“Sort of Court Minstrel,” said his father, thumping down his napkin with his hand spread flat on it. “Don Eugenio Cannon, with his minstrel playing to him in the gloaming! It’s very picturesque. Did you ever think of having a Court Fool too, or perhaps you don’t feel as if you needed one?”
He arose from his chair before Gene, who never quite understood the somewhat ferocious humor of his parent, had time to reply.
“Well, so long,” said the old man; “be good children and don’t get into mischief, and Rose, see that your brother doesn’t get lost or so carried away by the Poet and the Peasant that he forgets the dinner hour. Adios, girlie.”
A half-hour later he walked down the flight of marble steps that led in dignified sweep from the front door to the street. It was a wonderful day and for a moment he paused, looking with observing eyes at the prospect of hill and bay which seemed to glitter in the extreme clearness of the atmosphere. Like all Californians he had a strong, natural appreciation of scenic and climatic beauty. Preoccupied with thoughts and schemes which were anything but uplifting, he yet was sensitively responsive to the splendors of the view before him, to the unclouded, pure blue of the vault above, to the balmy softness of the air against his face. Some one had once asked him why he did not live in Paris as the ideal home of the man of great wealth and small scruples. His answer had been that he preferred San Francisco because there were more fine days in the year there than anywhere else he knew of.
Now he paused, sniffing the air with distended nostril and inhaling it in deep, grateful inspirations. His eye moved slowly over the noble prospect, noted the deep sapphire tint of the bay, the horizon, violet dark against a pale sky, and the gem-like blues and amethysts of the distant hills. He turned his glance in the other direction and looked down the gray expanse of the street, the wide, clear, stately street, with its air of clean spaciousness, sun-bathed, silent, almost empty, in the calm quietude of the Sabbath afternoon. The bustling thoroughfares of greater cities, with their dark, sordid crowds, their unlovely, vulgar hurry, their distracting noise, were offensive to him. The wonder crossed his mind, as it had done before, how men who could escape from such surroundings chose to remain in them.
He walked forward slowly, a thick-set, powerful figure, his frock-coat buttoned tight about the barrel-like roundness of his torso, a soft, black felt hat pulled well down on his head. His feet were broad and blunt like his hands, and in their square-toed shoes he planted them firmly on the pavement with a tread of solid, deliberate authority. His forward progress had something in it of an invincible, resistless march. He was thinking deeply as he walked, arranging and planning, and there was nothing in his figure, or movements, or the expression of his face, which suggested the sauntering aimlessness of an afternoon stroll.
When he turned into Van Ness Avenue the Ryan house was one block beyond him, a conglomerate white mass, like a crumbling wedding cake slowly settling on a green lawn. He surveyed it as he approached, noting its ugliness with a musing satisfaction. Its size and the bright summery perfection of surrounding grass and flower beds lent it impressiveness and redeemed it from the position of a colossal blight on the prospect to which architect and builder had done their best to relegate it. Prosperity, a complacent, overwhelming prosperity, was suggested not only by its bulk but by the state of studied finish and neatness that marked mansion and grounds. There did not seem to be a wilting flower bed or withered leaf left on a single stalk in the garden borders. Every window-pane gleamed like a mirror innocent of dust or blemishing spot. The marble steps up which Cannon mounted were as snowily unsullied as though no foot had passed over them since their last ablution.
The door was opened by a Chinaman, who, taking the visitor’s card, left him standing in the hall, and, deaf to his queries as to where he should go, serenely mounted the stairs. Cannon hesitated a moment, then hearing a sound of voices to his right, entered the anteroom that gave on that suite of apartments into which Dominick had walked on the night of the ball. They were softly lit by the afternoon sun filtering through thin draperies, and extended in pale, gilt-touched vista to the shining emptiness of the ball-room. The old man was advancing toward the voices when he suddenly saw whence they proceeded, and stopped. In the room just beyond him Cornelia Ryan and a young man were sitting on a small, empire sofa, their figures thrown out in high relief against the background of silk-covered wall. Cornelia’s red head was in close proximity to that of her companion, which the intruder saw to be clothed with a thatch of sleek black hair, and which he recognized as appertaining to a young man whose father had once been shift boss on the Rey del Monte, and who bore the patronymic of Duffy.
Cornelia and Jack Duffy had the appearance of being completely engrossed in each other’s society. In his moment of unobserved survey, Cannon had time to note the young woman’s air of bashful, pleased embarrassment and the gentleman’s expression of that tense, unsmiling earnestness which attends the delivery of sentimental passages. Cornelia was looking down, and her flaming hair and the rosy tones of her face, shading from the faintest of pearly pinks to deepening degrees of coral, were luminously vivid against the flat surface of cream-colored wall behind her, and beside the black poll and thin, dark cheek of her companion. That something very tender was afoot was quickly seen by the visitor, who softly withdrew, stepping gingerly over the fur rugs, and gaining the entrance to the hall with a sensation of flurried alarm.
An open door just opposite offered a refuge, and, passing through it with a forward questing glance alert for other occupants who might resent intrusion, the old man entered a small reception-room lit by the glow of a hard coal fire. The room was different in furnishings and style from those he had left. It had the austere bleakness of aspect resultant from a combination of bare white walls and large pieces of furniture of a black wood upon which gold lines were traced in ornamental squares. An old-fashioned carpet was on the floor, and several tufted arm-chairs, begirt with dangling fringes, were drawn up sociably before the fire. This burned cheerily, a red focus of heat barred by the stripes of a grate, and surmounted by a chastely severe white marble mantelpiece. He had been in the room often before and knew it for Mrs. Ryan’s own particular sanctum. When a celebrated decorator had been sent out from New York to furnish the lower floor of the house, she had insisted on retaining in this apartment the pieces of furniture and the works of art which she approved, and which the decorator wished to banish to the garret. Mrs. Ryan had her way as she always did, and the first fine “soote” of furniture which she and Con had bought in the days of their early affluence, and various oil paintings also collected in the same era of their evolution, went to the decking of the room she used for her own and oftenest sat in.