XXI
Early in the forenoon he started northward with the Brothertons and Estenegas. Reinaldo kissed him on both cheeks, much to his embarrassment; but Prudencia accepted his farewells with chilling dignity, and did not invite him to return.
The Rancho de los Pinos was some ten miles from Monterey. Behind the house was a pine forest whose outposts were scattered along the edge of the Pacific; facing it were some eight thousand acres of rolling land, cut with willowed creeks, studded with groves of oaks, dazzling, at this season, with the gold of June. Thousands of cattle wandered about in languid content; the air lay soft and heavy on unquiet pulses.
The Brothertons and their guests “horse-backed” in the morning, but spent the greater part of the day in the hammocks swung across the long cool corridors. After supper, they rambled through the woods, sometimes as far as the ocean, where they sat on the rocks until midnight. The conversation rarely wandered from politics; for it was the summer of 1860, and the approaching national earthquake rumbled loudly. Nevertheless, life on the Rancho de los Pinos was less in touch with the world than any part of the strange new land which Thorpe had visited; and he hardly felt an impulse to speed the lagging moments. Doña Eustaquia, who had been one of the very pulses of the old régime, still beat with loud and undiminished vigour; but Chonita was very restful, and the country enfolded one with a large sleepy content. He received nothing from Nina Randolph, but her father wrote once or twice saying that she was well, but taking little interest in the summer gaieties.
On the first of July, he took the boat from Monterey to San José. There he was the guest of Don Tiburcio Castro for a few days, and attended a bull fight, a race at which the men bet the very clothes off their backs, a religious festival, and three balls; then took the stage which passed Redwoods on its way to San Francisco. It was a ride of thirty miles under a blistering sun, through dust twelve inches deep which the heavy hoofs of the horses and the wheels of the lumbering coach tossed ten feet in the air, half smothering the inside passengers, and coating those on top within and without. Thorpe had secured the seat by the driver, thinking to forget the physical discomforts in the scenery. But the tame prettiness of the valley was obliterated by the shifting wall of dust about the stage; and Thorpe closed his eyes, and resigned himself to misery. Even the driver would not talk, beyond observing that it was “the goldarndest hottest day he’d ever knowed, and that was saying a darned sight, you bet!” It was late in the afternoon when the stage pulled up at the “hotel” of a little village.
“That there’s Redwoods,” said the driver, pointing with his whip toward a mass of trees on rising ground. “Evenin’. I wish I wuz you.”
The hotel seemed principally saloon; but the proprietor, who was chewing vigorously, told Thorpe he guessed he could accommodate him, and led him to a small room whose very walls were crackling with the heat. Thorpe distinctly saw the fleas jumping on the bare boards, and shuddered.
“Can I have a bath?” he asked.
“A what?”
“A bath.”
“Oh!—we don’t pronounce it that way in these parts. And bath-tubs is a luxury you’ll have to go to ’Frisco for, I guess.”
“Hav’n’t you any sort of a tub you could bring me? I have a call to pay, and I must clean up.”
“Perhaps the ole woman’d let you have one of her wash-tubs. I’ll ask her.”
“Do. And I should like supper as soon after as possible.”
The old woman contributed the tub. It leaked, and it was redolent of coarse soap and the indigo that escapes from overalls. Thorpe got rid of his dust; but the smells, and the hot room, and the cloud of dust that sprang back from his clothes as he shook them out of the window, improved neither his aching head nor his temper. To make matters worse, the steak for his supper was fried, the potatoes were swimming in grease, the butter was rancid, and the piecrust hung down with its own weight. He ate what little of this typical repast he could in a close low room, crowded with men in their shirt-sleeves, who expectorated freely, mopped their faces and necks with their napkins, and smelt. The flies swarmed, a million strong, and invaded the very plates; a previous battalion lay, gasping or dead, on the tables, some overcome by the heat, others by the sharp assaults of angry napkins. When Thorpe left the room, he had half made up his mind not to call on Nina Randolph that evening; he felt in anything but a loverlike mood. Moreover, such an introduction to a reunion was grotesque; but after he had smoked his cigar in the open air, he felt better, concluded not to be a romantic ass, and started for the house.
He climbed the dusty road toward the two tall redwoods (the only ones in the valley) that gave her home its name, then turned into a long cool avenue. Beside it ran a creek, dry already, its sides thick with fragrant shrubs. So closely planted was the avenue that he did not catch a glimpse of the house until he came suddenly upon it; then he paused a moment, regarding it with pleasure. It looked like a fairy castle, so light and delicate and mediæval of structure was it. The yellow plaster of its walls, the vivid bloom of the terrace on which it stood, were plainly visible in the moonlight. The dark mountains, covered with their redwood forests, seemed almost directly behind, although they were twenty miles away. Thorpe was glad he had come. The hideous afternoon and evening slipped out of his thought.
The front doors were open. Cochrane was walking up and down the hall, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent. He looked like a man who was listlessly awaiting a summons.
Light streamed from open windows to the verandah on the right of the house. Thorpe, conceiving that Nina was there, determined to look upon her for a moment unobserved. He skirted the house, and heard Nina’s voice. To command a view of the interior, he must reach the verandah. He mounted the steps softly, but other sounds rose high above his footfalls as he walked toward the window. A peal of coarse laughter burst forth. The light swept obliquely across the verandah; he stood in the shadows just beyond it, and looked into the room.
Nina sat in a corner, her elbows on her knees, her eyes fixed on the floor. Her black dress was destitute of any feminine device. Mrs. Randolph and Mrs. Reinhardt sat on opposite sides of a table. Between them was a steaming bowl of punch. There were two unopened brandy-bottles on the table. The faces of both women were flushed, and their hair was disordered.
“Tha’t a fool, Nina,” remarked Mrs. Randolph, in a remarkably steady tone. “Coom and ’ave a glass. My word! it’s good.”
Nina made no reply.
“Such nonsense,” wheedlingly. “It’s the best a iver made, and the Lord knows a’ve made mony. Coom and try just one glass.”
“I am sitting here to test my strength. I shall not touch it.”
Mrs. Randolph laughed, coarsely and loudly. “Tha’t a fool. Tha doon’t knoo what tha’t talking aboot. It strikes me a ’ve ’eard thot before. Coom. Tha mought as well give in, fust as last.”
Nina made no reply.
Mrs. Randolph’s evil eyes sparkled. She filled an empty glass with the punch, and walked steadily over to where her daughter sat. Nina sprang from her chair, overturning it, thrusting out her hands in a gesture eloquent with terror, and attempted to reach the door. Mrs. Randolph was too quick for her; with a dexterous swoop, she possessed herself of the girl’s small hands and pressed the goblet to her nostrils. Nina gave a quick gasp, and, throwing back her head, staggered slightly, the glass still against her face. Outside Thorpe reeled for a moment as if he too were drunk. The blood pounded in his ears; his fingers drew inward, rigid, in their desire to get about the throat of some one, he did not much care whom.
Nina wrenched one hand free, snatched the goblet and held it with crooked elbow, staring at her mother. Mrs. Randolph laughed. Mrs. Reinhardt held her breath in drunken awe at the tragedy in the girl’s face. Nina brought the goblet half way to her lips, her eyes moving to its warm brown surface with devouring greed. Then she flung it at her mother’s breast, and sank once more to her chair, covering her face with her hands.
Mrs. Randolph, cursing, returned to the table and consoled herself with a brimming glass. Outside, the man’s imagination played him an ugly trick. A picture flashed upon it, vivid as one snatched from the dark by the blaze of lightning. A struggling distorted foaming thing was on the floor, held down by the strong arms of two men, and the face of the thing was not the face of Mrs. Randolph. She stood apart, looking down upon her perfected work with a low continuous ripple of contented laughter. The vision passed. Thorpe leaped from the verandah and wandered aimlessly about the grounds. He cursed audibly and repeatedly, not caring whether he might be overheard or not. He felt as if every nerve in his body were a separate devil. He hated the thought of the next day’s sunlight, and wondered if it would shine on a murderer or a suicide; he felt capable of crime of the blackest variety.
Fascinated, he returned to the verandah. Mrs. Randolph had fallen forward on the table. The man Cochrane entered and took her by the shoulders. She flung out her arm and struck him.
“Give oop! Give oop!” she muttered. But he jerked her backward, and half dragged, half carried her from the room. Mrs. Reinhardt staggered after, slamming the door behind her. Then Nina rose and came forward, and leaned her finger-tips heavily on the table.
“Come in,” she said; and Thorpe entered.
They faced each other in silence. For a moment Thorpe was conscious only of the change in her. Her cheeks were sunken and without colour; her eyes patched about with black. The features were so controlled that they were almost expressionless.
“Sit down,” she said. “I will tell you the story.”
He took the chair Mrs. Reinhardt had occupied, Nina her mother’s. She pressed her knuckles against her cheeks, and began speaking rapidly, but without excitement.
“My father’s home in Yorkshire was near the town of Keighley, which is a few miles from Haworth, the village where the Brontës lived. He and Branwell Brontë were great friends, and used to meet at the Lord Rodney Inn in Keighley, as Haworth is an almost inaccessible place. They were both very brilliant young men; and many other young men used to drop in on Saturday evenings to hear them talk politics. Of course the night ended in a bout, which usually lasted over Sunday. My mother was bar-maid at that inn. She made up her mind to marry my father. It is said that at that time she was handsome. She had an insatiable thirst for liquor, but was clever enough to keep my father from suspecting it. Once my father—who cared little for drink, beyond the conviviality of it—and Brontë went on a prolonged spree, the result of a bet. When he came to himself, he found that he had married her before the registrar. He belonged to one of the oldest families in the county. He had married a woman who could neither read nor write, and who talked at all times as she does now when she is drunk. Nevertheless, he determined to stand by her, because he thought he deserved his fate, and because he thought she loved him. But he left the country. To introduce her to his people and friends was more than he was equal to. To bury himself with her on his estate, denying himself all society but hers, was equally unthinkable, to say nothing of the fact that he was ashamed to introduce her to the servants. He wished to go away and be forgotten, begin life over in a new land where social conditions were as the builders made them. He came to California. She was furious. She had married him for the position she had fancied such a marriage would give her: she wanted to be a lady. Her mind was somewhat diverted by travel, and she kept her peace until she reached San Francisco—Yerba Buena, it was called then. It was a tiny place: a few adobe houses about the plaza, and a warehouse or two at the docks. Then there was a frightful scene between the two. My father learned why she had married him, and that she had instigated the wager which led to the spree which enabled her to accomplish her purpose. She ordered him to take her back to England at once, threatening to punish him if he did not. He refused, and she went on a prolonged drinking bout. This was shortly before my birth. They were the guests of Mr. Leese, a German who had married a native Californian and settled in the country. These people were very kind; but it was horribly mortifying for my father. He built her a house as quickly as possible, in order to hide her in it. I forgot to say that he had brought over Cochrane, who took charge of his household affairs. At the end of a year there was another scene, in which my father made her understand that he would never return to England; and that, were it not for me, he would turn her out of the house and let her go to the devil as fast as she liked. It was the mistake of his life that he did not, both for himself and for me. He should have taken or sent me back to England, and left her with a subsistence in the new country. But he is a very proud man. He feared that she would follow him home, and publish the story. There is no getting away from a woman like that.
“She was forced to accept the position; but she hated him mortally, and no less than he hated her. She had threatened again to make him rue his refusal to return to England, but refused to explain her meaning. This is what she did. He idolised me. She put whisky in my baby food until I would not drink or eat anything that was not flavoured with it. She was very cunning: she habituated my system to it gradually, so that it never upset me. She also gave it to me for every ailment. My father suspected nothing. There were depths of depravity that neither his imagination nor his observation plumbed. When I was about thirteen, he left us in charge of Cochrane—who had more influence over my mother than any one—and went off to the Crimean war, rejoining his old regiment. The necessity to get away from her for a time overrode his paternal instinct—everything. Moreover, he wanted to fight somebody. He distinguished himself. Just after his return, he discovered what my mother had made of me. His rage was awful; he beat her like a navvy. For once she was cowed. I went off my head altogether. When I came to, he was crouching in a corner as if some one had flung him there, sobbing and gasping. It was awful—awful! Then he sent me to the Hathaways to study with the girls. They knew, and promised to keep me away from her, and to see that I had nothing to drink. My mother sent me a bottle of whisky every week in my clean clothes. I did not tell him, for I wanted it. He found that out, too, and then debated whether he had not better send me away from the country. But he knew that the cry was in my blood, and that if I went to his people in England the chances were I would disgrace him. Then he made his second mistake: he did not throw her out. He ordered her to go, and she laughed in his face and asked him how he would like to read every morning in the Golden Era that James Randolph’s wife had spent the night in the calaboose. Now, only two or three people besides the Hathaways and Shropshires even suspected it, so carefully had Cochrane watched her.
“He sent me to boarding-school. She kept me in money, and I got what I wanted, although my father’s pride was in me, and I never took enough to betray my secret. It was not until I had finished school that I really gave way to the appetite. My father, closely as he watched me, did not suspect for a long time. He was very busy,—he threw himself heart and soul into the development of the city,—and when the appetite mastered me, I either feigned illness or went to the country. At last he found it out. There have been many bitter hours in my life, but that was incomparably the bitterest. I had always loved him devotedly. When he went down on his knees and begged me to stop, of course I swore that I would. I kept my promise for six months, she doing all she could to entice me the while. Then I yielded. After that, after another interview with my father, I restrained the intolerable craving for another six months. Then it went on irregularly. I don’t know that I began to think much, to look into the future, until about a year ago—it was when I first saw her as you saw her that night. Then I aged suddenly. My moral sense awakened, my sense of personal responsibility. I loathed myself. I looked upon what I had become with horror. I struggled fiercely,—but with indifferent success,—although, I must add, there were weeks at a time when I never thought of it; for I have the joie de vivre, and there are many distractions in society. Then you came. For a time I was happy and excited, and the thing was in abeyance. I touched nothing: that was my only chance. I fought it under,—after that first night,—and the desire did not come again until I drank the mescal at Don Tiburcio’s merienda. But I had known that it would come back sooner or later, and was determined not to marry you, nor to let myself fall seriously in love with you. But after that first night out on the strawberry patches I knew that I loved you, and, as I am not a light-minded person, irrevocably. But I made up my mind to enjoy that week, and look no farther. You know the rest. What I have suffered since perhaps you can divine, if you love me. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter.” Her monotonous calm left her suddenly. She brought her fist down on the table. “This room is full of the smell of it!” she cried. “And I want it! I want it!”
She pushed back her chair. “Come,” she said, “let us go outside.”
She ran out to the verandah. He followed, and she grasped his arm. “Let us go for a ride,” she said. “I shall go off my head, if I keep still another moment. I want motion. Are you tired?”
“No, I am not tired.”
She led the way to the stables. The men in charge had gone to bed. She and Thorpe saddled two strong mustangs, rode rapidly down the avenue and out into the high road. For some time they followed the stage-route, then struck into a side road leading to the mountains. Nina did not speak, nor did Thorpe. He was thankful for the respite. Once he touched his cheek mechanically, wondering if it had fallen into wrinkles.
They rode at a break-neck pace. The night had become very dark: a great ocean of fog had swept in from the Pacific, blotting out mountains and stars. The mustangs moderated their pace as they began to ascend the foot-hills. The long rush through the valley had quickened Thorpe’s blood without calming his brain. He did not speak. There seemed to be a thousand words struggling in his brain, but they would not combine properly. He could have cursed them free, but although he was too bitter and excited to have tenderness or pity for the woman beside him, he considered her in a half blind way; she was the one woman on earth who had ever sent him utterly beside himself. They ascended, two black spots of shifting outline in the fog, for an hour or more. Neither below nor above could an object be seen, not a sound came to them. It was unreal, and ghostly, and portentous. Then, almost abruptly, they emerged, the mustangs trotting on to the flat summit of a hill. Nina sprang to the ground.
“Tie the horses,” she said; and Thorpe led them to a tree some yards away.
Nina stood with her back to him, her hands hanging listlessly at her sides, looking downward. Thorpe, after he had tethered the horses, paused also.
The world below was gone. In its place was a vast ocean of frothy milk-white fog. On each side, melting into the horizon in front, until it washed the slopes of the Contra Costa range, lay this illimitable ocean pillowed lightly on sleeping millions. Now calm and peaceful, now distorted in frozen wrath, it was so shadowy, so unreal, that a puff of wind might have blown it to the stars. Out of it rose the hill-tops, bare weather-beaten islands. Against them the sea had hurled itself, then clung, powerless to retreat. Upon some it had cast its spray half way to the crest, over others it rushed in mighty motionless torrents; here and there it but half concealed the jagged points of ugly rocks. Beating against solitary reefs were huge, still, angry breakers, sounding no roar. A terrible death-arrested storm was there in mid-ocean,—a storm which appalled by its very silent wrath. On one of the highest and barest of the crags an old building looked, in that sunless light, like a castle in ruin. Above, the cold blue sky was thickly set with shivering stars. The grinning moon hung low.
There was not a sound; not a living creature was awake but themselves. They might have been in the shadowy hereafter, with all space about them; in the twilight of eternity. Where they rested, the air was clear as a polar noon; not a stray wreath of that idle froth floated about them.
“I came here,” said Nina, turning to Thorpe, “because I knew it would be like this. It will be easier to hear what you think of me, than it would have been down there.”
He brought his hands down on her shoulders, gripping them as if possessed of the instinct to hurt.
“Once or twice I could have killed you as you spoke,” he said. “I shall marry you and cure you, or go to hell with you. As I feel now, it does not matter much which.”
And then he caught her in his arms and kissed her, with the desire which was consuming him.
“But even you cannot conquer me,” she said to him an hour later. “I shall not marry you until I have conquered myself. I believe now that I can. I got your letter. I very nearly knew that you would say what you have done, after I told you the truth. I won’t marry you, knowing that, in spite of your love, which I do not doubt, at the bottom of your intelligence, you despise me. I have always felt that if I could make a year’s successful fight, I should never fall again. There may be no reason for this belief; but we are more or less controlled by imagination. There is no doubt in my mind on this point. If I win alone, you will respect me again, and love me better.”
“I do not despise you. I hardly know what I felt for you five weeks ago. But I have only sympathy for you now—and love! You must let me do the fighting. It will knit us the more closely—”
“It would wear me out, kill me, knowing that you were watching my struggles, no matter how lovingly. Besides, I know myself; my moods are unbearable at such times. I cannot control my temper. Before the year was over, we should have bickered our love into ruins. We could not begin over again. If you will do as I wish, I believe we can be happy. It is not long to wait—we are both young. Cannot you see that I am right?”
“I don’t want to leave you, not for a day again!”
“And I don’t want you to go! But I know that it is our only chance. If you marry me now, you will hate me before the year is over; and, what is worse, I shall hate you. The steamer sails to-morrow. Will you go?”
He hesitated, and argued, a long while; but finally he said: “I will go.”
“Don’t go all the way back to England. I should like to think you were in America; that would help me.”
“I will stay in New Orleans, and write by every steamer.”
“Oh, do, do! And if I do not write as regularly, you will understand. There will be times when I simply cannot write. But promise that, no matter what you hear, you will not lose faith in me.”
“I promise.” Involuntarily his mouth curled into a grin. The ghosts of a respectable company of extorted promises capered across his brain, as small irreverent ghosts have a habit of doing in great moments. But his mouth was close upon hers, and she did not see it.
An hour later she pointed outward. Far away, above the Eastern mountains, was a line of flame. The sun rose slowly. It smiled down upon the phantom ocean and flung bubbles of a thousand hues to the very feet of the mortals on the heights.
Then slowly, softly, the ocean moved. It quivered as if a mighty hand struck it from its foundations, swayed, rose, fled back to the sea that had given it birth.
A moment more and the world was visible again, awake, and awaiting them.
BOOK II
I
Mr. Randolph owned a large ranch in Lake County which was managed by an agent. A mile distant from the farm-house in which the agent lived with the “hands” was a cottage, built several years since at Nina’s request. As Lake County was then difficult of access, Mr. Randolph seldom visited his ranch, his wife never; but once a year Nina took a party of girl friends to the cottage, usually in mid-summer. This year she went alone. Immediately after Thorpe’s departure she told her father of the conditional engagement into which she had entered.
“And I wish to spend this year alone,” she added. “Not only because I want to get away from my mother, but because I believe that nothing will help me more than entire change of associations. And solitude has no terrors for me. I simply cannot go on in the old routine. I am bored to death with the meaninglessness of it. That has come suddenly: probably because I have come to want so much more.”
“But wouldn’t you rather travel, Nina?” Mr. Randolph was deeply anxious; he hardly knew whether to approve her plan or not. A year’s solitude would drive him to madness.
“No, I want to live with myself. If I rushed from one distraction to another I should not feel sure of myself at the end. I have thought and thought; and, besides, I want to see and live Europe with Dudley Thorpe alone. I feel positive that my plan is the right one. Only keep my mother away.”
“I will tell her plainly that if she follows you, I’ll shut her up in the Home of the Inebriates; and this time I’ll keep my word. What excuse shall you give people?”
“You can tell them of my engagement, and say that as we have agreed it shall last a year, I have my own reasons for spending the interval by myself. Their comments mean nothing to me.”
“Shall you see no one?”
“Molly will come occasionally, and you,—no one else. I shall fish and hunt and sail and ride and read and study music. Perhaps you will send me a little piano?”
“Of course I will.”
“I shall live out of doors mostly. I love that sort of life better than any; I like trees better than most people.”
“Very well. If you change your mind, you have only to return. I will send to New York for all the new books and music. Cochrane will go ahead and put things in order. I will also send Atkins to look after the horses; and he and his wife will sleep in the house and look after you generally. I hope to God the experiment will prove a success. I think you are wise not to marry until the fight is over.”
II
The cottage was on the side of a hill over-looking one of the larger lakes. Beyond were other lakes, behind and in front the pine-covered mountains. The place was very wild; it was doubtful if civilisation would ever make it much less so. The cottage was dainty and comfortable. Nina sailed a little cat-boat during the cooler hours of the day; and she was a good shot. She wrote a few lines or pages every night to Thorpe; but it was several days before she opened a book. She roamed through the dark forests while it was hot, and in the evenings. She had for California that curious compound of hatred and adoration which it inspires in all highly strung people who know it well. It filled her with vague angry longings, inspired her at times with a fierce desire to flee from it, and finally; but it satisfied her soul. At times, a vast brooding peace seemed lying low over all the land. At others, she fancied she could hear mocking laughter. More than once she hung out of the window half the night, expecting that California would lift up her voice and speak, so tremendous is the personality of that strange land. She longed passionately for Thorpe.
The weeks passed, and, to her astonishment, the poison in her blood made no sign. Three months, and there had not been so much as a skirmish with the enemy. She felt singularly well; so happy at times that she wondered at herself, for the year seemed very long. Thorpe wrote by every steamer, such letters as she had hoped and expected to get. Some of his vital personality seemed to emanate from them; and she chose to believe that it stood guard and warned off the enemy.
She was swinging in her hammock on the verandah one hot afternoon, when a wagon lumbered to the foot of the hill, and her father and Molly Shropshire emerged from the cloud of dust that surrounded it. She tumbled out of the hammock, and ran down to meet them, her loose hair flying.
“She looks about ten,” thought Mr. Randolph, as she rushed into his arms; “and beautiful for the first time in her life.”
“We thought that you had had as much solitude as was good for you at one time,” said Miss Shropshire, in her hard metallic voice, which, however, rang very true. “I am going to stay a month, whether I am wanted or not.”
“We have an addition to our family,” said Mr. Randolph, as he sat fanning himself on the piazza. “Your cousin has arrived.”
“My what? What cousin?”
“Your mother, it seems, has a brother. If I ever knew of his existence, I had forgotten it. But it seems that I have had the honour of educating his son and of transforming him into a sort of pseudo-gentleman.”
“He is not half bad, indeed,” said Miss Shropshire.
“He is the sort of man who inspires me with a desire to lift my boot every time he opens his mouth. But I must confess that his appearance is fairly creditable. The obsolete term ‘genteel’ describes him better than any other. He has got Yorkshire off his back, has studied hard,—he is a doctor with highly creditable certificates and diplomas,—and dresses very well. His manners are suave, entirely too suave: I felt disposed to warn the bank; and his hands are so soft that they give me a ‘turn’ as the old women say. He has reddish hair, a pale grey shifty eye, a snub nose, and a hollow laugh. There you have your cousin—Dr. Richard Clough, aged twenty-eight or thereabouts. In my days, he probably wore clogs. At present his natty little feet are irreproachably shod, and he makes no more noise than a cat. I feel an irrepressible desire for a caricature of him.”
Nina laughed heartily. “Poor papa! And you thought you had had the last of the Cloughs. I hope he is not quartered on you.”
“He is, but is looking about for an opening. To do him justice, I don’t think he is a sponge. He seems to have saved something. He wanted to come up here and pay his devoirs to you, but I evaded the honour. I have a personal suspicion which may, of course, be wide of the mark, that the object of his visit to California is more matrimonial than professional; if that is the case, he might cause you a great deal of annoyance: there is a very ugly look about his mouth.”
Mr. Randolph remained several days; they were very happy days for him. It was impossible to see Nina as she was at that period, to catch the overflow of her spirits, without sharing her belief in the sure happiness of the future.
Miss Shropshire fell in easily with all of Nina’s pursuits. There was much of Nina Randolph that she could never understand; but she was as faithful as a dog in her few friendships and, with her vigorous sensible mind, she was a companion who never bored. She was several years older than Nina. Their fathers had been acquaintances in the island which had the honour of incubating the United States.
“I approve of your engagement,” said Miss Shropshire, in her downright way. “I know if I don’t you will hate me, so I have brought myself to the proper frame of mind. He is selfish; but he certainly grows on one, and no one could help respecting a man with that jaw.”
But Nina would not discuss Thorpe even with Molly Shropshire. When she felt obliged to unburden her mind, she went up and talked to the pines.
The girls returned home one morning from a stiff sail on the lake to be greeted by the sight of a boot projecting beyond the edge of one of the hammocks, and the perfume of excellent tobacco.
“What on earth!” exclaimed Miss Shropshire. “Have we a visitor? a man?”
Nina frowned. “I suspect that it is my cousin. Papa wrote the other day that Richard had heard of a practice for sale in Napa, and had come up to look into it. I suppose it was to be expected that he would come here, whether he was invited or not.”
As the girls ascended the hill, the occupant of the hammock rose and flung away his cigar. He was a dapper little man, and walked down the steep path with a jaunty ease which so strikingly escaped vulgarity as to suggest the danger.
“Dear Cousin Nina!” he exclaimed. “Miss Shropshire, you will tell her that I am Richard? Will you pardon me for taking two great liberties,—first, coming here, and then, taking possession of your hammock and smoking? The first I couldn’t help. The last—well, I have been waiting two hours.”
“I am glad you have made yourself at home,” said Nina, perfunctorily; she had conceived a violent dislike for him. “Your trip must have been very tiresome.”
“It was, indeed. This California is all very well to look at, but for travelling comforts—my word! However, I am not regretting. I cannot tell you how much I have wanted—”
“You must be very hungry. There is the first dinner-bell. Are you dusty? Would you like to clean up? Go to papa’s room—that one.
“Detestable man!” she said, as he disappeared. “I don’t believe particularly in presentiments, but I felt as if my evil genius were bearing down upon me. And such a smirk! He looks like a little shop-keeper.”
“I think he cultivates that grin to conceal the natural expression of his mouth—which is by no means unlike a wolf’s. But he is a harmless little man enough, I have no doubt. I’ve been hasty and mistaken too often; only it’s a bore, having to entertain him.”
But Dr. Clough assumed the burdens of entertaining. He talked so agreeably during dinner, told Nina so much of London that she wished to know, betrayed such an exemplary knowledge of current literature, that her aversion was routed for the hour, and she impulsively invited him to remain a day or two. He accepted promptly, played a nimble game of croquet after supper, then took them for a sail on the lake. He had a thin well-trained tenor voice which blended fairly well with Miss Shropshire’s metallic soprano; and the two excited the envy of the frogs and the night-birds. He was evidently a man quick to take a hint, for he treated Nina exactly as he treated Molly: he was merely a traveller in a strange land, delighted to find himself in the company of two charming women.
“Upon my word,” said Molly, that night, “I rather like the little man. He’s not half bad.”
“I don’t know,” said Nina. “I’m sorry I asked him to stay. I’ll be glad to see him go.”
The next day he organised a picnic, and made them sit at their ease while he cooked and did all the work. They spent the day in a grove of laurels, and sailed home in the dusk. It was on the following day that Nina twice caught him looking at her in a peculiarly searching manner. Each time she experienced a slight chill and faintness, for which she was at a loss to account. She reddened with anger and terror, and he shifted his eyes quickly. When he left, the next morning, she drew a long sigh of relief, then, without warning, began to sob hysterically.
“There is something about that man!” she announced to the alarmed Miss Shropshire. “What is it? Do you suppose he is a mesmerist? He gave me the most dreadful feeling at times. Oh, I wish Dudley were here!”
“Why don’t you send for him?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know! I wish the year were over!”
“It is your own will that makes it a year. I don’t see any sense in it, myself. I believe this climate, and being away from everything, has set you up. Why not send for him, and live here for some months longer? He is your natural protector, anyhow. What’s a man good for?”
“Oh, I feel as if I must! Wait till to-morrow. That man has made me nervous; I may feel quite placid to-morrow, and I ought to wait. It is only right to wait.”
And the next day she was herself again, and dismissed the evil spell of Dr. Clough with a contemptuous shrug. Nor would she send for Thorpe.
“I may cut it down to eight months,” she said. “But I must wait that long.”
III
A week later Miss Shropshire returned to San Francisco. Nina was not sorry to be alone again. She drifted back into her communion with the inanimate things about her, into the exaltation of spirit, impossible in human companionship, and lived for Thorpe’s letters.
One day she received a letter from Dr. Clough.
“Dear Cousin Nina,” it ran. “I am to have the practice in Napa, but not for two or three months, unfortunately, for I look forward to meeting you again. Those few days with you and Miss Molly were delightful to the lonely wanderer, who has never known a home.” (“Not since he wore clogs,” thought Nina.) “Perhaps some day I shall make substantial acknowledgment of my gratitude. This is a world of vicissitudes, as we all know. Remember this—will you, Nina?—when you need me I am there. There are crises in life when a true friend, a relative whose interests merge with one’s own, is not to be despised. Don’t destroy this letter. Put it by. It is sincere.
“Your faithful and obd’t servant,
“Richard Clough.”
Nina tossed the letter impatiently on the table, then caught it up again and re-read the last pages.
“That sounds as if it were written avec intention,” she thought. “Can papa be embarrassed? But what good could this scrubby little man do me, if he were? Most likely it is the first gun of the siege. Thank Heaven the guns must be fired through the post for a while.”
December was come, but it was still very warm. The lake was hard and still and blue. The glare was merciless.
Nina, followed by a servant bearing cushions, climbed wearily up the hill to the forest. Once or twice she paused and caught at a tree for support.
“If I ever get into the forest, I believe I’ll stay there until this weather is over,” she thought. “It has completely demoralised me.”
The servant arranged the cushions in a hammock between two pines whose arms locked high above,—a green fragrant roof the sun could not penetrate. Nina made herself comfortable, and re-read Thorpe’s last letter, received the day before. It was a very impatient letter. He wanted her, and life in the South was a bore after the novelty had worn off.
She lay thinking of him, and listening to the drowsy murmur of forest life about her. Squirrels were chattering softly, somewhere in the arbours above those slender grey pillars. A confused hum rose from the ground; from far came the roar of a torrent. She could see the blue lake with its ring of white sand, the bluer sky above, and turned her back: the sight brought heat into those cool depths. Above her rose the dim green aisles, the countless columns of the forest. She was very tired and languid. She placed Thorpe’s letter under her cheek and slept; and in her sleep she dreamed.
She was still in the forest: every lineament of it was familiar. For a time there were none of the changes of dreams. Then from the base of every pine something lifted slowly and coiled about the tree,—something long and green and horridly beautiful. It lifted itself to the very branches, then detached itself a little and waved a foot of its upper length to and fro, its glittering eyes regarding her with sleepy malice. The squirrels had hidden in their caves; not a sound came from the earth; the waters had hushed their voice. Nothing moved in that awful silence but the languid heads of the snakes.
Then came a sudden brisk step; her cousin entered. He did not notice the sleeper, but went to each constrictor in turn and stroked it lovingly. Once he caught a coil close to his breast and laughed. The small malignant eyes above moved to his, their expression changing to friendliness, albeit shot with contempt. To Nina’s agonised sense the scene lasted for hours, during which Clough fondled the reptiles with increasing ardour.
But at last the scene changed, and abruptly. She was on the mountain above the fog-ocean, close to the stars. Thorpe’s arms were strong about her. It had seemed to her in the past five months that she had never really ceased to feel the strength of his embrace, to hear the loud beating of his heart on her own. This time he withdrew one arm and, thrusting his fingers among her heartstrings, pulled them gently. Something vibrated throughout her. She had been happy before, but that soft vibration filled her with a new and inexplicable gladness. She asked him what it meant. He murmured something she could not understand, and smote the chords again. Her being seemed filled with music.
She awoke. The woods were dark. She tried to recall the ugly prelude to her dream, but it had passed. She put her hands against her shoulders, fancying she must encounter the arms that had held her, for their pressure lingered. Then she drew her brows together, and craned her neck with an expression of wonder. But several moments passed before she understood. She was very ignorant of many things, and her experience up to the present had been exceptional.
But she was a woman, and in time she understood.
Her first mental response was a wild unreasoning terror, that of the woman who is in sore straits, far from the man who should protect her and evoke the hasty sanction of the law. But the mood passed. She was sure of Thorpe, and she had all the arrogance of wealth. He would hasten at her summons, and they would live in this solitude for a year or more; no one beyond the necessary confidants need ever know.
The maternal instinct had awakened in her dream. She folded herself suddenly in her own arms. Her imagination flew to the future. Every imaginative woman who loves the man that becomes her husband must have one enduring regret: that in a third or more of his life she had no part; he grew to manhood knowing nothing of her little share in the scheme of things, met her when two at least of his personalities were coffined in the yesterday that is the most vivid of all the memories. And if his child be a boy, she may fancy it the incarnation of her husband’s lost boyhood and youth, and thus complete the circle of her manifold desire.
And then Nina knew what had scotched the monster of heredity; she could see the tiny hands at its throat. She lay and marvelled until the servants, alarmed, came to look for her. The world took on a new and wonderful aspect; she was the most wonderful thing in it.
IV
After supper she went into the sitting-room and wrote to Thorpe. As she finished and left the desk, her eye fell on Richard Clough’s letter, which lay, open, on the table. The same chill horror caught her as when she had encountered his searching eyes on the last day of his visit, and she understood its meaning. He knew; there was the key to his verbiage.
She dropped upon a chair, feeling faint and ill. Like many women, she had firm trust in her intuitions. If they had seemed baseless before, they rested on a firm enough foundation now. She was in this man’s power; and the man was an adventurer and a Clough. Would he tell her father? Or worse—her mother! She pictured her father’s grief; his rage against Thorpe. It would be more than she could endure. When Thorpe came, it would not matter so much. And if her father were not told, it was doubtful if he would ever suspect: he was very busy, and hated the trip from San Francisco to Lake County. After Thorpe’s arrival, it was hardly likely that he would visit her.
A few moments’ reflection convinced her that Clough would keep her secret. His was the mind of subtle methods. He would make use of his power over her in ways beyond her imagining.
Terror possessed her, and she called loudly upon Thorpe. With the sound of his name, her confidence returned. He would be with her in something under three months. Meanwhile, she could defy Clough. Later, he would meet more than his match.
The next day she wrote to Molly Shropshire, telling her the truth and giving her many commissions. Miss Shropshire’s reply was characteristic:
“I have bought everything, and start for the cottage on Tuesday. It is fortunate that I have two married sisters; I can be of much assistance to you. I have helped on several wardrobes of this sort, and acquired much lore of which you appear to be painfully ignorant. I am coming with my large trunk; for I shall not leave you again.”
The momentous subject was not broached for some hours after her arrival. Then—they were seated before the fire in the sitting-room, and the first rain of winter was pelting the roof—Miss Shropshire opened her mouth and spoke with vicious emphasis.
“I hate men. There is not one I’d lift my finger to do a service for. My sisters are supposed to have good husbands. One—Fred Lester—is a grown-up baby, full of whims and petty vanities and blatant selfishness, who has to be ‘managed.’ Tom Manning is as surly as a bear with a sore head when his dinner disappoints him; and when things go wrong in the office there is no living in the house with him. My brother’s life is notorious, and his wife, what with patience and tears, looks like a pan of skim-milk. Catch me ever marrying! Not if Adonis came down and staked a claim about a mountain of gold quartz. As for Dudley Thorpe!” her voice rose to the pitch of fury. “What is a man’s love good for, if it can’t think of the woman first? Aren’t they our natural protectors? Aren’t they supposed to think for us,—take all the responsibilities of life off our shoulders? This sort of thing is in keeping with the character, isn’t it? Why don’t you hate him? You ought to. I’d murder him—”
Nina plunged across the rug, and pressed both hands against Miss Shropshire’s mouth, her eyes blazing with passion.
“Don’t you dare speak of him like that again! If you do, it will be the last time you will ever speak to me. I understand him—as well as if he were literally a part of myself. I’ll never explain to you nor to any one, but I know. And there is nothing in me that does not respond to him. Now, do you understand? Will you say another word?”
“Oh, very well. Don’t stifle me!” Miss Shropshire released herself. “Have it that way, if it suits you best. I didn’t come here to quarrel with you.”
Nina resumed her seat. After a few moments she said: “There is another thing: Richard Clough knows.” And she told Miss Shropshire of his letter.
“Um, well, I don’t know but that that will be as good an arrangement as any. Some one must attend you, and a relative—”
“What! Do you think I’d have that reptile near me?”
“Now, Nina, look at the matter like a sensible woman. We shall have to get a doctor from Napa. If it storms, he may be days getting here. If he has a wife, she’ll want to know where he has been, and will worm it out of him. If he hasn’t, he’ll let it out some night when he has his feet on the table in his favourite saloon, and is outside his eighth glass of punch. It will be to Richard’s interest to keep the matter quiet—you can make it his interest: I don’t fancy he’s above pocketing a couple of thousands. And he’ll not dare annoy you after Dudley Thorpe is here. I’ll do Dudley Thorpe this much justice: he could whip most men, and he wouldn’t stop to think about it, either. Don’t let us discuss the matter any further now. Just turn it over in your mind. I am sure you will come to the conclusion that I am right. If you ignore Richard, there’s no knowing what he may do.”
V
The next day Miss Shropshire cut out many small garments, Nina watching her with ecstatic eyes. Both were expert needlewomen,—most Californian girls were in those days of the infrequent and inferior dressmaker,—and in the weeks that came they fashioned many dainty and elegant garments. Nina no longer went to the forest, rarely on the lake. Miss Shropshire could hardly persuade her to go out once a day for a walk, so enthralled was she by that bewildering mass of fine linen and lace. She was prouder of her tucks than she had ever been of a semi-circle of admirers, four deep; and when she had finished her first yoke she wept with delight.
Miss Shropshire often watched her curiously, half-comprehending. She abominated babies. Her home was with one of her married sisters, and a new baby meant the splitting of ear-drums, the foolish prattle and attenuated vocabulary of the female parent, and the systematic irritations of the inefficient nurse-maid. Why a woman should look as if heaven had opened its gates because she was going to have a baby, passed her comprehension, particularly in the embarrassing circumstances.
Nina was alone when Thorpe’s next letter arrived.
“I am starting for Cuba,” it began. “My brother Harold has joined me; and as his chest is in a bad way, he thinks of settling in a hot country. I have suggested California; but he is infatuated with the idea of Cuba. You will forgive me for leaving the United States for a short period, will you not, dearest? I can do you no particular good by remaining here, and I am bored to extinction. If you would but give me the word, I should start for California on the next steamer; but as you hold me to the original compact, perhaps you will give me a little latitude. The talk here is war, war, war,—never a variation by any possible chance. My sympathies are with the South, and if they fight I hope they’ll win; but as I have no personal interest in the matter I feel like a man condemned to a long course of one highly seasoned dish, with no prospect of variety. Address as usual; your letters will be forwarded, unless I return in a few weeks, as I think I shall.”
Then followed several closely written pages which advised her of the unalterable state of his affections.
Nina put the letter down, and stared before her with a wide introspective gaze. When Miss Shropshire entered, she handed her the first two pages. The older girl shut her lips.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “It means delay, and every week is precious. It looks—” She paused.
“Unlucky; I have been wondering. I have a queer helpless feeling, as if I were tangled in a net, and even Dudley, with all his love and will, could not get me out. I suppose there is something in fate. I feel very insignificant.”
“Come, come, you are not to get morbid. Nobody’s life is a straight line. You must expect hard knots, and rough by-ways, and malaria, and all the rest of it. Don’t borrow trouble. You are sure of him, anyhow.”
“Sometimes I hate California. One might as well be on Mars. It’s thousands of miles from New Orleans, and New Orleans is hundreds of miles from Cuba. And now that everything is getting so upset, who knows if he’ll ever get my letters? I wish I’d started straight for New Orleans the moment I knew. I am utterly at the mercy of circumstances.”
“Well, thank Heaven you’re rich,” said Miss Shropshire, bluntly. “Just fancy if you were some poor little wretch deserted by the man, and with no prospect but the county hospital; then you might be blue.”
“Oh, I suppose it might be worse!” replied Nina.
The next day her buoyant spirits were risen again, and she resolved to accept the immediate arrangement of her destiny with philosophy; peace and happiness would be hers eventually. She could not violate the most jealous of social laws and expect all the good fairies to attend the birth of her child. But she longed by day for the luxury of the night, when she could cry, and beg Thorpe under her breath to come to her.
When the next steamer arrived it brought her no letter from Thorpe. But this was to be expected. Another steamer arrived; it brought nothing. She turned very grey.
“Make a close calculation,” she said to Miss Shropshire. “You know how long it takes to go to Cuba and back. Has there been time?”
“Yes, there has been time.”
It was the middle of February, the end of a mild and beautiful winter. Little rain had fallen. Nature seemed to Nina more caressing than ever. The sun rarely veiled his face with a passing cloud. She worked with feverish persistence, keeping up her spirits as best she could. There was a bare chance that the next steamer would bring Thorpe.
Her father had paid her another visit, and gone away unsuspicious. He had, in fact, talked of nothing but the approaching rebellion of the Southern States, and the possible effect on the progress of the country. It was not likely that he would come again, for he had embarked on two new business enterprises, and he allowed himself to believe that Nina had passed the danger point.
The third steamer arrived. It brought neither Thorpe nor a letter. Then Nina gave way. For twenty-four hours she wept and sobbed, paying no attention to expostulations and threats. Miss Shropshire was seriously alarmed; for the first time she fully realised the proportions of the responsibility she had assumed. She longed for advice. She even contemplated sending for Mr. Randolph; for with all her dogged strength of character she was but a woman, and an unmarried one. Finally she wrote to Clough, who had arrived in Napa a fortnight before. She could not bring herself to betray Nina’s confidence; but Clough already knew. Then she went to her room, and cursed Thorpe roundly and aloud. After that she felt calmer, and returned to Nina.
“I can’t think he is dead,” said Nina, abruptly, speaking coherently for the first time. “If he were, I should know it. I should see him.” Miss Shropshire shivered, and cast an apprehensive glance into the dark corners of the room. “But he is ill; that is the only explanation. You don’t doubt him?” turning fiercely to her friend.
“No; I can’t say that I do. No—” with some reluctance, “decidedly not. He’s not that sort. Like most men, he will probably cool off in time; but he’s no weathercock, and one could hardly help believing in his honesty.”
Nina kissed her with passionate gratitude. “I couldn’t stand having you doubt him,” she said. “I never have, not for a moment; but—oh—what does it matter what is the reason? He hasn’t come, and I haven’t heard from him. That is enough!”
“There will be one more steamer. There is just time.”
“He won’t come. I feel that everything is going wrong. One way and another, my life is going to ruin—”
“Nonsense, you are merely overwrought and despondent—”
“That is not all. And I know myself. Listen—if my baby dies, and he does not come, I shall go down lower than I have ever been, and I shall stay there. I’d never rise again, nor want to—”
“Then, for Heaven’s sake, don’t do your best to kill it! Brace up. I believe that a good deal of what you say is true. Some people are strong for the pleasure of giving other people a chance to add to the platitudes of the world; but you are not that sort. So take care of yourself.”
“Very well; put me to bed. I will do what I can.”
She did not rise the next day, and, when Clough came, consented, listlessly, to see him. In this interview he made no impression on her whatever; he might have been an automaton. Her brain realised no man but the one for whom her weary heart ached.
She made an effort on the following day, and embroidered, and listened while Miss Shropshire read aloud to her. The effort was renewed daily; and every hour she fought with her instinct to succumb to despair. Physically, she was very tired. She longed for the care and tenderness which would have been hers in happier circumstances.
VI
Miss Shropshire took the precaution to ask Clough to come to the cottage a day or two before the next steamer was due, and to be prepared to remain. The steamer arrived, and with it nothing of interest to Nina Randolph.
She was very ill. Even Clough, who was inimitable in a sick room, looked grey and anxious. But it passed; and the time came when the housekeeper, who had had many babies in her time, placed a little girl in Nina’s arms.
Nina, who had been lying with closed eyes, exhausted and wretched, turned her face toward the unfamiliar weight, and looked wonderingly into the face of the child. For a moment she hardly realised its significance, vivid as had been her imaginings. The baby’s colour was fair and agreeable, and its large blue eyes moved slowly about with an expression of sober inquiry.
Nina glanced hastily outward. She was alone for the moment. Miss Shropshire had gone to her well-earned rest, and Dr. Clough was in the dining-room, attended by Mrs. Atkins. Nina drew the baby closer, and kissed it. For the moment she held Dudley Thorpe in her arms,—for she could not grasp their separateness,—and peace returned. Thorpe was ill, of course; but he was hardy and young, and would recover. The rapture of young motherhood possessed her. She kissed the baby many times, softly, fearing that it might break, then drew back and gazed at it with rapt adoration. Once she met its wise solemn eyes, and the first soul of Dudley Thorpe looked from their depths. She moved it with trembling care, and laid its head on her breast.
She gave no thought to the time when the world must know; the world no longer existed for her. Dudley Thorpe was her husband, and his child was in her arms,—an actual tangible beautiful certainty; all the rest that went to make up life was nebulæ.
It was a very good baby, and gave little trouble; consequently Nina was permitted to hold it most of the time. She felt no desire to rise from the bed, to take an active part in life again. She would have liked to remain there until Thorpe came and sat beside her. She spoke little, excepting to the child, and perhaps those hours, despite the great want, were the happiest of her life.
“What are some women made of?” demanded Miss Shropshire of Dr. Clough. “What is she going to do with that baby? That’s what I want to know. It may be months before Dudley Thorpe gets here, and it certainly won’t be long before Mr. Randolph comes up again. I don’t believe she has given a thought to the consequences—and I have always thought her an unusually bright and level-headed woman.”
“I see nothing to do but let matters take their course.” He hesitated a moment, then gave Miss Shropshire a swift tentative glance, shifting his eyes hastily. “Would you—you believe in my disinterestedness, do you not, Miss Molly?”
“I do, indeed. You have been a real friend. I’m sure I don’t know what I should have done without you.”
“Then—if Mr. Thorpe does not return, when she has become convinced that he does not mean to return, will you help me to make her understand that I am only too willing to marry her and adopt her child?”
Miss Shropshire stared, then shook her head. “You don’t know Nina. It would be years before she got over her infatuation for Dudley Thorpe, if ever; and by that time everybody would know. Besides, I don’t share your distrust of Thorpe. He is selfish, and is probably travelling beyond the reach of mails; but he is the soul of honour: no one could doubt that.”
“He may be dead.”
“We should have heard by this time; and it would not help you if he were. Most likely it would kill her.”
“We don’t die so easily.”
“The thing to consider now is that baby. It’s a dear little thing, and looks less like putty than most babies; I can actually see a resemblance to Thorpe. But, all the same, its presence is decidedly embarrassing.”
The baby solved the problem. It died when it was ten days old. Even Miss Shropshire, who scorned the emotions, shuddered and burst into tears at the awful agony in Nina’s eyes. Nina did not cry, nor did she speak. When the child was dressed for its coffin, the housekeeper brought it to the bedside. Nina raised herself on her elbow, and gave it a long devouring glance. It looked like marble rather than wax, and its likeness to Dudley Thorpe was startling. The contours of infancy had disappeared in its brief severe illness, and the strong bold outlines of the man who had called it into being were reproduced in little. The dark hair fell over its forehead in the same way, the mouth had the same arch.
Miss Shropshire entered the room, and Nina spoke for the first time since the baby had given its sharp cry of warning.
“Take it up into the forest, and bury it between the two pines where my hammock was.” And then she turned her back and stared at the wall.
Shortly after, Mr. Randolph was informed that Nina had had a brief but severe attack of rheumatic fever, and he paid her a hurried visit. He wondered at the change in her, but did not suspect the truth.
“She is pining for Thorpe, I suppose,” he said to Miss Shropshire. “I cannot understand his silence; and now God knows when we’ll hear from him, unless he managed to get North before April 19th. Something has happened, I am afraid. Poor child, she was not born under a lucky star! Is she all right otherwise?”
“Yes, it looks as if she were cured. But when she goes to San Francisco, she had better stay with me for a time. I don’t think her mother’s society would be the best thing for her while she is so despondent.”
“By all means. And that detestable Clough?”
“He is really a first-rate doctor, and has been devotion itself.”
“Very well: I shall send him a handsome cheque. But if he has any matrimonial designs, let him look out. Don’t imagine I am blind. A man does not neglect a fresh practice for cousinly affection. I cannot suppose for a moment that she would tolerate him, but when a woman is listless and despondent, and thinks that all her prospects of happiness are over, there’s no telling what she will do; particularly if the besieger has the tenacity of a bull dog. I’d rather see her in her coffin than married to Richard Clough.”
Miss Shropshire was very anxious to return to San Francisco. She loved Nina Randolph; but she had immured herself in the cause of friendship long enough, and thought that her afflicted friend would be quite as well off where distractions were more abundant. When she suggested return, Nina acquiesced indifferently, and Mrs. Atkins packed the trunks with a hearty good-will. Dr. Clough brought a hack, at great expense, from Napa, and packed her into it as if she were a baby. As it drove off, she looked through the window up to the forest where her baby lay. She had not been strong enough to climb to the grave. She knew that she should never see it.
BOOK III
I
When Thorpe left New Orleans his plan was to return on the next steamer but one, then to go North to New York or Boston,—he had friends in both cities,—and amuse himself in new fields until he was permitted to return to California. He sought distraction, for although he was reasonably sure of Nina’s power to conquer herself, and intended to marry her whether she did or not, separation and time deepened his passion for her, and he only found peace of mind in filling his hours to the brim. It is doubtful if he would have consented to remain the year out were it not that he wished to admire her as much as she longed to have him. Her pride and confidence in herself would invigorate the happiness of both.
He left orders in New Orleans to have his mail held over until his return. Harold was very ill on the voyage. Almost immediately upon landing in Havana his health began to mend, and he declared himself ready to kiss the soil, as he could not bestow a similar mark of favour on the climate. He announced his intention of sending for his affianced and spending the rest of his life in the West Indies. Thorpe did not take him too seriously, but seeing that there was no prospect of getting away for some time, and believing that Cuba would offer himself entertainment for several months, he sent to New Orleans for his mail, and wrote to Nina announcing his present plans. Whether the letters never left the Havana post-office, or whether the mail sack was lost overboard later, or ignored in the excitement at New Orleans, no one will ever know. Nor does it matter; they were never received, and that is all that concerns this tale. Thorpe and Harold started inland immediately, and finally determined to go to Jamaica and San Domingo before returning to Havana. He knew it was worse than folly to trust letters to the wretched inland post-offices, and he had told Nina in his letter of explanation not to expect another for some time. He should be in New Orleans on the first of May, and, meanwhile, he kept a diary for her future entertainment.
While exploring the mountain forests in the central part of Hayti, their guide was murdered, and they were two months finding their way to San Domingo. They were months of excitement, adventure, and more than one hair-breadth escape. Thorpe would have been in his element had it been possible to communicate with Nina, and could he have been sure of getting out of the West Indies before the rainy season began. They came unexpectedly upon San Domingo; and he learned that war had broken out in the United States during April. They made what haste they could to Havana, Harold as eager to return to civilisation as his brother; for vermin and land-crabs had tempered his enthusiasm, and he had acquired a violent dislike for the negro. At Havana, Thorpe found no letters awaiting him. He also learned from an American resident that postal communication had ceased between the North and South on May 31st. He wondered blankly at his stupidity in not going North while there was yet time, but like many others, he had heard so much talk of war that he had ceased to believe in its certainty. He could only hope that his letter had reached Nina, but knew that it was more than doubtful. The Southern ports were in a state of blockade. He and his brother ran it in a little boat rowed by themselves. In New Orleans he read the packet of letters from Nina, that awaited him.
II
The great change in Nina Randolph’s appearance and manner induced no small amount of gossip in San Francisco. Women are quick to scent the sin that society loves best to discuss, and there were many that suspected the truth: her long retirement had prepared them for an interesting sequel. Nina guessed that she was dividing with the war the honours of attention in a small but law-making circle, but was quite indifferent. She rarely went down to the parlour when people called, but sat in her bedroom staring out at the bay; the Lester house was on the summit of Clay Street hill.
Her father was deeply anxious, full of gloomy forebodings. He believed Thorpe to be dead, and shook with horror when he thought of what the consequences might be.
“Wouldn’t you like a change?” he asked her one day. “How would you like go to New York? Molly and Mrs. Lester could go with you.”
Nina shook her head, colouring faintly.
“I see. You are afraid of missing Thorpe. I wish there were some way of finding out—”
She turned to him with eager eyes. “Would you go, papa,—to New Orleans? I haven’t dared to ask it. Go and see what is the matter.”
“My child, I could not get there. The ports are blockaded; if I attempted the folly of getting to New Orleans by land, I should probably be shot as a spy. It is for those reasons that he will have great difficulty in getting here, as he did not have the forethought to leave the South in time.”
To this Nina made no reply, and as she would not talk to him, he left her.
That evening Miss Shropshire came into Nina’s room, and spoke twice before she was answered. The room was dark.
“Look here, Nina!” she said peremptorily. “You’ve got to brace up. People are talking. I know it!”
“Are they? What does it matter? I have no more use for them. I may as well tell you I have come to the conclusion that Dudley Thorpe ceased to care for me, and that is the reason of his silence. He has gone back to England.”
“I don’t believe it. You’re growing morbid. Women frequently do after that sort of experience. I remember Beatrix sat in one position for nearly a month, staring at the floor: wouldn’t even brush her teeth. You have too much brains for that sort of thing.”
“I believe it. I have made up my mind. He is in England. He wrote me once that if it were not that I had asked him not to leave the country, he would run over, he was so tired of America. He went, and stayed.”
“Well, then, go out in the world and flirt as you used to. Don’t let any man bowl you over like this; and, for Heaven’s sake, don’t mope any more!”
“I hate the thought of every man in San Francisco. When I knew them, I was an entirely different woman. I couldn’t adapt myself to them if I wanted to—which I don’t.”
“But there are always new ones—”
“Oh, don’t! Haven’t you imagination enough to guess what this last year has made of me? If I got as far as a ball-room I’d stand up in the middle of the floor and shriek out that since I was there last my heart had lived and been broken, that I had lost a husband and buried a baby—”
“Then, for Heaven’s sake, stay at home! But I think,” with deep meaning, “that you had better try a change of some sort, Nina. If you don’t want to risk going East, why not visit some of the Spanish people in Southern California?”
“I shall stay here.”
It was during the next night that Nina left her bed suddenly, flung herself into a chair, and pressed her elbows hard upon her knees. She had barely slept for three nights. Her nerves were in a highly irritable state. If any one had entered she would not have been able to control her temper. Black depression possessed her; the irritability of her nerves alternated with the sensation of dropping through space; and her relaxed body cried for stimulant.
She twisted her hands together, her face convulsed. “Why should I fight?” she argued aloud. “In that, at least, I should find temporary oblivion. And what else have I left? Down deep, ever since I got his last letter, I have known that I should never see him again. It is my destiny: that is the beginning and the end of it. This is the second time I have wanted it since the baby died. I beat it out of me the first time. I hoped—hoped—and if he were here I should win. If I could be happy, and go away with him, it would not come again: I know—I know. He could have got me some word by this. He is not dead. There is only one other explanation. Men are all alike, they say. Why should I struggle? For what? What have I to live for? I am the most wretched woman on earth.”
But she did struggle. The dawn found her sitting there still, her muscles almost rigid. Her love for Thorpe had undergone no change; it took the fight into its own hands. And it seemed to her that she could hear her soul beg for its rights; its voice rose above the persistent clamour of her body.
She went to bed and slept for a few hours; but when she awoke the desire in her nerves was madder than ever. Every part of her cried out for stimulant. She had no love for the taste of liquor; the demand came from her nerve-centres. But still she fought on, materialising the monster, fancying that she held it by the throat, that she cut its limbs off, its heart out; but it shook itself together with magnificent vitality, and laughed in her face.
Days passed. The clamour in her body strove to raise itself above the despairing cry in her soul. But still, mechanically, without hope, she lifted her ear to the higher cry, knowing that if she fell now she should never rise again in her earthly life, nor speak with Dudley Thorpe, should he, perhaps, return.
She invoked the image of her baby, the glory of the few days she had known it. But a bitter tide of resentment overwhelmed the memory of that brief exaltation. If she was to be saved, why had not the baby been spared? Those who shared her secret had attempted to console her by assuring her that its death was a mercy for all concerned. She had not answered them; but her grief was cut with contempt for their lack of vision. The baby might have cost her her social position, but it would have stood between her soul and perdition. It had been taken—by One who was supposed to know the needs of all His creatures. Therefore it was only reasonable to assume that He wished her to be destroyed.
She thought of nothing else, but cunningly pretended to be absorbed in her books.
There came a night when her nerves shrieked until her brain surged with the din of them, and her hands clutched at the air, her eyes hardened and expanded with greed, her lips were forced apart by her panting breath. She jerked the stopper out of a bottle of cologne and swallowed a quarter of the contents, then flung her wraps about her, stole downstairs and out of the house, found a carriage, and was driven to South Park.
III
Two weeks later she sat huddled over the fire in the library. Her face was yellow; her eyes were sunken and dull; her hands trembled. She looked thirty-five.
In her lap lay a letter from Dudley Thorpe. He and his brother, at the risk of their lives, had got through the lines and reached New York. The excitement, fatigue, and exposure had nearly killed Harold, who was in a hospital in a precarious condition. Thorpe could not leave him. He implored her to come on to New York at once; and he had never written a more tender and passionate letter.
Cochrane opened the door, and announced that Dr. Clough had called.
“Tell him to come here,” she said.
Dr. Clough wore his usual jaunty air, and he made no comment on her appearance; he had come straight from Miss Shropshire.
“Sit down,” said Nina, curtly, interrupting his demonstrations. “You come at the right moment. I was about to send for you.”
“My dear cousin Nina! I hope there is no—”
“Let me talk, please. Do you wish to marry me?”
Clough caught his breath. He flushed, despite his nerve. “Of course I do,” he stammered. “What a question! Certainly there never was a woman so original. It is like you to settle matters in your own way.”
“Don’t delude yourself for a moment that I even like you. Of all the men I have ever known, the sort of person I take you to be has my most unmitigated contempt. It is for that reason I marry you. I must marry some one at once to keep myself from ruining the life of Dudley Thorpe. I choose you, because, in the first place, I am so vile a thing that no punishment is severe enough for me; and, in the second, Fate has acquitted herself so brilliantly in regard to my humble self that I feel a certain satisfaction in giving her all she wants.”
“My dear Nina, you are morbid.” He spoke pleasantly, but he turned away his eyes.
“Possibly; it would be somewhat remarkable if I were not. Do you still wish to marry me?”
“Certainly. I do not take your rather uncomplimentary utterances seriously. In your present frame of mind—”
“It is the only frame of mind I shall ever be in. You will have an unpleasant domestic life; but you will have all the money you want. Don’t flatter yourself for a moment that you will either control or cure me. You will be no more in my house than a well-paid butler—after my father has been induced to accept you, which will not be in a hurry. Meanwhile, you will probably beat me: you are quite capable of it; but you may save yourself the exertion.”
“I shall not beat you, Nina, dear.” He spoke softly, with an assumption of masculine indulgence; but his small pointed teeth moved suddenly apart.
“You will understand, of course, that this engagement must not get to my father’s ears. He would lock me up before he would permit me to marry you. He has all the contempt of the gentleman for the cad, of the real man for the bundle of petty imitations: and you are his pet aversion. On the tenth, he is obliged to go to San José to attend an important law-suit. He will be detained not less than three days. We shall marry on the eleventh—at Mrs. Lester’s. I shall not tell my mother, for I will not give her the pleasure of conspiring against my father. I suppose that I shall break my father’s heart; but I don’t know that I care. He might have saved me, if he had been stronger, and I am no longer capable of loving any one—”
“Suppose Mr. Thorpe should come out here after you, anyhow, married or not.”
“He will do nothing of the sort. One reason you would be incapable of understanding, should I attempt to explain; the other is, that he will no longer want me after I have been the wife of a person of your sort.”
“My word, Nina, you are rather rough on a fellow; but give me a kiss, and I’ll overlook it.”
She lifted her face, and let him kiss her, then struck him so violent a blow that the little man staggered.
“Now go,” she said, “and don’t let me see you again until the eleventh. If you have anything to say, you can write it to Molly Shropshire.”
When he had gone, she drew her hand across her lips, then looked closely at it as if expecting to see a stain. Then she shuddered, and huddled closer to the fire, and in a few moments threw Dudley Thorpe’s letter on the coals.
IV
“Well, some women are remarkable!” exclaimed Miss Shropshire to her sister, Mrs. Lester. “The idea of her having a wedding dress,—white satin, train, and all. She even fussed over at least twenty pairs of slippers, and I was almost afraid to bring home that bridal veil for fear it wouldn’t suit her.”
“I suppose she thinks that weddings, white satin ones, at least, only come once in a lifetime.” Mrs. Lester was a tired little woman, quite subservient to her strong-minded sister. The wedding was to take place in her back parlour at an hour when Mr. Lester, occupied and unsuspecting, would be away from home. She did not approve of the plot; but her opinion, much less her consent, had not been asked.
“I’d like to thoroughly understand Nina Randolph, just for once,” said Miss Shropshire, meditatively. “It would be interesting, to say the least.”
The night before the wedding she went into Nina’s room, and found her standing before the mirror arrayed in her bridal finery,—veil, gloves, slippers, all. She had regained her natural hues; but her eyes were still sunken, her face pinched and hard. She was almost plain.
“Nina! Why on earth have you put on those things? Don’t you know it’s bad luck?”
Nina laughed.
Miss Shropshire exclaimed, “Umburufen!” and rapped loudly three times on the top of a chair. “There! I hope that will do some good. I know what you are thinking—you are so unlucky, anyhow. But why tempt fate?” She hesitated a moment. “It is not too late. Put it off for six months, and then see how you feel about it. You are morbid now. You don’t know what changes time might—”
“No earthly power can prevent me from marrying Richard Clough to-morrow.”
“Very well, I shall stand by you, of course. That goes without saying. But I believe you are making a terrible mistake. I would rather you married almost any one else. There are several gentlemen that would be ready and willing.”
“I don’t wish to marry a gentleman.”
The next afternoon Nina, Mrs. Lester, and Miss Shropshire were in the back parlour awaiting the arrival of Clough, his best man, and the clergyman, when there was a sudden furious pull at the bell of the front door. Nina sprang to her feet. For the first time in many weeks animation sprang to her eyes.
“It is my father!” she said. “Close the folding-doors. Molly, I rely on you! Do you understand? Send him away, and as quickly as possible. Tell a servant to watch outside, and take the others round the back way.”
Before she had finished speaking, Mr. Randolph’s voice was heard in the hall, demanding his daughter. The servants had been given orders to deny the fact of Miss Randolph’s presence in the house to any one but Dr. Clough. Nevertheless, Mr. Randolph brushed past the woman that opened the door, and entered the front parlour. Miss Shropshire joined him at once. Every word of the duologue that followed could be heard on the other side of the folding-doors.
“Why, Mr. Randolph!” exclaimed Miss Shropshire, easily. “Why this unexpected honour? I thought you were in San José.”
“Is my daughter here?” He was evidently much excited, and endeavouring to control himself.
“Nina? No. Why? Is she not at Redwoods? She was to go down yesterday.”
“She is not at Redwoods. I have received private and reliable information that she is to marry Richard Clough this afternoon, and I have reason to think that she is in this house.”
“What? Nina going to marry that horrid little man? I don’t believe it!” Miss Shropshire was a woman of thorough and uncompromising methods.
“Is Nina in this house or not?”
“Mr. Randolph! Of course she is not. I would have nothing to do with such an affair.”
Mr. Randolph swallowed a curse, and strode up and down the room several times. Then he paused and confronted her once more.
“Molly,” he said, “I appeal to you as a woman. If you have any friendship for Nina, give her up to me and save her from ruin, or tell me where she is. It is not yet too late. I will risk everything and take her abroad. She is ruining her own life and Thorpe’s and mine by a mistaken sense of duty to him, and contempt for herself: I know her so well that I feel sure that is the reason for this act she contemplates to-day. I will take her to Thorpe. He could reclaim her. Clough—you can perhaps imagine how Clough will treat her! Picture the life she must lead with that man, and give her up to me. And, if you have any heart, keep my own from breaking. She is all that I have. You know what my home is; I have lived in hell for twenty-four years for this girl’s sake. I have kept a monster in my house that Nina should have no family scandal to reproach me with. And all to what purpose if she marries a cad and a brute? I would have endured the torments of the past twenty-five years, multiplied tenfold, to have secured her happiness. If she marries Richard Clough, it will kill me.”
“She is not here,” replied Miss Shropshire.
Mr. Randolph trembled from head to foot. “My God!” he cried, “have you women no heart? Are all women, I wonder, like those I have known? My wife, a demon who nursed her baby on brandy! My daughter, repaying the devotion of years with blackest ingratitude! And you—” He fell, rather than dropped to his knees, and caught her dress in his hands.
“Molly,” he prayed, “give her to me. Save her from becoming one of the outcast of the earth. For that is what this marriage will mean to her.”
Miss Shropshire set her teeth. “Nina is not here,” she said.
Mr. Randolph stumbled to his feet, and rushed from the house. He walked rapidly down the hill toward Old Trinity in Pine Street, the church Nina attended, his dislocated mind endeavouring to suggest that he wait for her there. His agitation was so marked that several people turned and looked after him in surprise. He reached the church. A carriage approached, passed. Its occupants were Richard Clough, a well-known gambler named Bell, and a man who carried the unmistakable cut of a parson.
Mr. Randolph rushed to the middle of the street, ordering the driver to stop. The window of the carriage was open. He caught Clough by the shoulder.
“Are you on your way to marry my daughter?” he demanded.
“My dear Uncle James,” replied the young man, airily, “you are all wrong. I am on my way to marry—it is true; but the unfortunate lady is Miss McCullum.”
Mr. Randolph turned to the gambler, and implored him, as a man of honour, to tell him the truth.
Bell replied: “As a man of honour, I dare not.”
Mr. Randolph appealed to the clergyman, but met only a solemn scowl, and mechanically dropped back, with the sensation of having lost the good-will of all men. A moment later the carriage was rattling up the street at double speed, and he cursed his stupidity in not forcing an entrance, or hanging on behind. There was no other carriage in sight.
V
The days were very long to Dudley Thorpe. The invalid recovered slowly, and demanded much of his time. Before an answer to his letter could be expected, Harold was sufficiently mended to be removed to the house of a friend on Long Island. He declared his intention of sailing for California as soon as he could obtain the doctor’s permission to travel. The lady to whom he was betrothed came over from England and married him; and Thorpe had little to do but to think.
He bitterly reproached himself that he had asked Nina to come to New York, instead of trusting to his brother’s recuperative powers, and starting at once for California. He dared not go now, lest he pass her. But he was beset by doubts, and some of them were nightmares. She would come if her child had lived, and she had weathered her year. If she had not! He knew what she had suffered during that year, would have guessed without the aid of the few letters she had written after letters from him had ceased to reach California. Exposure and shame might have come to her since. If he could have been sure that she believed in him, he would have feared little; but it was not to be expected that she had received a letter he had sent her from the West Indies. The telegraph has averted many a tragedy, but there was none across the United States. With all his will and health and wealth and love, he had been as powerless to help her in the time of her great trouble, was as powerless to help her now, as if he were in the bottom of a Haytian swamp. All that was fine in him, and there was much, was thoroughly roused. He not only longed for her and for his child, but he vowed to devote the rest of his life to her happiness. It seemed to him incredible that he could have committed such a series of mistakes; that no man who loved a woman with the passion of his life had ever so consistently done the wrong thing. But mistakes are not isolated acts, to be plucked out of life and viewed as an art student views his first model, in which he finds only a few bald lines; even when the pressure of many details is not overwhelming it often clouds the mental vision. Years after, Thorpe accepted the fact that the great links in that year’s chain of events were connected by hundreds of tiny links as true of form; but not then.
One day a budget of mail got through the lines, and in it was a letter for him. It was from Nina, and was dated shortly after the last he had found awaiting him when he arrived from Cuba.
I don’t know where you are, if you will ever get this; but I must write to you. The baby is dead. It was a little girl. It is buried in the forest.
Nina.
The steamer by which he expected her arrived a few days later. It brought him the following letter:
I was married yesterday. My name is Mrs. Richard Clough. My husband is the son of a Haworth cobbler. I received your letter.
Nina Randolph Clough.
VI
Mr. and Mrs. Harold Thorpe sailed on the next steamer for California. Dudley Thorpe worked his way South, offered his services to the Confederacy, fought bitterly and brilliantly, when he was not in hospital with a bullet in him, rose to the rank of colonel, and made a name for himself which travelled to California and to England. At the close of the war, he returned home and entered Parliament. He became known as a hard worker, a member of almost bitter honesty, and a forcible and magnetic speaker. Socially he was, first, a lion, afterward, a steady favourite. Altogether he was regarded as a success by his fellow-men.
It was some years before he heard from his brother. Harold was delighted with the infinite variety of California; his health was remarkably good; and he had settled for life. Only his first letter contained a reference to Nina Randolph. She had lived in Napa for a time, then gone to Redwoods. She never came to San Francisco; therefore he had been unable to call, had never even seen her. All Thorpe’s other friends had been very kind to himself and his wife.
Thorpe long before this had understood. The rage and disgust of the first months had worn themselves out, given place to his intimate knowledge of her. Had he returned to California it would have been too late to do her any good, and would have destroyed the dear memory of her he now possessed. He still loved her. For many months the pain of it had been unbearable. It was unbearable no longer, but he doubted if he should ever love another woman. The very soul of him had gone out to her, and if it had returned he was not conscious of it. As the years passed, there were long stretches when she did not enter his thought, when memory folded itself thickly about her and slept. Time deals kindly with the wounds of men. And he was a man of active life, keenly interested in the welfare of his country. But he married no other woman.
It was something under ten years since he had left California, when he received a letter from his sister-in-law stating that his brother was dead, and begging him to come out and settle her affairs, and take her home. She had neither father nor brother; and he went at once, although he had no desire to see California again.
There were rails between New York and San Francisco by this time, and he found the latter a large flourishing and hideous city. The changes were so great, the few acquaintances he met during the first days of his visit looked so much older, that his experience of ten years before became suddenly blurred of outline. He was not quite forty; but he felt like an old man groping in his memory for an episode of early youth. The eidolon of Nina Randolph haunted him, but with ever-evading lineaments. He did not know whether to feel thankful or disappointed.
He devoted himself to his sister-in-law’s affairs for a week, then, finding a Sunday afternoon on his hands, started, almost reluctantly, to call on Mrs. McLane.
South Park was unchanged.
He stood for a moment, catching his breath. The city had grown around and away from it; streets had multiplied, bristling with the ugliest varieties of modern architecture; but South Park, stately, dark, solemn, had not changed by so much as a lighter coat of paint. His eyes moved swiftly to the Randolph house. Its shutters were closed. The dust of summer was thick upon them. He stood for fully five minutes staring at it, regardless of curious eyes. Something awoke and hungered within him.
“My vanished youth, I suppose,” he thought sadly. “I certainly have no wish to see her, poor thing! But she was very sweet.”
He walked slowly round the crescent on the left, and rang the bell at Mrs. McLane’s door. As the butler admitted him he noted with relief that the house had been refurnished. A buzz of voices came from the parlour. The man lifted a portière, and Mrs. McLane, with an exclamation of delight, came forward, with both hands outstretched. Her face was unchanged, but she would powder her hair no more. It was white.
“Thorpe!” she exclaimed. “It is not possible? How long have you been here? A week! Mon Dieu! And you come only now! But I suppose I am fortunate to be remembered at all.”
Thorpe assured her that she had been in his thoughts since the hour of his arrival, but that he wished to be free of the ugly worries of business before venturing into her distracting presence.
“I don’t forgive you, although I give you a dinner on Thursday. Will that suit you? Poor little Mrs. Harold! We have all been attention itself to her for your sake. Come here and sit by me; but you may speak to your other old friends.”
Two of the “Macs” were there; the other was dead, he was told later. Both were married, and one was dressed with the splendours of Paris. Mrs. Earle was as little changed as Mrs. McLane, and her still flashing eyes challenged him at once. Guadalupe Hathaway was unmarried and had grown stout; but she was as handsome as of old.
They all received him with flattering warmth, “treated him much better than he deserved,” Mrs. McLane remarked, “considering he had never written one of them a line;” and he felt the past growing sharp of outline. There were several very smart young ladies present, two of whom he remembered as awkward little girls. The very names of the others were unknown to him. They knew of him, however, and one of them affected to disapprove of him sharply because he had “fought against the flag.” Mrs. McLane took up the cudgels for her South, and party feeling ran high.
Nina Randolph’s name was not mentioned. He wondered if she were dead. Not so much as a glance was directed toward the most momentous episode of his life. Doubtless they had forgotten that he had once been somewhat attentive to her. But his memory was breaking in the middle and marshalling its forces at the farther end; the events of the intervening ten years were now a confused mass of shadows. Mrs. Earle sang a Mexican love-song, and he turned the leaves for her. When he told Guadalupe Hathaway that he was glad to find her unchanged, she replied:—
“I am fat, and you know it. And as I don’t mind in the least, you need not fib about it. You have a few grey hairs and lines; but you’ve worn better than our men, who are burnt out with trade winds and money grubbing.”
He remained an hour. When he left the house, he walked rapidly out of the Park, casting but one hasty glance to the right, crossed the city and went straight to the house of Molly Shropshire’s sister. It also was unchanged, a square ugly brown house on a corner over-looking the blue bay and the wild bright hills beyond. The houses that had sprung up about it were cheap and fresh, and bulging with bow-windows.
“Yes,” the maid told him, “Miss Shropshire still lived there, and was at home.” The room into which she showed him was dark, and had the musty smell of the unpopular front parlour. A white marble slab on the centre table gleamed with funereal significance. Thorpe drew up the blinds, and let in the sun. He was unable to decide if the room had been refurnished since the one occasion upon which he had entered it before; but it had an old-fashioned and dingy appearance.
He heard a woman’s gown rustle down the stair, and his nerves shook. When Miss Shropshire entered, she did not detect his effort at composure. She had accepted the flesh of time, and her hair was beginning to turn; but she shook hands in her old hearty decided fashion.
“I heard yesterday that you were here,” she said. “Take that armchair. I rather hoped you’d come. We used to quarrel; but, after all, you are an Englishman, and I can never forget that I was born over there, although I don’t remember so much as the climate.”
“Will you tell me the whole story? I did not intend to come to see you, to mention her name. But it has come back, and I must know all that there is to know—from the very date of my leaving up to now. Of course, she wrote me that you were in her confidence.”
She told the story of a year which had been as big with import for one woman as for a nation. “Mr. Randolph died six months after the wedding,” she concluded, wondering if some men were made of stone. “It killed him. He did not see her again until he was on his death-bed. Then he forgave her. Any one would, poor thing. He left his money in trust, so that she has a large income, and is in no danger of losing it. She lives with her mother at Redwoods. Clough died some years ago—of drink. It was in his blood, I suppose, for almost from the day he set foot in Redwoods he was a sot.”
“And Nina?”
“Don’t try to see her,” said Miss Shropshire, bluntly. “You would only be horrified,—you wouldn’t recognise her if you met her on the street. She is breaking, fortunately. I saw her the other day, for the first time in two years, and she told me she was very ill.”
“Have you deserted her?”
“Don’t put it that way! I shall always love Nina Randolph, and I am often sick with pity. But she never comes here, and one cannot go to Redwoods. It is said that the orgies there beggar description. Even the Hathaways, who are their nearest neighbours, never enter the gates. It is terrible! And if your letter had come six days earlier, it would all have been different. But she was born to bad luck.”
Thorpe rose. “Thank you,” he said. “Are your sisters well? I shall be here only a few days longer, but I shall try to call again.”
She laid her hand on his arm. She had a sudden access of vision. “Don’t try to see Nina,” she said, impressively.
“God forbid!” he said.
VII
He slept not at all that night. He had thought that his days of poignant emotion were over, that he had worn out the last of it on the blood-soaked fields of Virginia, on nights between days when Death rose with the sun; but up from their long sleep misery and love rose with the vigour of their youth, and claimed him. And the love was for a woman who no longer existed, whose sodden brain doubtless held no memory of him, or remembered only to curse him. He strove to imagine her as she must be. She rose before him in successive images of what she had been: from the night he had met her to the morning of their last interview on the mountain,—a series of images sometimes painful, always beautiful. Then his imagination created her as she must have been during the months of her solitude in the midst of a wild and beautiful country, when in her letters she had sent him so generous and so exquisite a measure of herself; then the last months, when he would have been half mad with love and pity if he had known. Nor was that all: it seemed to him in the torments of that night that he realised for the first time what he had lost, what poignant, enduring, and varied happiness might have been his during the past ten years. Instead, he had had excitement, honours, and mental activity; he had not been happy for an hour. And the possibility of such happiness, of union with the one woman whom he was capable of passionately loving with soul and mind and body, was as dead as his youth, buried with the soul of a woman whose face he would not recognise. She was above ground, this woman, and a different being! He repeated the fact aloud; but it was the one fact his imagination would not grasp and present to his mental vision. It realised her suffering, her morbid despair, her attitude to herself, to the world, and to him, when she had decided to marry Clough; but the hideous metamorphosis of body and spirit was outside its limitations.
In the morning he asked his sister-in-law if she would leave California at the end of the week. She was a methodical and slow-moving little person, and demurred for a time, but finally consented to make ready. Her business affairs—which consisted of several unsold ranches—could be left in the hands of an agent; there was little more that her brother-in-law could do.
Harold’s remains had been temporarily placed in the receiving vault on Lone Mountain. Thorpe went out to the cemetery in the afternoon to make the final arrangements for removing them to England.
Lone Mountain can be seen from any part of San Francisco; scarcely a house but has a window from which one may receive his daily hint that even Californians are mortal. Here is none of the illusion of the cemetery of the flat, with its thickly planted trees and shrubbery, where the children are taken to walk when they are good, and to wonder at the glimpses of pretty little white houses and big white slates with black letters. The shining tombs and vaults and monuments, tier above tier, towering at the end of the city, flaunt in one’s face the remorselessness and the greed of death. In winter, the paths are running brooks; one imagines that the very dead are soaked. In summer, the dusty trees and shrubs accentuate the marble pride of dead and living men. Behind, higher still, rises a bare brown mountain with a cross on its summit,—Calvary it is called; and on stormy nights, or on days when the fog is writhing in from the ocean, blurring even that high sharp peak, one fancies the trembling outlines of a figure on the cross.
To-day the tombs were scarcely visible within the fine white mist which had been creeping in from the Pacific since morning and had made a beautiful ghost-land of the entire city. The cross on Calvary looked huge and misshapen, the marbles like the phantoms of those below. The mist dripped heavily from the trees, the walks were wet. It is doubtful if there is so gloomy, so disturbing, so fascinating a burying-ground on earth as the Lone Mountain of San Francisco.
The sexton’s house was near the gates. Thorpe completed his business, and started for the carriage which had brought him. He paused for a moment in the middle of the broad road and looked up. In the gently moving mist the shafts seemed to leave their dead, and crawl through the groves, as if to some ghoulish tryst. Thorpe thought that it would be a good place for a man, if lost, to go mad in. But, like all the curious phases of California, it interested him, and in a moment he sauntered slowly upward. His own mood was not hilarious, and although he had no wish to join the cold hearts about him, he liked their company for the moment.
Some one approached him from above. It was a woman, and she picked her way carefully down the steep hill-side. She loomed oddly through the mist, her outlines shifting. As she passed Thorpe, he gave her the cursory glance of man to unbeautiful woman. She was short and stout; her face was dark and large, her hair grizzled about the temples, her expression sullen and dejected, her attire rich. She lifted her eyes, and stopped short.
“Dudley!” she said; and Thorpe recognised her voice.
He made no attempt to answer her. He was hardly conscious of anything but the wish that he had left California that morning.
“You did not recognise me?” she said, with a laugh he did not remember.
“No.”
He stared at her, trying to conjure up the woman who had haunted him during the night. She had gone. There was a dim flash in the eyes, a broken echo in the voice of this woman, which gave him the impression of looking upon the faded daguerreotype of one long dead, or upon a bundle of old letters.
Her face dropped under his gaze. “I had hoped never to see you again,” she muttered. “But I don’t know that I care much. It is long since I have thought of you. I care for one thing only,—nothing else matters. Still, I have a flicker of pride left: I would rather you should not have seen me an ugly old sot. I believe I was very pretty once; but I have forgotten.”
Thorpe strove to speak, to say something to comfort the poor creature in her mortification; but he could only stare dumbly at her, while something strove to reach out of himself into that hideous tomb and clasp the stupefied soul which was no less his than in the brief day when they had been happy together. As long as that body lived on, it carried his other part. And after? He wondered if he could feel more alone then than now, did it take incalculable years for his soul to find hers.
She looked up and regarded him sullenly. “You are unchanged,” she said. “Life has prospered with you, I suppose. I haven’t read the papers nor heard your name mentioned for years; but I read all I could find about you during the war; and you look as if you had had few cares. Are you married?”
“No.”
“You have been true to me, I suppose.” And again she laughed.
“Yes, I suppose that is the reason. At least I have cared to marry no other woman.”
“Hm!” she said. “Well, the best thing you can do is to forget me. I’m sorry if I hurt your pride, but I don’t feel even flattered by your constancy. I have neither heart nor vanity left; I am nothing but an appetite,—an appetite that means a long sight more to me than you ever did. To-morrow, I shall have forgotten your existence again. Once or twice a year, when I am sober,—comparatively,—I come here to visit my father’s tomb. Why, I can hardly say, unless it is that I find a certain satisfaction in contemplating my own niche. I am an unconscionable time dying.”
“Are you dying?”
“I’m gone to pieces in every part of me. My mother threw me downstairs the other day, and that didn’t mend matters.”
“Come,” he said. “I have no desire to prolong this interview. There is a private carriage at the gate. Is it yours? Then, if you will permit me, I will see you to it.”
She walked beside him without speaking again. He helped her into her carriage, lifted his hat without raising his eyes, then dismissed his carriage, and walked the miles between the burying-ground and his hotel.
VIII
Four days later he received a note from Miss Hathaway:—
“Nina Randolph is dying; I have just seen her doctor, who is also ours. I do not know if this will interest you. She is at Redwoods.”
An hour later Thorpe was in the train. He had not stopped to deliberate. Nothing could alter the fact that Nina Randolph was his, and eternally. He responded to the summons as instinctively as if she had been his wife for the past ten years. Nor did he shrink from the death-bed scene; hell itself could not be worse than the condition of his mind had been during the past four days.
There was no trap for hire at the station; he walked the mile to the house. It was a pale-blue blazing day. The May sun shone with the intolerable Californian glare. The roads were already dusty. But when he reached the avenue at Redwoods, the temperature changed at once. The trees grew close together, and the creek, full to the top, cooled the air; it was racing merrily along, several fine salmon on its surface. He experienced a momentary desire to spear them. Suddenly he returned to the gates; he had carried into the avenue a sense of something changed. He looked down the road sharply,—the road up which he had come the last time he had visited Redwoods, choking on a lumbering stage. Then he looked up the wooded valley, and back again. It was some moments before he realised wherein lay the change that had disturbed his introspective vision; one of the great redwoods that had stood by the bridge where the creek curved just beyond the entrance to the grounds, was gone. He wondered what had happened to it, and retraced his steps.
The house, the pretty little toy castle with its yellow-plastered brown-trimmed walls, looked the same; he had but an indistinct memory of it. Involuntarily, his gaze travelled to the mountains; they were a mass of blurred redwoods in a dark-blue mist. But they were serene and beautiful; so was all nature about him.
He rang the bell. Cochrane opened the door. The man had aged; but his face was as stolid as ever.
“Mr. Thorpe, sir?” he said.
“Yes; I wish to see Miss—Mrs. Clough.”
“She won’t live the day out, sir.”
“Show me up to her room. I shall stay here. Is any one else with her?”
“No, sir; Mrs. Randolph has been no good these two days, and the maid that has been looking out for Miss Nina is asleep. I’ve been giving her her medicine. We don’t like strange nurses here. Times are changed, and everybody knows now; but we keep to ourselves as much as possible. There’ve been times when we’ve had company—too much; but I made up my mind they should die alone. You can go up, though.”
“Thanks. You can go to sleep, if you wish.”
Cochrane led him down the hall with its beautiful inlaid floor, scratched and dull, up the wide stair with its faded velvet carpet, and opened the door of a large front room.
“The drops on the table are to be given every hour, sir; the next at twenty minutes to two.” He closed the door and went away.
The curtains of the room were wide apart. The sun flaunted itself upon the old carpet, the handsome old-fashioned furniture. Thorpe went straight to the windows, and drew the curtains together, then walked slowly to the bed.
Nina lay with her eyes open, watching him intently. Her face was pallid and sunken; but she looked less unlike her old self. She took his hand and pressed it feebly.
“I am sorry I spoke so roughly the other day,” she said. “But I was not quite myself. I have touched nothing since; I couldn’t, after seeing you. It is that that is killing me; but don’t let it worry you. I am very glad.”
Thorpe sat down beside her and chafed her hands gently. They were cold.
“It was a beautiful little baby,” she said, abruptly. “And it looked so much like you that it was almost ridiculous.”
“I was a brute to have left you, whether you wished it or not. It is no excuse to say that the consequences never entered my head, I was half mad that morning; and after what you had told me, I think I was glad to get away for a time.”
“We both did what we believed to be best, and ruined—well, my life, and your best chance of happiness, perhaps. It is often so, I notice. Too much happiness is not a good thing for the world, I suppose. It is only the people of moderate desires and capacities that seem to get what they want. But it was a great pity; we could have been very happy. Did you care much?”
He showed her his own soul then, naked and tormented,—as it had been from the hour he had received her letters upon his return from the West Indies until Time had done its work upon him,—and as it was now and must be for long months to come. Of the intervening years he gave no account; he had forgotten them. She listened with her head eagerly lifted, her vision piercing his. He made the story short. When he had finished, her head fell back. She gave a long sigh. Was it of content? She made no other comment. She was past conventions; her emotions were already dead. And she was at last in that stage of development wherein one accepts the facts of life with little or no personal application.
“It didn’t surprise me when you came in,” she said, after a moment. “I felt that you would come—My life has been terrible, terrible! Do you realise that! Have they told you? No woman has ever fallen lower than I have done. I am sorry, for your sake; I can’t repent in the ordinary way. I have an account to square with God, if I ever meet Him and He presumes to judge me. If you will forgive me, that is all that I care about.”
“I forgive you! Good God, I wonder you don’t hate me!”
“I did for a time, not because I blamed you, but because I hated everybody and everything. There were intervals of terrible retrospect and regret; but I made them as infrequent as I could, and finally I stifled them altogether. I grew out of touch with every memory of a life when I was comparatively innocent and happy. I strove to make myself so evil that I could not distinguish an echo if one tried to make itself heard; and I succeeded. Now, all that has fallen from me,—in the last few hours, since I have had relief from physical torments,—for I could not drink after I saw you, and I had to pay the penalty. It is not odd, I suppose, that I should suddenly revert: my impulses originally were all toward good, my mental impulses; the appetite was always a purely physical thing; and when Death approaches, he stretches out a long hand and brushes aside the rubbish of life, letting the soul’s flower see the light again for a few moments. Give me the drops. Now that you are here, I want to live as long as I can.”
He lifted her head, and gave her the medicine. She lay back suddenly, pinioning his arm.
“Let it stay there,” she said.
“Are you sure, Nina, that your case is so bad?” he asked. “Couldn’t you make an effort, and let me take you to England?”
She shook her head with a cynical smile. “My machinery is like a dilapidated old engine that has been eaten up with rust, and battered by stones for twenty years. There isn’t a bit of me that isn’t in pieces.”
She closed her eyes, and slept for a half hour. He put both arms about her and his head beside hers.
“Dudley,” she said, finally.
“Well?”
“I had not thought of the baby for God knows how many years. It was no memory for me. But since the other day I have been haunted by that poor little grave in the big forest—”
“Would you like to have it brought down to Lone Mountain?”
She hesitated a moment, then shook her head.
“No,” she said. “In the vault with my mother and—and—him? Oh, no! no!”
“If I build a little vault for you and her will you sign a paper giving me—certain rights?”
Her face illuminated for the first time. “Oh, yes!” she said. “Oh, yes! Then I think I could sleep in peace.”
Thorpe rang for Cochrane and the gardener, wrote the paper, and had it duly witnessed. It took but a few moments, and they were alone again.
“I wonder if I shall see her—and you again, or if my unlucky star sets in this world to rise in the next? Well, I shall know soon.
“I am going, I think,” she said a few moments later. “Would you mind kissing me? Death has already taken the sin out of my body, and down deep is something that never was wholly blackened. That is yours. Take it.”
It was an hour before she died, and during that hour he kissed her many times.
A FRAGMENT
It was some twelve years later that Thorpe received a copy of a San Francisco newspaper, in which the following article was heavily marked:—
WHAT AM I BID?
AN AUCTION SALE OF FUNERAL AND WEDDING
TRAPPINGS
“What am I offered?”
“Oh, don’t sell that!” said one or two bidders.
The auctioneer held up a large walnut case. It contained a funeral wreath of preserved flowers.
“Well, I’ve sold coffins at auction in my time, so I guess I can stand this,” replied the auctioneer. “What am I offered?”
He disposed of it, with three other funeral mementos, very cheap, for the bidding was dispirited. It was at the sale yesterday, in a Montgomery Street auction-room, of the personal effects, jewelry, silverware, and household bric-a-brac of a once very wealthy San Francisco family. The head of the family was a pioneer, a citizen of wealth and high social and commercial standing. It was he who, in early days, projected South Park. There was no family in the city whose society was more sought after, or which entertained better, than that of James Randolph.
“What am I offered for this lot?”
He referred to the lot catalogued as “No. 107,” and described as “Wedding-dress, shoes, etc.”
“Don’t sell that!” The very old-clo’ man remonstrated this time.
It seemed worse than the sale of the funeral wreath. The dress was heavy white satin—had been, that is; it was yellowed with time. The tiny shoes had evidently been worn but once.
“What am I offered? Make a bid, gentlemen. I offer the lot. What am I offered?”
“One dollar.”
“One dollar I am offered for the lot—wedding-dress, shoes, etc. One dollar for the lot. Come gentlemen, bid up.”
Not an old-clo’ man in the room bid, and the outsider who bid the dollar had the happiness to see it knocked down to him.
“What am I bid for this photograph album? Bid up, gentlemen. Here’s a chance to get a fine collection of photographs of distinguished citizens, their wives, and daughters.”
A gentleman standing on the edge of the crowd quietly bid in the album. When it was handed to him, he opened it, took out his own and the photographs of several ladies, dressed in the fashion of twenty years ago, and tossed the album, with the other photographs, in the stove, remarking: “Well, they won’t go to the junk-shop.”
“What am I offered, gentlemen, for this? There is just seventeen dollars’ worth of gold in it. Bid up.”
The auctioneer held up an engraved gold medal. It was a Crimean war medal which its owner was once proud to wear. There was a time in his life when no money could have purchased it. He had risked his life for the honour of wearing it; and after his death it was offered for old gold.
“Twenty dollars.”
“Twenty dollars; twenty, twenty, twenty! Mind your bid, gentlemen. Seventeen dollars for the gold, and three for the honour. Twenty, tw-en-ty, and going, going, gone! Seventeen dollars for the gold, and three for the honour.”
In this way an ebony writing-desk, with the dead citizen’s private letters, was sold to a hand-me-down shop-keeper. A tin box with private papers went to a junk-dealer; and different lots of classical music, some worn, some marked with the givers’ names, some with verses written on the pages, were sold to second-hand dealers. “What am I bid?” The sale went rapidly on. Sometimes an old family friend would bid in an article as a souvenir. But the junk-dealers, second-hand men, and hand-me-down shop-keepers took in most of the goods.
The above articles were the contents of a chest, and were the personal effects of Mrs. Richard Clough, the late daughter of the late James Randolph, of San Francisco. She had evidently carefully packed them away at some time before her death; and the chest had been mislaid or overlooked, until it made its way, intact, and twelve years after, into the hands of the public.
And that was the last that Dudley Thorpe heard of Nina Randolph in this world.
Transcriber’s Note:
1. Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters’ errors; otherwise, every effort has been made to remain true to the author’s words and intent.
2. The original of this book did not have a Table of Contents; one has been added for the reader’s convenience.