ONE week from the day Viola had told her father of their contemplated return to San Francisco, Colonel Reed had passed into a memory.
Death had come and gone so quickly—so terribly, bewilderingly quickly! Viola had hardly realized what had happened to so check and change the current of her life when the days had already sprung back to their monotonous routine, and the other boarders had laid aside the expressions of lugubrious solemnity which they had worn while death had hushed the house. Now, while she sat still and stupid in her room up-stairs, they told funny stories and “joshed” each other at dinner, as they had “joshed” the old pioneer a few weeks before. Even Corinne had returned to the doll and the kitten, though, out of consideration for Viola, she played with them furtively on the corner of the balcony, where, with the assistance of an old umbrella and a pair of towels, she had built herself what she called a house. One morning, stepping out upon the balcony, Viola came upon the child lying face downward and whispering to herself while she played the solitaire the colonel had taught her, with the pack of cards he had bought for her a few days before his death.
The waters of oblivion had closed without a ripple over the old pioneer. In the dingy boarding-house where he had spent the last months of his life his name was unknown, and his fellow-lodgers had come to regard the personal part of his reminiscences as figments of his imagination. So obscure had been his situation, so little trusted his own words, that his passing had not even been awarded the short newspaper notice that is evoked by the death of the most commonplace forty-niner. In the Sacramento boarding-house Colonel Reed was as a stranger in a strange land. Only his daughter, Mrs. Seymour, and Bart Nelson were the mourners at the funeral of the man who had once been one of the most extravagant and picturesque figures of California’s brilliant youth.
At the end of the week Viola was to return to San Francisco. In her heart-sickness and desolation she had turned to her home as a cat does. After the first stunned bewilderment she woke to a sense of loneliness that chilled her to the marrow. The world seemed terribly wide and menacing as she stood thus hesitating on its verge. For the first time in her life she realized what it meant to be alone, to be thrown into that great maelstrom without a hand to hold or a shoulder to lean on.
She had no intimates—few acquaintances, even. The houses and streets of San Francisco came to her mind with a more friendly aspect than the people. Mrs. Seymour had asked her if she should write to any one. She had answered that there was no one to write to. The good-natured landlady had gazed at the girl—looking so slight and pale in her somber draperies—with a frowning and fidgeted anxiety. She thought it a very hazardous thing to let this delicate creature, still half stupefied by a sudden blow, go away alone and unprotected into a city of strangers. But Viola insisted. To herself she kept reiterating, “I want to go home.” It seemed to her as if the gaunt, gray city, crowded on its wind-swept hills, would welcome her with the silent, understanding love of a mother. It was the one friend she knew and trusted.
After the expenses of the colonel’s funeral were paid and her score settled with Mrs. Seymour, she had still nearly one thousand dollars left. This to her represented a little fortune. Even without work she could live on it for several years. Economy had been the only completed branch in Viola’s education, and in this she was as proficient as she was ignorant of all pertaining to business and the investment or disposal of money. If she could find employment she would put her money away—tie it up in an old glove, and hide it in the bottom of her trunk. Mrs. Seymour had refused to allow her to leave until she had positively arranged for a place of abode which would be waiting and ready for her. Under the direction of that sensible woman, Viola had written and engaged one of Mrs. Cassidy’s upper back rooms—it being the only place of its kind in the city where she knew the people.
The evening before her departure the last leaf was added to this momentous and miserable Sacramento chapter. Meeting her in the sitting-room, Bart Nelson had detained her and made a halting and bashful offer of marriage. Viola, too stunned by the terrible surprise of the past week to have room for any more astonishment, had listened to him indifferently, and then politely but coldly refused him.
The young man seemed to be astonished. He looked at her incredulously.
“But—but,” he stammered, “what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to San Francisco to-morrow,” she answered, rather wearily, as she knew he was aware of her purpose.