagination never worked towards the full and original development in this country. We have other faults; the serenest optimist would never deny them; but, faults or no faults, we crown civilization to-day. The richest man in America has not the least idea what it means to live like a gentleman in our sense. And there is no flaw in my appreciation of your country. In many respects it is the most marvellous the world has known—but—I sometimes wonder if the pioneer blood in my veins is red enough to stand it. No matter what the most successful reformers accomplish, there will be no high civilization here in our time—no background. Unconsciously, or otherwise, I shall always have the goal of England in my mind—and if that is the case, why am I here? Isn't civilization the highest that man is capable of accomplishing, the best that Earth has to offer any of us? What sense is there in going back to the beginnings and plodding or fighting towards a goal you were born to? It's more than once I've felt like Don Quixote. The whole infernal country is a windmill—and a large percentage of its inhabitants are windbags."
"Of course you have a streak of Don Quixote in you. All men of genius have, I suppose. You felt that you had a mission—to pack a great deal into a convenient phrase. You could do nothing in England but sit down and sup with the elect. You would have choked very quickly. And if you went back you would not stay. You would not only be bored, but you know now how badly this country needs one disinterested man of genius."
"I am not disinterested. I never felt more selfish in my life."
"You have an immense capacity for disinterested statesmanship. Of course all motives, especially with the highly gifted, are complex. You have said yourself they would be fanatics otherwise. And you are far more American than you know, although you have just confessed that you do know it well enough at times. All your American ancestors may be living again in you. It was your own instinct, no influence of mine, that sent you out here, filled with mixed but high ambitions. No full-blooded Englishman would ever do what you have done. Insanity and inebriety skip a generation. Why not Americanism? Heaven knows there is nothing American about your mother. And when the political cleanup comes, as it is bound to—"
"Oh, I am sick of this everlasting optimism: 'Everything is bound to come out all right,' 'God's own country,' and all the rest of it. I can understand it well enough out here, though. It is a wonder to me that any Californian has energy enough to care. Life is easy at the worst. The scoundrels batten unnoticed—although they are sending up the price of everything; and the most ungrateful and rapacious labor class on earth never get their deserts. The labor class hasn't a leg to stand on, so far as bare justice goes. Pity they can't have a taste of Eastern factories and wages and climate for a while. If it were not for its bay and the tremendous significance of its position opposite the Orient, California would be what it ought to be, the pleasure gardens of the world. No politics, no labor-unions, merely a succession of estates, big and little, where a man could live a happy animal existence for one-third of the year, after working the other two-thirds—that is a sane division. But if I stay here I work. And for what ultimate object? England, as sure as fate."
"You cannot possibly tell how you will feel twenty years hence—"
"Twenty years! That is a fair estimate, no doubt! I believe that the real secret of discontent has been the prospect of this cursed period of inaction. Nice substitute—coruscating as a blooming barrister; and it's mighty difficult to travel along for four years without showing your hand. It requires a tact that I may or may not have. If I have it, there may be other depths of hideous guile, as yet undiscovered. I have had glimpses of them already. All these farmers that I am nursing? What if my beneficent virus works too quickly—before I can represent them? Some other fellow reaps the benefit; and when my turn comes, likely as not there will be a reaction. I've to keep and increase my hold on these men of every nationality under the sun, as well as upon the seasoned old Americans, lest they should break away from me. Nice job I've cut out." He hesitated a moment, but added: "Beastly idea to subject all to the same law. It should be ten years for immigrants, and one for the man-of-the-world anxious to take the oath of allegiance—not that I am frantic to take it."
"I never knew any one so keen for obstacles; and now that you have found more than you bargained for—"
"It's not the obstacles that daunt me. If I were only sure of accomplishing any result worth while, if I had the materials to work on—if I were sure I cared! The American is an unhatched Englishman, but he won't be hatched out in my time——I even long for the close compact drama of English life. Everything is spread over such a vast loose surface here. These four years through which I may—must stumble along with my hands tied, are a fair example. And it seems to me that I never go to bed without seeing a face on the dark trying to enunciate: 'What for?' 'Why?'"
He sat down suddenly on a chair in front of her and took his head in his hands. "Do you ever ask yourself those questions?" he demanded, abruptly.
Isabel nodded. He noted absently that she looked like an elf with her face half-hidden by her hair, and that he could see but one little black mole, but a narrow ring of blue about the dilated pupils of her eyes, the tiny dimple at the corner of her mouth. She wore a loose blue wrapper, and the wood fire leaped in high flames behind her. The storm was terrific. He suddenly realized that this was the only homelike room he knew outside of England. He felt as if nothing would ever give him peace again, but he was suddenly and overwhelmingly glad to be there—and comfortably alone with Isabel on this raging night. He stared at her until his own pupils dilated, but she replied more tranquilly than she felt.
"Cui bonois the motto on Earth's coat of arms. The only thing that saves us is that we don't see it all the time. There are long intervals in which we eat and sleep and dance and love and play at politics and enjoy the storm—and our best companions."
"We certainly are not here to spend our lives preparing for another world. Otherwise there would be no sense in the complexities of civilizations. A man could do that much in a cave. It is merely the diabolism of instinct that prompts the young to believe that the race is all. Certainly love is not the only source of happiness. I have been ecstatically happy when writing—thinking, in the fever of composition that I was dashing out the finest thing in literature. I have been happy under fire, or excited enough to think so. And I have felt enough exultation with exaltation to make happiness when I have been on a platform and carried a hostile crowd off its head and to my feet. If two people were indescribably mated—I don't know—"
"Why not deliberately accept the doctrine that there is a purpose, even if you are not permitted to read the riddle of life—"
"All very well, but what have politics to do with it? You may answer that a man should lay up all the credits he can, and that he can possibly get more by cleaning out the political trough than in any other way. If those are my lines I suppose I shall work along them, but my higher faculties whisper that to live this life on the intellectual plane, fighting for your country when necessary, is the rational existence for those that have the luck to be born to the good things of the old civilizations. Here they don't know any better, or if they do they can't help themselves. If that plane isn't meant to live on, why is it there? Has a man the right deliberately to step off the high plane upon which a long succession of circumstances have planted him—pull up his roots and plant them in a virgin soil?"
"Perhaps it is his duty to go where he is most needed—where his riper instincts and experience—"
"Your arguments are always good, otherwise I should not be here arguing with you. What do you really think of love?"
She jumped with the suddeness of the attack, and then drew backward a little, for he was leaning towards her and she felt his masculine magnetism as she had never done before. It pulled and repelled her, fascinated and filled her with resentment. And she was fully alive to the romantic conditions, the wild night, the isolation, the vibrating atmosphere. But she replied, soberly:
"I don't think about it. I buried all that—"
"Chuck it on the dust-heap! It served its purpose: women should have some such experience in their first youth as men have others. You are the better for it, because you worked off on the poor devil all the morbid and ultra-romantic tendencies that were spoiling your life. But let it go at that. It was no more love than my first Byronic madness for one of my mother's friends when I was sixteen—"
"You were thirty when you were in love with Mrs. Kaye. And she was not even your second—nor your tenth, no doubt."
"Quite right. I do not understand and shall waste no time on the effort. All men run pretty much the same gamut. That attack was the most commonplace sort of passion, no madness in it, no idealization, no sense of mating—"
"And how, may I ask, do you expect to know when you really do fall in love—"
"I'll know, all right. I wish you would put up your hair. You look uncanny, not like a woman at all. You have too many sides. I like you when you are human and normal."
"If you think my hair in its proper place will accomplish that result—my hair-pins are up-stairs on my dressing-table—"
He disappeared instantly. When he returned she was standing and coiling her hair about her head. Her sleeves were loose and the attitude bared her arms. As Gwynne handed her the pins, one by one, he stared, fascinated; but when she had finished and shaken down her sleeves, returning his stare with two polar stars, he turned his back suddenly and resumed his tramp of the room.
"I have changed my mind," he said, abruptly. "I had intended to marry you on any terms, merely because you suited my critical taste. But I believe that if I married you in that way I should beat you or kill you—or you would kill me. You are capable of anything. Love would square matters with us—nothing else."
"Then is the engagement broken?" asked Isabel, placidly. She did not sit down, but stood with a foot on the fender.
He relieved his feelings by kicking a stool across the room, then came and stood in front of her.
"Could you love me?" he demanded.
"I am not the village prophet."
"Have you made up your mind you will not marry me?"
"Oh yes—that."
"Because you couldn't love me, or because you are determined not to marry?"
"I won't feel and suffer and have my life torn to tatters when I can keep it whole! I had rather marry you without love, if I believed myself indispensable to your success in life."
"Much you know about it. I won't have you on any such terms."
"You are in no imminent danger. Heavens, what a wind! You must stay here to-night. If the spare room is too cold you can sleep on this divan."
"If that is a polite hint, I am ready to take it. I have been here long enough."
"Oh, but I mean it. I will not hear of you riding back in this pitch darkness. You would be more likely to go into the marsh than not. You can return to Rosewater so late to-morrow that Sister Ann will infer you have made a morning call."
"I shall return to-night. It was as dark when I came, and I am not altogether a fool. Neither is my horse."
"But you are not so familiar with the road," murmured Isabel, irrepressibly.
"That is the one decent thing you have said to me to-night. It is these sudden lapses into the wholly feminine that save me from despair. What a night for romance, and you and I sparring like two prize-fighters! That is as far as we have ever got. If you would ever let me know you—sometimes I have an odd fancy that I can see a lamp burning in your breast, and that if ever I got at it, and searched all the nooks and crannies of your strange nature by its light, I should love you as profoundly as it is possible for a man to love a woman."
"I am afraid it is only a taper in a cup of oil. At all events it is not a search-light, even to myself. I fancy people only seem complicated to others when they do not wholly understand themselves."
"Do you understand yourself?"
She shrugged her shoulders.
"Are you perfectly satisfied that you never could love me?"
She reddened and her sensitive mouth moved, but she brought her teeth together. "That has nothing to do with it."
"Everything!"
"Nothing!"
"Do you mean to tell me that you are literally contented with your life as it is?—living out here alone with nothing to do but read and look after those confounded chickens? You have the most romantic temperament I have ever met, and the way you gratify it would make an elephant laugh."
"I dream and think of the future."
"Future? You saw what that amounted to when you were in town—"
"I have shaken off the impression. It must have been that I had too much at once—and the purely frivolous, which offended my puritanical streak—"
"You don't like the Bohemian crowd any better."
"There are plenty of others. When I am ready I shall make the plunge and forbid myself to shrink from realities—"
"And the only people that will interest you will be those deep in public affairs. A woman to be a political power must be married. Otherwise she becomes the worst sort of feminine intriguer."
"I am interested in the women that are interested in the improvement of all things."
"And what is their ultimate aim, for heaven's sake? The franchise. Do you mean to tell me that you intend to become a Club woman? I had sooner you wrote a book."
"I have no intention of doing either—"
"In other words you are a plain dreamer, and a selfish one at that—"
"I try not to be selfish. I visit no ill-humor on any one—but you!—and I do good where I can. I should be more selfish if I ran the risk of making—some man unhappy in matrimony."
"Well, I'm sick of the subject. I came to say good-bye for a time. I'm off to the south to-morrow, and then east on business. I don't know when I shall be back—Oh, you can turn white—I can make you turn white!"
"What do you expect when you fire such a piece of news at me? What is behind this?"
"I have told you enough."
"Don't you trust me?"
"Oh, you can keep a secret. I don't know that I want to tell you."
"Very well."
"Oh, well, it would be beastly ungrateful in me not to. I have had a hint that, not having de-Americanized myself formally when I came of age, I may still be an American citizen. Judge Leslie has advised me to go to Washington and find out, and I am going. Are you really so interested?"
"Oh yes," said Isabel, softly. "I am interested! I have been afraid you might become discouraged and disgusted. Four more years would be a long time. Are you glad?"
"I don't know whether I am or not. When it comes to taking the oath of allegiance to the United States—if that is sprung on me in Washington—I shall feel more like taking the next steamer for England and making my oaths there. It is a little too sudden."
"All this hesitation and doubt are natural enough until you are settled down, and become too accustomed to the country to think of anything else—"
"I accept the balm. But I have less hesitation than you imagine—whatever the doubt and disgust. And I really believe the secret of my unrest is you! Good heavens!DoI love you—already—that would be the last straw!"
He was staring at her, and something in his face blinded her. She turned cold from head to foot; but she moved her glance to the baskets on the mantel-shelf, and replied, quietly:
"It will take some time for you to know whether you are in love again or not. You have seen me too constantly—barring the last month. I have become in many ways necessary to you. When you move to San Francisco, as I am convinced you will, and have many other resources——propinquity is all there is to ninth-tenths of what we call love——and then a little more kills it! Even if I were under the same delusion as you are I should not yield to it."
"I do love you," he said, as slowly and clearly as he was capable of enunciating. But his voice was hoarse, and she was sensible, without turning her head, that he was rigid. "It is different—quite different. I am willing to wait, however. I understand your hesitation. When I return—"
"Doubt of the reality of your—well—"
"Love," said Gwynne, grimly.
But Isabel could not bring herself to utter the word. "One way or the other, it does not alter my determination not to marry."
"Let that rest for a while. What I want to know is, could you—do you love me?"
"Oh, I don't know! I only know I don't want to. You have a tremendous influence—you have made every one else seem commonplace and uninteresting—I have resented very much your neglect this last month. I am willing to tell you all this—also, that I have dreamed, imagined myself in love with you. But I am convinced that if you let me alone I shall get over it."
"I have no intention of letting you alone."
She moved backward suddenly, and he laughed. "I wouldn't touch you with a forty-foot pole," he said, roughly, "unless you wanted me. That, perhaps, shows how far gone I am. But precious little you know about men. Or yourself. If I kissed you this minute you would succumb—"
He turned suddenly and was down the hall and had slammed the kitchen door behind him before she realized that she was actually alone, that he meant to leave the house. For a moment she clutched the edge of the mantel-piece in a passion of relief and regret. Then her femininity was swept aside by her hospitable instinct and vehement fear. She ran down the hall and into the kitchen. But even his rain garments and boots were gone. She opened the back door and peered out into the inky darkness. A light was moving in the stable. The rain was falling in a flood and the wind almost drove her backward. But she gathered up her gown and ran as fast as she could make headway to the stable. He was alone, and tightening his horse's saddle-girths by the light of a dark lantern. He gave her a bare glance and went on with his work.
"You must not go!" She was forced to scream. "You shall not. Why, you are mad. The marsh—such conventionality is ridiculous. I refuse to recognize it."
He rose to his feet and led his horse outside. But before he could vault to the saddle she caught his arm and dragged him backward. "You shall not go! You shall not!" She could hardly hear the sound of her voice. But she heard his, and there was nothing in either storm or darkness to blunt the sense of touch. For a moment she felt as if the whole had never been halved, as if they two were youth incarnate; and his arm was like vibrating iron along her back. She thought he was going to kiss her and dazedly moved her head towards him. But he cried into her ear instead:
"I stay if you marry me to-morrow."
"No, no, no!" Her will sprang through her lips, and before it was beaten down again she saw a spark of light engulfed in the dark, and stood alone in the storm, wondering if the world had turned over.
"Monday Morning."This is merely to announce that I survived the marsh, and that upon my return we will resume where we left off last night. E. G."
"Monday Morning.
"This is merely to announce that I survived the marsh, and that upon my return we will resume where we left off last night. E. G."
Isabel received this note early in the morning. That night she had accepted an invitation of some weeks' standing, and was established in the old Yorba mansion on Nob Hill. She anathematized her cowardice, but solitude was beyond her endurance for the moment. She had made up her mind that she would not think of Gwynne at all, much less give herself opportunities to miss and desire him; and her will, reinforced by conditions, was strong enough at times to persuade her that she hated him.
And there was nothing in the Trennahan household to try her nerves, everything to soothe them. Although the old buff walls and terrible carpets of Mrs. Yorba's day had gone long since and the house had been completely refurnished, it looked like a home, not a museum. Trennahan had taken his family to Europe many times, and they had brought back much that was rare and beautiful; but nothing stood out obtrusively, not even a color. They entertained constantly in a quiet way, and if Magdaléna was far too Spanish to seek out the clever of all sets, and Trennahan too indifferent, at least Isabel met daily such of thehaute noblesseas were not completely fossilized, and many men that interested her well enough. Moreover, as Mrs. Trennahan now had a grown-up daughter, she was obliged to take her to the cotillons and other routs given under the merciless supervision of the Leader. Isabel accompanied her as a matter of course, and when she declined an invitation her guest was at liberty to go with the ever faithful Mrs. Hofer.
For three weeks Isabel did little thinking. She went to the ranch once a week for the day only, spent an occasional hour with Lady Victoria. Even then she was barely reminded of Gwynne. She was busy during every moment while in the country, and her relative was no more communicative than of yore. Only once did Victoria remark casually, that, by a sort of poetic justice, Gwynne was detained in the south with a sprained ankle, and was hurling maledictions at fate from the classic shades of Santa Barbara. Isabel grudgingly admired the restraint with which he denied himself the possible solace of correspondence with herself, and it crossed her mind once or twice that the young man might have the understanding of women that proceeded from instinct, if not from study. But she deliberately dismissed him, and although his name was frequently mentioned in her presence, she soon ceased to turn cold, and forced him to flit with a hundred others across the surface of her mind.
For the first time in her life she flirted desperately, and with others besides young Hofer. She was quite wickedly indifferent to consequences, and was inspired to woo the fickle goddess of popularity. The peace and charm and intellectual relief of the Trennahan home did much to modify her shrinking from realities, and the effort to please, and the abandonment to the purely frivolous instincts of youth, were the only aides her beauty needed to achieve that popularity she had abstractly desired the night Gwynne brought her the stars. She no longer desired it at all, but she disguised this fact, and reaped the reward.
Moreover, although her analytical faculty slept in the darkest wing of her brain, the mere fact that she was stormily loved and desired by a man to whom she was powerfully attracted, that for a moment she had been awake and eager in his embrace, had warmed her blood and given her an insolent magnetism that she had never possessed before.
Through Mr. Colton she received a formal request from Gwynne to dedicate the Otis Building—named in honor of the creator of the family fortunes—on the day the last of the foundation-stones was laid. In company with half a hundred other young people in automobiles, she astonished South of Market Street, one beautiful spring day—the spring was making desperate assaults upon the lingering winter—and amidst much mock solemnity and many cheers, deposited into the chiselled crypt of one of the great concrete blocks upon which the building would rest, a strong-box containing three of Concha Argüello's Baja California pearls, several family daguerreotypes, and the original deed of sale which had transferred the property from the city to the first James Otis. When the ceremony was over the contractor shook hands with her approvingly.
"That's as good a place as any for a deed of sale in this here town," he remarked. "For no shake will ever budge them concrete pillars. They're down to bed-rock. And no fire'll ever crack them, neither. We'll begin on the steel frame to-morrow, and you must come down occasionally and cheer us up. It'll be worth it. The Otis's goin' to be the cock o' the walk. Better make up your mind to have them terra-cotta facings."
"Oh, they would not raise the rents, and would hardly be appreciated by their present neighbors," said Isabel, lightly. "I am going to send you a bottle of champagne to-night, and you must drink to the health of The Otis."
The man promised fervently that he would, and then after ordering beer from a neighboring saloon for the workmen, Isabel and her party motored out to the beach beyond the Cliff House, where a number of old street-cars had been converted into bath-houses, and disported themselves in the waves until it was time to rush home and make ready for the Mardi Gras ball.
This yearly function was given in the Institute of Art on Nob Hill, the wooden Gothic mansion with bow-windows, erected in the Eighties by a railroad millionaire who had barely survived his nimble victorious assault upon Fortune. His widow had presented his "monument" to Art, and now its graceful flimsy walls housed much that was valuable in canvas and marble, and more that was worthless. Once a year, on the eve of Lent, Society gave a Mardi Gras ball, and such of the artists as were known to the elect decorated the rooms, and contributed certain surprises. This year, partly out of compliment to the Leader and Miss Otis, partly because the old Spanish spirit had been roaming through its ancient haunts of late, the interior of the mansion was hung with red and yellow. Isabel, in full Spanish costume, led the grand march with young Hofer, who was dressed as a toreador, and supported the jeers of his friends in the gallery with what fortitude he could summon: he was plump and pink and golden. The great room, surrounded with boxes draped with the colors of Spain and filled with women splendidly dressed and jewelled, was very gay and inspiring, and the masques flung confetti and had a squib for everybody with a salient characteristic. When the march finished, Isabel, who wore a half-mask of black satin, and her hair in two long braids plaited with gold tinsel, danced a Spanish dance by herself, alternating tambourine and castanets. She had practised it during the past week with a professional, and she gave it with all the graceful sexless abandon of those California girls, who, a hundred years before that night, were dancing out at the Presidio and Mission. She was the success of the evening as she had purposed to be, and went home with two proposals to her credit, and as gratified a vanity as ever titillated the nerves of an ambitious and heartless young flirt. It was not the first time that Isabel had deliberately elected to play a rôle and achieved so signal a triumph that she was beset with the doubt if she had not but just discovered herself. As she fell asleep in the dawn of Lent it was with the somewhat cynical reflection that perhaps she could make quite as great a success of the rôle of the statesman's wife were she to essay it.
The roads were still in too muddy and broken a condition for the long-projected automobile trip, and the Trennahans had decided to hire a special car and journey to Mexico, spending some time in Southern California. They urged Isabel to go with them, but she was sure that she had had all the respite she needed, nor would she neglect her chickens any longer. In truth she said good-bye to the party, which included not only Lady Victoria, but several other congenial spirits, with a considerable equanimity. She was suddenly tired of them all and glad to go back to her solitudes.
Although she did not return with that exuberance of joy, which, upon former occasions had made her feel like a long-prisoned nymph restored to her native woodland, still she was more than content to be at home again, and sat on her veranda until darkness closed the long evening. Every trace of the winter's madness had vanished. The marsh was high and red above the fallen waters, the hills were green, the trees budding, wild flowers were beginning to show their heads. The scene, until the last ray of twilight had gone, leaving that dark formlessness of a California night with its horrid suggestion, was almost as peaceful as England.
For several days Isabel, from reaction after weeks of incessant gayety, and the heaviness of early spring, was too languid to find even her Leghorns interesting. She slept late, yawned through the day; and never had her hammock—swung on the porch at the beginning of spring—possessed so recurrent an attraction. At the same time she was conscious, under the physical inertia which had brought her mind to a standstill, that she avoided Rosewater lest she should be forced to talk of Gwynne. He was still in Santa Barbara, and it was likely that he would be persuaded to go with the Trennahans to Mexico. There was time enough to seek his passport, and Isabel could well imagine that his impatience was not uncontrollable. No doubt he understood by this time that he could expect no change in her, if indeed he had not dismissed the matter from his mind.
She was rudely shaken out of her apathy by a long telegram from him, dated at El Paso:
"I have come this far with the Trennahans. Go on to Washington to-day. Expect me any time now. But should I be detained will you go over to the ranch occasionally? Use old power of attorney should occasion arise. Glad you made the running you wanted at last. Better order terra-cotta facings for The Otis. Am told that two other buildings will go up shortly in neighborhood. Quite fit again. E. G."
"I have come this far with the Trennahans. Go on to Washington to-day. Expect me any time now. But should I be detained will you go over to the ranch occasionally? Use old power of attorney should occasion arise. Glad you made the running you wanted at last. Better order terra-cotta facings for The Otis. Am told that two other buildings will go up shortly in neighborhood. Quite fit again. E. G."
The delight and relief this telegram induced, the subtle sensation of hope and flattery, not only routed torpidity, but lashed her into such a state of fury that she ran up to her bedroom and indulged in an attack of nerves. When it was over she faced the truth with the unshrinking clarity of vision she could summon at will. But if she was not as astonished as she thought she ought to be, she was no less angry, not only with herself, but with life for playing her such a trick. Less than ever did she want to marry, and cease to be wholly herself, to run the risk of disillusionment and weariness, and that ultimate philosophy which was no compensation for the atrophy and death of imagination. But no less did she turn appalled from the thought of a future without Gwynne. All her old vague plans were suddenly formless, and she felt that if she even faced the prospect of regarding the shifting beauties of the Rosewater marsh for the rest of her life, she would hate nature as much as she now hated her treacherous self. And none could divine better than she, that, present or dismissed, when a man has conquered a woman's invisible and indefensible part she might as well give him the rest. He is in control. She has lost her freedom for ever. So strong was the feeling of mental possession that Isabel glanced uneasily about the room, half-expecting to see the soul of Gwynne; wondering inconsequently if it would descend to notice that her eyes were red. But she vowed passionately that she would not marry him. If she had to be unhappy, far better unhappy alone and free, with some of her illusions undispelled. She had seen no married happiness that she envied, even where there was a fine measure of love and philosophy. Even Anabel had come to her one day in town, looking rather strained and worn, and, in the seclusion of Isabel's bedroom, had confessed that the constant exactions of a husband, three children, and migratory servants "got on her nerves," and made her long for a change of any sort. "And there are so many little odd jobs, in a house full of children," she had added, with a sigh. "And they recur every day. You can no more get away from them than from your three meals; I never really have a moment I can call my own. Of course I am perfectly happy, but I do wish Tom were not in politics and would take me to Europe for a few years."
And if Anabel was not happy—wholly happy—with her supreme capacity for the domestic life, how could she hope to endure the yoke? She with her impossible ideals and theories? Not that they were impossible; but to anticipate, in this world, the plane upon which the more highly endowed natures dared to hope they were to dwell in the next, absolute freedom was necessary. Isabel's theory of life—for women of her make—had not altered a whit, but the beckoning finger had lost its vigor. That left her with no material out of which to model a future for this plane—which, of course, was another triumph to the credit of the race.
She knew that Gwynne had conquered, that she had really loved him, as soon as he had ceased to play upon her maternal instincts. She had casually assumed at the time that her interest in him was decreasing, but in this day of retrospect, she realized keenly that it had marked the opening of a new chapter. This was, perhaps, the most signal of Gwynne's victories, for the maternal tenderness for man means maternal dominance, a cool sense of superiority. Isabel was so conscious of Gwynne's mastery that she longed to kick him as she blushed to recall she had done once before. She rubbed her arms instinctively, as if she still felt the furious pressure of his fingers, and when the memory of another sort of pressure abruptly presented itself she hurreedly bathed her eyes and went out on her horse.
For a week she was so moody and irascible that Abraham twice gave warning, Old Mac artfully took to his bed with rheumatism, and only the inexcitable Chuma was unconcerned. She rode her horse nearly to death, snubbed Anabel—whose children were down with the measles—over the telephone, and even boxed the ears of a dilatory hen. At the end of the week a sudden appreciation of her likeness to a cross old maid frightened her, and time and the weather completed the cure. Her ill-humor, which had scourged through every avenue of her being, took itself off so completely that it seemed to announce it had had enough of her and would return no more.
And the spring came with a rush. The hills burst into buttercups, "blue eyes," yellow and purple lupins, the heavy pungent gold-red poppy. The young green of weeping willows and pepper-trees looked indescribably delicate against the hard blue sky. Rosewater was a great park, all her little squares and gardens, and long rambling streets, set thick with camellias, roses, orange-trees heavy with fruit, immense acacia-trees loaded with fragrant yellow powdery blossoms. Main Street was clean again, and so were the farmers and their teams at the hitching-rails; the girls were beginning to wear white at church on Sunday, and to walk about without their hats. The great valley was as green as the hills, save where the earth had been turned, and one or two almond orchards were so pink they could be seen a mile away. It was spring in all its glory, without a taint of summer's heat, or a lingering chill of winter.
In Isabel's garden were many old Castilian rose bushes, that for fifty years had covered themselves pink with the uninterrupted lustiness of youth; and their penetrating, yet chaste and elusive fragrance, combined with the rich heavy perfume of the acacia-tree beside the house, would have inspired a distiller and blender of scents. The birds sang as if possessed of a new message; and several of Isabel's prize roosters, tired of their old harems, flew over the wire-fences and strutted off in search of adventure, proclaiming their route by loud and boastful clamor. When they were captured by the unsympathetic Abe and restored to their excited ladies, they flew at and smacked them soundly, then tossed back their red combs and crowed with all their might: a pæan to the ever conquering male.
There were other flowers besides Castilian roses in Isabel's garden, haphazardly set out and cared for, but the more riotous and luxuriant for that. And all around her, save on the Leghorns' hills, was the gay delicate tapestry of the wild flowers. The marsh glittered like bronze in the sunlight. In the late afternoon it was as violet as the hills. In the evening afterglows it swam in as many colors as the Roman Campagna. At this hour the sky was often as pink as the almond orchards, melting above into a blue light but intense; while everything in its glow, the tall trees on the distant mountains, and the picturesque irregularities of the marsh-lands, seemed to lift up their heads and drink in the beauty until Isabel expected to see them reel.
And the pagan intoxication of spring took as complete a possession of her. She sat under the long drooping yellow sprays of her acacia-tree, her lap full of the pink Castilian roses, and dreamed. No one could help being in love in the spring, she concluded, given a concrete inspiration; and far be it from any creature so close to nature as herself to attempt to stem that insidious musical scented tide. It was possible that Gwynne would not return, or returning, would flout her; she hardly cared. In fact so steeped was she in the pleasures of merely loving, in a sweet if somewhat halcyon passion, that she had no wish that the mood should be dispelled; and felt that she could ask nothing more than to spend the rest of her mortal life with a beautiful memory—like the aunt whose dust lay over the mountain in the convent yard. She knew that if Gwynne returned and demanded her, she should be tempted to marry him—she never went so far as to promise either him or herself the rounded chapter; but one of the strongest instincts of her nature was to squeeze the passing moment dry, jealously drink every drop of its juice. She had no intention of tormenting herself with problematical futures. Futures took care of themselves, anyhow.
She was subconciously aware that she could conceive and portray a more extreme phase of emotion than this present evolution, but she deliberately avoided the phantasm. She was utterly, ideally, absurdly happy. Not for a moment did she desire the raw material, the concrete substance, to which all dreams owe their being. The wild pagan gladness of the wood-nymph, rejoicing in her freedom from the worries of common mortals, and in the vision of an undefined but absolute happiness, was enough for her. Sometimes, when walking in the early morning, far into the hills, and away from human eyes, she let the light electric breezes intoxicate her, and danced as she walked, or sang; nor, indeed, was she above whistling. She often spent the evening hours on the marsh, those long twilights that are so like England's; remaining, sometimes, as late into the night as the tide would permit, enjoying the contrast of the lonely desolate menacing landscape with the utter beauty of the day. She avoided San Francisco and Rosewater, but the extraordinary effervescence within her demanded an outlet of a sort, and she was so radiant to her small staff that they looked upon her with awe. She had actually a fortnight of bliss, and hoped that nothing might happen to disturb it for ever and ever. But no one's world has ever yet stood still.
One day Tom Colton's hoarse voice over the telephone begged her to "come at once." She was on her horse in ten minutes, in Rosewater in half an hour. There were groups of people in the street near the younger Coltons' house, the front door was open, several members of the family were passing in and out. As she entered the garden she saw one of them tie a knot of white ribbon to the bell knob.
Her first impulse was to run. She felt that rather would she hear of Gwynne's death than face Anabel in her maternal agony. But she set her teeth and went on, far more frightened than sympathetic. The people that overflowed the hall and parlor were all crying, but nodded to her, and Tom Colton, haggard and white, appeared at the head of the stair and beckoned. He pointed to the door of his wife's bedroom, as she ascended, and she went forward hastily and entered without knocking. Anabel was standing on the threshold of the door that led into the nursery. Her face was white and wild, but she had not been crying.
"Isabel!" she exclaimed, in loud astonished voice, "my baby is dead! My baby is dead!"
Then Isabel, greatly to her own surprise, dropped into a chair and burst into vehement tears. For the moment the child was hers, she suffered pangs of maternal bereavement that seemed to tear her breast and twist her heart. But there was a terrible silence in those two rooms, and in a few moments it chilled and calmed her. She looked up to see Anabel staring at her with blank expanded eyes.
"What are you crying for? You?" demanded the young mother. "I never saw you cry before. And it's not your baby."
"I know it," said Isabel, humbly. "I suppose it is because I am so sorry for you. I am—terribly."
"I never thought you had that much feeling," said Anabel, dully. "You were always the strong one. Come and see my baby."
Isabel rose, trembling and unnerved, but no longer shrinking, and followed Anabel into the nursery, where the child, looking like a little wax-work, lay in its crib.
"She is dead!" said Anabel, in the same astonished indignant voice. "My baby!" She caught Isabel's arm and shook it violently. "It isn't true," she commanded. "Say it is not. How can it be? She spoke and laughed only two hours ago. The relapse was nothing. The doctor said so. That is not my baby." And then her brain stopped for a moment, and Isabel carried her into the other room.
She remained with her until after the funeral. Anabel, when she recovered her senses, cried hopelessly for hours, but gradually controlled herself and rose and went about her affairs with a stern calm. It was her first trouble, but not for nothing had she been given a square jaw and a sturdy little figure. She was filled with dumb protest, and laid away her bright careless youth in the child's coffin, but she accepted the inevitable.
Mr. and Mrs. Leslie were in the south when the baby died, but arrived for the funeral. Until then Anabel clung to her friend, and so did young Colton, who was far more demoralized than his wife. He did not brush his hair, nor go to bed, but wandered about the house like a bewildered spirit, occasionally smiting his hands together, or embracing the other two children convulsively. He had no support to offer his wife, and Isabel was glad to stay with the brave stricken little creature; but when Mrs. Leslie arrived she felt herself superfluous and returned home.
She had had little time to think of Gwynne, but it had crossed her mind that she would accept this heartrending episode, in which she had been called upon to play an intimate part, as but another warning; one, moreover, that would stand its ground did she attempt to force it aside. But Gwynne entered and filled her dispossessed mind the moment she sat down under her acacia-tree, which was perhaps an hour after her return home. But this time her dreams did not flow upon a smooth golden scented tide. She searched the accumulated newspapers for mention of him in the despatches, wept stormily at his neglect, tormented herself with the belief that Julia Kaye was in Washington; at all events that he had discovered that his love for herself was but one more passing fancy, born of propinquity.
She saw mention of him. Twice he had dined at the White House, and his name was frequently in the list of guests at other dinners and functions. He was not visiting at the British Embassy, and Isabel drew her only comfort from the fact: he might be enjoying himself too much to think of her, but his purpose was unaltered, or he certainly would be the guest of a man whom she knew to be his friend: Gwynne was the last man to embarrass anybody, and if the ambassador had enemies they would find his connivance at the Americanization of a useful British peer vastly to his own discredit.
Isabel enjoyed no further peace of mind. The flames of uncertainty devoured her. The worst she could endure, but suspense spurred her always ardent imagination to such appalling feats that she barely ate or slept. But she was far too high-handed to suffer actively for long. She buried her pride in one of her many crypts, summoned her feminine craft, and wrote Gwynne a letter. It began in the brief and business-like manner the iniquities of their builders demanded—they were on strike—and her facile pen flowed on with various other items of information, more or less unpleasant. Mr. Clink, the lessee of Mountain House, had absconded with all the furniture, including the doors and windows, and she hesitated to refurnish, not knowing if Gwynne would return in time for the salmon-fishing. Nor had she been able to find another tenant, although she had spent two days in the mountains. She thought it might be a good place for a sanitarium, if he were inclined to form a company. Some sulphur springs had recently bubbled out of the ground near the house, which would add to the value of the property; but she must confess that they ruined the place for her. She distrusted the sudden advent of mineral waters; one never knew what was coming next. Then, after more cheering, but equally practical information, she rambled off into gossip, told the sad story of the Coltons' bereavement, and asked him a few friendly questions about himself. Of course he had not succeeded in getting his passport or he would be home—unless, to be sure, the Britisher was too strong in him after all, and he would not return. This alternative she contemplated with a lively regret, for she had had no one to talk to since he left, and so much business sat heavily on her shoulders. Then she announced herself his affectionate cousin; and it was not until the letter was gone, and quite a day of self-gratulation at her own adroitness, that it suddenly occurred to her that Gwynne had made up his mind that the first letter should come from her. For a few moments she was furious, then concluded that she did not care; she wanted to hear from him on any terms. She counted the days, intending finally to count the hours and minutes; but this agreeably breathless task came to an abrupt end at the close of the sixth day. Gwynne answered by telegraph. He thanked her for her interesting and more than welcome letter. He was well, and bored, and hoping daily to settle his affairs and start for home. In any case he should have returned to California: he was surprised at her doubts. She was not to bother further about his affairs out there. He had telegraphed to the contractor that he could wait as long as the strikers. He added that he longed for California.
Isabel wondered if he had not dared to trust himself in a letter, finally concluded that this was the secret of the long telegram, dismissed her apprehensions, and, with a soothed but by no means tranquil imagination, yielded herself up again to dreams and the spring.
It was close upon the middle of April when Gwynne left the train a mile from Lumalitas, and, being unheralded, walked across the fields to his house. He had intended to get off at Rosewater, hire the fastest horse in town, and ride out to Old Inn; but he had been seized with doubt and diffidence, and while he was still turning hot and cold the train moved out of the station. It was now nearly ten weeks since he had seen Isabel, and during that time he had received one letter from her. This letter he had read and reread until its contents were meaningless; and he was still in doubt as to what might lurk between the lines. He was reasonably sure that he had forced her to write, but whether mere pique and curiosity had been his aides, he was far from being able to determine. She had been right in assuming that he dared not trust himself to the tempting privacy of the letter. He had no idea how he stood, and would not run the risk of making a fool of himself; not until he was face to face with her could he pretend to decide upon any course of action. But he had been tormented for ten weeks as he had never expected to be tormented by any woman. Although he still assured himself that he intended to marry her, the riot in his mind and blood bred distrust of himself and evoked terrible images of Isabel at the altar with another. He should hate to the day of his death the beautiful old town of Santa Barbara, where he had been without any sort of refuge from his thoughts; and in Washington, although he had managed to occupy his mind and time profitably, there were still hours which he must spend alone, and he had dreaded them.
And he was beset by other doubts than those of the mere lover. He was conscious that in these weeks of absence and longing, he had idealized Isabel, until the being he dwelt with in fancy was more goddess than woman. He knew many sides of her, but much had eluded him, even after he began to study her. That she was gifted in large measure with what the Americans so aptly termed cussedness he had good reason to know; and whether this very definite characteristic so far controlled her nature as to hold her nobler qualities in durance——or were there nobler qualities? She had brain and common-sense; both attributes had compelled his respect long since. And she had character and pride—loyalty and independence. He had had glimpses of what he would unhesitatingly have accepted as heart and passion had he not known himself to be dazzled by her beauty and wilful powers of fascination. That she was wholly feminine, at least, he was convinced; she was too often absurdly so to keep up, with any one that saw her constantly, the fiction of the sexless philosopher. The very devil in her was of the unmistakable feminine kidney. All this gave him hope, and he knew, that when caprice permitted, she would be unrivalled as a companion. Intellectually, at least, there was no thought of his she could not share and appreciate; and her sense of humor and her feminine perversities would always delight him. If only there were depths beneath. The longings of the spirit are always formless, vaguely worded, a little shamefaced. Gwynne hardly knew what was the great extreme he wanted in his wife, but he knew that if he did not find it he should be miserable. He was by no means the young man that had fallen blindly in love with Julia Kaye. He had had little time for introspection, for intimate knowledge of himself, in those days.
The spring was invented to remind men what mere mortals they are. Gwynne would have felt restless and disinclined for law and politics this morning had he never seen Isabel Otis. Every lark in the great valley was singing madly. Blue birds, yellow birds, sat on the fences and carolled at each other as if the world were always May. The very earth seemed to have sprouted into color. He had never imagined wild flowers by the billion, nor such a harmonious variety of color. The fields were green, the cherries, black and red and white, glistening and luscious, were ready for picking in his orchards. As he approached his house, he saw that all the white oaks, bare in winter, were in leaf; large soft young green leaves, that almost hid the pendent sad green moss. The air was warm and light, the sky so blue it seemed to laugh with a promise of eternal good things. The whole land breathed hope, and youth, and allurement to every delight, of which she alone possessed the store. He was soon to learn what a liar she was, but although it was many a long day before he took note of any phase of nature again, save her weather, he had an elusive presentiment that he should never cease to be grateful for that moment of quick unreasoning exultation in his youth and manhood, and in the mere joy of life.
He was not surprised, as he turned the corner of the veranda, to find Imura Kisaburo Hinamoto sitting with his feet on the railing, a cigarette in his mouth, and a volume, issued by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, on his knee. But as the servant saw the master he rose promptly to his feet, extinguished the cigarette with his fingers, and stood in an attitude of extreme respect. He even smiled, but not propitiatingly; it was almost patent that the return of his chance superior was welcome.
Gwynne nodded. "Glad to see that you still improve your mind," he observed. "Tell Carlos to hitch up and go for my luggage: I left it at the station." He looked at his watch. It was half-past eleven. He hesitated a moment, then decided to postpone his visit to Isabel again. He did not feel in the mood to sit down and eat with her. "My horse at two o'clock," he added. And the Jap disappeared.
Gwynne went into the kitchen, and Mariana, who was peeling onions for anolla podrida, screamed and embraced him.
"No could help," she said, philosophically. "Very glad, señor, very glad."
Gwynne was not in the humor to repulse anybody, and assured her that she really made him feel that he had returned to his home. Several of her tribe were in the kitchen and looked expectant. He informed them that he had a box of New York sweets in his trunk, and retreated.
On the veranda he sat down facing his mountain, which like the rest of the world was a mass of delicate color, where it was not merely green, and seemed to move gently under the pink shimmering haze. Beyond was the blue crouching mass of the old volcano. "The eternal hills" was a phrase that never occurred to him when he watched these mountains, always veiled under a colored and moving haze. They looked far more likely to pull up their feet and walk off. But Gwynne, although the border beneath his veranda was full of sweet scents, and the roses on the pillars hung about him, and the air was a soft caressing tide, was no longer concerned with nature. He was nervous and full of doubt, of uneasy anticipation that he would not appear to advantage at three o'clock that afternoon. He knew that if he were really panic-stricken and attempted to carry it off in the masterful manner, she would laugh in his face. If he could work himself up to the attitude, well and good. At the same time he was vaguely conscious that this period of alternate hope and fear, of cold fits and hot, would one day be sweet in the retrospect, and regretted with some sadness; an episode in the lover's progress gone beyond recall.
There was a sound of wheels on the county road, then on his own property. He wondered at the unusual dispatch of his Carlos, but realized in a moment that a buggy was approaching, not a wagon. Then there was a light slouching step on the veranda, and he rose to greet Tom Colton.
"By Jove, old chap, I'm glad to see you," he began, and thankful that he had written his condolences; but he paused abruptly. Colton ignored the outstretched hand.
"So you've got your passport?" he said. And his ingenuous blue eyes were full of a hard antagonism.
"Yes," said Gwynne. "I should have told you in a day or two. How did you find out?" he added, curiously. "I took my oath before the passport clerk in the innermost recess of the State Department."
"There's not much I don't find out. Only, I got wind of this a little too late. So did some others, or you might have hung round Washington for the next four years. Do you call it square not to have told me of this before you left?"
"I saw no obligation to take you into my confidence. In the first place the result of my pilgrimage was very doubtful, and in the second you would have done all you could to balk me. When have I given you reason to write me down an ass?"
"You are too damned clever," muttered Colton. "Too clever by half. Much better for you if you had stayed where you were. You had no enemies when you left, but now, let me tell you, you've got a bunch that it will take more than your cleverness to handle."
"They can do their worst. I thought that all I needed was hard work, but I fancy that what I missed most was the stimulus of enemies."
"Well, you've got it all right."
Somewhat to the host's surprise he suddenly seated himself and tipped back his chair. Gwynne remained standing, leaning against a pillar, his hands in his pockets. Colton surveyed him frankly. His eyes were still hard and he was very angry, but he saw no reason why he should be uncomfortable, and although he could disguise his feelings when he chose, he knew that here it was safe to allow himself the luxury of frankness. He was the more annoyed, as what friendship he was capable of he had given to Gwynne. That would not have stayed hand or foot a moment, were his path in the least obstructed, but he regretted that they had come to an issue so early in the game. Indeed, he had hoped to manipulate Gwynne's destinies so subtly that they would be politically bound for life, with himself always a length ahead. It was true that once or twice he had felt a misgiving that the Englishman, with all his aristocratic disdain for devious ways, might match him and win, but the shock of this early outwitting had been none the less severe.
"Did you have a hard time getting it?" he demanded.
"Rather. Never heard so much palaver in my life."
"Well, I wish there had been more. I think I have at least the right to ask what you intend to do next."
"Return to Judge Leslie's office to-morrow—for the matter of that, I have read a good deal since I left. In September I shall have been a year in the State, and of course I can vote. I am not so sure that I shall."
"Yes! That is all, I suppose?"
"For the present. You are too good a politician to fancy that American citizenship has invested me with a halo. Except to a hundred odd farmers, Rosewater, a small group in San Francisco, and a party boss or two, I am unknown. No doubt I shall be several years achieving sufficient prominence either to run for office, or to accomplish anything whatever—outside of Rosewater. So far as I can see, this immediate citizenship has effected two results only: I am now in a position to take advantage of any political change that may develop, instead of sowing for another to reap—and—"
He hesitated, and Colton shot him a keen glance. "It has made a change in you, I guess. I noticed that the minute I laid eyes on you. If anything was needed to make me madder, it was that."
"Yes—I am changed. That is to say, I am poised. In spite of the determination to absorb Americanism with every pore, there was always the lurking doubt that it wouldn't do; that some day I should make a bolt for England. Now the matter is settled forever. I not only am an American but always have been. The highest legal opinion in the country was called in, and that was what finally decided the question. I accepted it as literally as the others did, and in so doing I relegated my English life to the episodical backwaters: among my adventures in India and Africa. I fancy that if England came to a death struggle in my time, and every man counted, I should fight for her. I certainly never should fight against her. But it is a profound relief to me that I am not throwing her over, that we have no legitimate right to each other. I fancy that that, too, demoralized me a bit."
"How did you feel when you took that oath?" asked Colton, more and more curious, almost forgetting his grievance. "It's a kind of solemn oath. I've had a sort of chill when I've heard it taken once or twice."
"There could hardly be a more solemn oath. I don't know that it gave me a chill, but I certainly read it over several times before I took it. And I took it without any reservations."
"Did you feel an American the moment you took it?"
"Yes—I did. That is to say I felt a certain buoyancy. The die was cast. There could be no more hesitation and doubt. My new life had actually begun."
"It's begun, all right. Jiminy, but you'll have a tough time. They're onto you now. You haven't the ghost of a chance to make a move they won't see before your hand is off the board."
Gwynne replied with even more than his usual fluency.
"Yes," replied Colton, with a sigh. "I guess that's where we'll all bring up. But meanwhile? Are you going to throw me over?"
"It will depend upon yourself. I have no objection to confide to you such plans as I have been able to formulate. Judge Leslie advised me to play about in society, in Washington, but I was in no humor for anything of the sort. I had uncommon opportunities to study men and conditions, and I took full advantage of them. I doubt if I shall vote until the next Presidential election. Then, if an independent party of consequence has not been formed, and I see no prospect of working up one in this State, I shall vote the Democratic ticket. As things stand at present, it is the less of two evils, and would at least accomplish a reduction of the tariff, and something towards a redistribution of wealth. I haven't the least doubt that the Democrats, if they get in—unless they have a really good man up their sleeve—will abuse their power quite as much as the Republicans have done; but that will take some time; and meanwhile a new party is sure to grow up, for the best men in the country are thoroughly roused. There's no doubt on that point—and it is a point you would do well to remember. There have been chapters before in the world's history when right has paid."
"For a while," said Colton, dubiously. "The point is now that you are likely to join the Democrats."
"To vote with them. Theirs are the soundest principles. I stick to that point."
"I don't question it. I only wish elections weren't two years off; I'd like to get to work." He took a bag of peanuts from his pocket and began to munch thoughtfully. "But you are turning me off. What do you mean exactly?"
"I shall have nothing to do with the machine. I shall speak and make propaganda, that is all. My object is not so much to get the Democrats in as the Republicans out. I shall do nothing to split the Democratic party—and play a losing game—unless a really great movement should rise, gather strength, and sweep the country. It is on the cards that there will be such a movement, and I throw myself into it the moment I am persuaded the split will not work to the advantage of the Republicans."