V
THE season had worn itself away to June. The winds were an established fact, and blew from the ocean down the long clefts of the streets out into the bay beyond. Outside the Golden Gate the fog lay along the horizon like the faint gray shores of a distant country. When the winds dropped at sundown, it came creeping in, drawing its white cloak over the water, across the dunes, and finally down the streets and round the houses. All night it brooded close over the city, sleeping on its crowded hills, and in the morning lay brimming in every hollow till the valleys looked like cups crowned high with a curdling white drink.
When the sun had driven it back to its cloud-country on the horizon, there were wonderful mornings, all blue and gold. The warm rays licked up the night’s moisture, and for a few clear, still hours had the world to themselves. They burned the land dry and parched. The hills at the mouth of the bay turned fawn-color, and looked like lean, crouching lions with hides that fell away from their gaunt bones. The sea and sky were a hard-baked blue, with the little sails of boats and the strenuous green leafage of tropical plants seeming as if inlaid in the turquoise background. The gardens about South Park grew dustier and drier. Only the aloes appeared to have sap enough to retain any color, and against the faded monochrome of the surrounding shrubs they shone a strong, cold gray-blue. In the Western Addition the gardens were watered and bloomed extravagantly, till the ivy geraniums hung from the window-boxes like pieces of pink carpet, and the heliotropes dashed themselves in purple spray to the second stories.
Fashionable people were leaving town daily. Some were going to the redwoods, where the forest glades are dim and still and full of a chill solemnity, like the aisles of old cathedrals. Others were en route for one of the twin towns which tip the points of the crescent that holds Monterey Bay between its horns. Many were repairing to the country houses which have sprung up in scattered clusters down the line of the railroad to the Santa Clara valley. Here they found the warmth and idleness which Californians love. All summer the vast expanse of the valley, shut in from wind and fog by a rampart of hills, brooded under perpetual sunshine. In the motionless noons its yellow fields, where the shadows of the live-oaks lie round and black, swam in quivering veils of heat, and the smell of the tar-weed rose heavy and aromatic, like the incense from a hundred altars.
The Mortimer Gaults, being fashionable folk, had broken up their household and gone their several ways—Letitia first, with many trunks, to make visits at hotels and country houses. Mrs. Gault, like other San Francisco matrons, did not close her house, but made quick flights into the country, which she sincerely hated, and then came back thankfully to town, where she dwelt in comfort with two servants, and, when her husband was not with her, ate meals of choice daintiness, which were laid on a square of drawn-work on the end of the dining-room table.
John Gault had not been able to see Letitia before her departure, which was not so strange, as she left shortly after the night at the opera. In the one or two small gatherings which took place at the Mortimer Gaults’ before the family exodus, he had been unable to participate—at least, that was what he wrote to Maud. She, it is needless to state, knowing of that evening interview after the opera, had tried to elicit from Letitia an account of what had taken place. In this, however, she was unsuccessful. Letitia was at first stubbornly silent, then cross. But she accepted an invitation to stay with the McCormicks at their country place, the Hacienda del Pinos, in the Napa valley; and Maud felt that her extraordinary and inexplicable sister was, for once in her life, behaving like a rational human being.
Gault’s reluctance to see Letitia had been the whim of a nature harassed past bearing. He had gone from her that evening in frenzy with her, himself, and a world where life was so unlivable and being alive so remorseless a tragedy. The man who had never had a serious check in his easy course from birth to middle age had now suddenly found himself the central figure in one of those maddening dilemmas which blight or make the lives of less fortunate individuals.
The time had come when the situation called for a determined step. But what step he could not decide. What particular course of action would end the whole matter most satisfactorily for himself was the question that besieged him. He hardly gave a thought to Viola. He was the victim of either a repulsively sordid plot, or else he was a man cruelly lured by fate into a position from which it seemed impossible to extricate himself without misery of one sort or another. At one moment he saw himself as the gullible victim of a clever pair of adventurers, and laughed fiercely at the scruples which prevented him from holding them at their own valuation. At the next he was sickened at the manner in which he was degrading himself and her by giving way to the meanest and most dastardly suspicions.
He longed to think that he wronged her, and yet, so fearful was he of being hoodwinked, so inclined to distrust himself and the rest of the world, that he could not rise up and believe in her, though his love bade him. Once he thought of going to Tod and asking him to explain his conversation with Letitia, and then revolted at the idea of exposing Viola and his own weakness to the vulgar curiosity of the shallow-brained youth. The only possible ground for believing in Viola’s innocence was that her father was deceiving her, and it seemed to Gault that the old man had neither the subtlety nor the desire to deceive anybody.
After suffering these torments for some days he suddenly came to a decision. He resolved that he would have an interview with Viola, in which, if she did not voluntarily tell him the truth, he would demand it from her. He would at first try to beguile her into an explanation, and if she evaded this, he would, directly and without circumlocution, force her to tell him. He knew it was brutal, but he was past consideration for any one. He had thought of this before, but merely from the comfortable distance of casual speculation. His attitude now was one of determination. His self-indulgent, indolent nature had been goaded to a point where it could act more easily than it could endure.