In those short years of mourning and lost faith between the downfall of Crown Point and the rise of the Con. Virginia and the Rey del Monte, Bill Cannon “lay low.” His growing reputation as an expert mining man and a rising financier had suffered. Men had disbelieved in him as they did in Virginia, and he knew the sweetness of revenge when he and the great camp rose together in titanic partnership and defied them. His detractors had hardly done murmuring together over the significant fact that Crown Point “had not scooped every dollar he had” when the great ore-body was struck on the thousand-foot level of the Rey del Monte, and Bill Cannon became a Bonanza King.
That was in seventy-four. The same year he bought the land in San Francisco and laid the foundation for the mansion on Nob Hill. His wife was still living then, and his son and daughter—the last of seven children, five of whom had died in infancy—were as yet babies. A year later the house was completed and the Cannon family, surrounded by an aura of high-colored, accumulating anecdote, moved down from Nevada and took possession.
Mrs. Cannon, who in her girlhood had been the prettiest waitress in the Yuba Hotel at Marysville and had married Bill Cannon when he was an underground miner, was the subject of much gossip in the little group which at that time made up San Francisco’s fashionable world. They laughed at her and went to her entertainments. They told stories of her small social mistakes, and fawned on her husband for positions for their sons. He understood them, treated them with an open cynical contempt, and used them. He was big enough to realize his wife’s superiority, and it amused him to punish them for their patronizing airs by savage impertinences that they winced under but did not dare resent. She was a silent, sensitive, loving woman, who never quite fitted into the frame his wealth had given her. She did her best to fill the new rôle, but it bewildered her and she did not feel at ease in it. In her heart she yearned for the days when her home had been a miner’s cabin in the foot-hills, her babies had known no nurse but herself, and her husband had been all hers. Those were her beaux jours.
She died some twelve years after the installation in San Francisco. Bill Cannon had loved her after his fashion and always respected her, and the withdrawal of her quiet, sympathetic presence left a void behind it that astonished, almost awed him. The two children, Eugene and Rose, were eighteen and thirteen at the time. She had adored them, lived for them, been a mother at once tender and intelligent, and they mourned her with passion. It was to dull the ache left by her death, that Gene, a weak and characterless changeling in this vigorous breed, sought solace in drink. And it was then that Rose, assuming her mother’s place as head of the establishment, began to show that capacity for management, that combination of executive power and gentle force—bequests from both parents—that added admiration to the idolizing love the Bonanza King had always given her.
The house in which this pampered princess ruled was one of those enormous structures which a wealth that sought extravagant ways of expending itself reared upon that protuberance in the city’s outline called by San Franciscans Nob Hill. The suddenly-enriched miners of the Comstock Lode and the magnates of the railway had money waiting for investment, and the building of huge houses seemed as good a one as any other.
Here, from their front steps, they could see the city sweeping up from its low center on to the slopes of girdling hills. It was a gray city, crowding down to the edge of the bay, which, viewed from this height, extended far up into the sky. In summer, under an arch of remote, cold blue, its outlines blurred by clouds of blown dust, it looked a bleak, unfriendly place, a town in which the stranger felt a depressing, nostalgic chill. In winter, when the sun shone warm and tender as a caress, and the bay and hills were like a mosaic in blue and purple gems, it was a panorama over which the passer-by was wont to linger. The copings of walls offered a convenient resting-place, and he could lean on them, still as a lizard in the bath of sun.
Bill Cannon’s house had unbroken command of this view. It fronted on it in irregular, massive majesty, with something in its commanding bulkiness that reminded one of its owner. It was of that epoch when men built their dwellings of wood; and numerous bay-windows and a sweep of marble steps flanked by sleeping stone lions were considered indispensable adjuncts to the home of the rich man who knew how to do things correctly. Round it spread a green carpet of lawns, close-cropped and even as velvet, and against its lower story deep borders of geraniums were banked in slopes of graduated scarlet and crimson. The general impression left by it was that of a splendor that would have been ostentatious and vulgar had not the studied elegance of the grounds and the outflung glories of sea, sky and hills imparted to it some of their own distinction and dignity.
On the day following their departure from Antelope, Cannon and his daughter reached home at nightfall. The obsequiously-welcoming butler—an importation from the East that the Bonanza King confided to Rose he found it difficult to refrain from kicking—acquainted them with the fact that “Mr. Gene had been up from San Luis Obispo” for two days, waiting for their arrival. Even as he spoke a masculine voice uttered a hail from the floor above and a man’s figure appeared on the stairway and ran quickly down. Cannon gave a careless look upward.
“Ah there, Gene,” he observed, turning to the servant who was helping him off with his coat. “Come up to town for a spell?”
The young man did not seem to notice anything especially ungracious in the greeting or probably was used to it.