Ancestors: A Novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

I

For Isabel Otis the genius loci had a more powerful and enduring magnetism than any man or woman she had ever known. She had felt the consolation of it, although without analysis, in her lonely girlhood by the great Rosewater Marsh; definitely in Tyrol, Perugia, Toledo, in Munich where she had lingered too long, in a hundred tiny high-perched and low-set villages of Austria and Italy of which the tourist had never heard, at Konigsee and Pragserwildsee; and deeply in England. But no place had ever called her, disturbed her, excited her into furious criticism, mockingly maintained its hold upon the very roots of her being, like the city of her birth. Her childhood's memories of it clustered about the old house on Russian Hill where the most cordial neighbors were goats; the beach by the Cliff House on a stormy day; long rides up and down the almost perpendicular hills of the city in the swift cable cars; and certain candy stores on Polk and Kearney streets. At long intervals there was a children's party at one of the fine houses on the ledge below her home; or out in the Western Addition, where an always migratory people were rivalling the splendors of Nob Hill—as that craggy height had long since humbled South Park and Rincon Hill into their abundant dust. She also cherished many charming memories of her mother, with dinner or ball-gown so prudently looped under her rain-coat that it gave her slender figure the proportions of the old-fashioned hoop-skirt; always laughing as she kissed the little girls good-night before braving the two flights of steps to the carriage at the foot of the cliff. Two years before her death Mrs. Otis was glad to bury her mortification and misery in Rosewater. After that Isabel had never so much as a glimpse of San Francisco until she was sixteen, when her father was induced to visit his adopted daughter and take his youngest martyr with him. Isabel had planned for this visit throughout six long months, and arrived in the city of her heart radiant in a frock every breadth of which was new—heretofore her wardrobe had risen like an apologetic ph[oe]nix from the moth-eaten remnants of her mother's old finery—and such uncompromising trust in the benevolence of fate as a girl rarely knows twice in a lifetime. There were three days of enchanted prowling about the old house on Russian Hill, where, as the tenant, in the rocking-chair by the bedroom window, did not invite her to enter, she consoled herself with the views and the memories; and of an even more normal delight in the shopping streets and gay restaurants of a real city. After that the visit existed in her mind with the confused outlines of a nightmare.

Her adopted sister's peevish complaints at being obliged to remain in the foggy windy city all summer, the crying baby, the whirlwinds of dust and shivering nights, she might have dismissed as unworthy the spirit of sixteen, and dreamed herself happy. But Mr. Otis, who had been sober for seven months, selected this occasion for a fall which resounded from Market Street to Telegraph Hill, and rejuvenated the long line of saloons that had graced Montgomery Street since the days when "Jim" Otis had been one of the wildest spirits in the wildest city on earth. That was "back in the Sixties," when his lapses were as far apart as they were unrivalled in consumption, span, and pyrotechny. By the late Eighties he had disappeared into the north, and the careless city knew him no more.

During the Seventies and early Eighties there had been a period of reform, incident upon his marriage with a pretty and high-spirited girl, and one of the city's estimable attempts to clean out its political stables. His brilliant and desperate encounter with Boss Buckley was historic, but its failure, and the indifference of the gay contented majority to the city's underworld, soured him and struck a fatal blow at the never vital roots of personal ambition. When he began to water the roots at his old haunts, the finish of his career and of his splendid inheritance passed into the region of problems that Time solves so easily. When she solved his problem he was glad to subside into one of his cottages in Rosewater. Here he reformed and collapsed, reformed and collapsed; but, with fewer temptations, and a remnant of his legal brilliancy, he supported his family after a fashion; and fed his pride to the day of his death with the fact that his wife, unlike the forgotten half of many another comet, had never been obliged to do her own work.

During that last visit to San Francisco, Isabel, guided by her amused brother-in-law, routed him out of no less than fourteen saloons, and spent night after night walking the streets with him to conquer the restlessness that otherwise would find a prolonged surcease beyond her influence. When she finally steered him back to Rosewater he fell into an exuberant fit of repentance, during which he was so charming and so legal that Isabel forgave him, laid by her bitterness and mortification, and hoped. But although no repentance could maintain a grip upon that slippery flabby substance which he still called his character, at least he never went to San Francisco again. Occasionally he permitted Isabel to spend a week with her sister, while he pledged himself to good behavior during her absence; and kept his word. He always kept his word; and he took care to withhold it except when he was sure of himself. Isabel decided that as everything was relative it was better to have a dipsomaniac as her life portion than a drinking-machine of more steady and industrious habits.

Finally his patient clients left him, he sold the cottage in Rosewater—all that remained of his inheritance—to pay its mortgages, and moved with Isabel out to the ranch-house, preserved with a few hundred acres by the more canny and less thirsty Hiram. When the elder brother died James would have returned forthwith to the sources of supply, but by this time Isabel had the upper hand, and although he disappeared for days at a time, he was always forced to return to the ranch when the small monthly sum allowed him by the terms of his brother's will was exhausted; no one in Rosewater would give him credit. As he invariably left a note behind him promising to "be quiet about it," Isabel ceased to haunt his footsteps. His appetite was far beyond his control or hers, and as he kept his word and spent his time in the back parlor of a saloon, and had no longer the digestive capacity to achieve his former distinction, she merely sat at home and waited. Fortunately he did not live long enough after his brother hopelessly to embitter his daughter's youth. Liberty came to her when she had ceased to hate with young intolerance and begun to pity; and before too much longing for freedom, and its insidious suggestions, had poisoned her nature. Indeed, when she had seen her father buried with much pomp in the cemetery behind Rosewater, and returned to the permanent peace of her home, she missed her cares and responsibilities, so long and systematically borne, and mourned, not as a child for its parent, but as an adoptive mother suddenly bereft. Nevertheless, she was bent upon enjoying her freedom to the utmost and rebelled against the obduracy of her uncle's executors, who disapproved of her pilgrimage to Europe unattended by a matron of Rosewater. Hiram Otis, who trusted no man, had appointed four executors; and had not Judge Leslie been one of them the other three might have delayed the settling of the estate beyond the legal term. But at the end of a year Isabel was absolute mistress of her property and herself.

One of the happiest moments of her life was when she sat before her lawyer's table in San Francisco and watched the pen strokes that cancelled the mortgage of the house on Russian Hill. The house and its acre, encumbered by the inevitable mortgage, had been all that remained of Mrs. Otis's personal inheritance when she left San Francisco for ever. James Otis had promised his dying wife that he would never sell the place, which she bequeathed to Isabel; and when his last client left him and he could no longer pay the interest, Hiram, who was morosely devoted to his niece, met the yearly obligation: he would not redeem the mortgage unless he were permitted to buy the property. But to this James Otis, clinging to his solitary virtue, would not consent; and Hiram, although he intended to leave all he possessed to Isabel, could not bring himself to part with any sum in four figures.

Before leaving for Europe Isabel had leased the house to a young newspaper man whose wife had an income of her own, and not only an artistic appreciation of the view, but a more practical esteem for a site so far removed from the "all-night life" below. Immediately after Isabel's return Mrs. Glait had asked permission to sublet the house, remarking cynically that time had inured her to the desultory phenomena of journalism, but never to the stable prospect of her husband's death struggle with foot-pads, or her children falling down the cliff of this wild bit of nature in the heart of a city.

Isabel took back her old home with another spasm of delight, and vowed that not until she was a pauper would she part with it again. Five or six days of every week must be spent on the chicken-ranch, which had grown to such proportions that she was now one of the persons that counted in her flourishing community. But in time she would live more and more in her lofty home, become a notable figure in San Francisco, drawing with both hands from its varied best; and meanwhile, once a week, she could sit for hours and look down upon the city, which, even in rainy weather, was a wild and beautiful sight from her eyrie.

Mrs. Otis had been a niece of the Mrs. Montgomery who had reigned on Rincon Hill twenty years ago, and a cousin of the Helena Belmont who had been the greatest belle the city had seen since that earlier time when Nina Randolph, Guadalupe Hathaway, Mrs. Hunt McLane, and "The Three Macs" had made history for themselves in spite of the momentous era of which they were so unheeding a part. Mary Belmont would have been no mean heiress herself had not her father been too adventurous a spirit on the stock-market during the Belcher Bonanza excitement of 1872. For a time it looked as if Gordon Belmont would be a far richer man than his famous brother, Colonel Jack, always contented with a modest million; but in ten mad days there was a decline of sixty million dollars in the aggregate value of stocks on the San Francisco market; and six months later, when he died of sheer exhaustion, he had nothing to leave his only child but the house on Russian Hill, and a small income generously supplemented by her uncle and guardian until her marriage. She was thirteen at her father's death, and as her mother had preceded him, she spent the following five years in a New York boarding-school. Then she returned home, and, after a year's gayety, married James Otis. Colonel Belmont surrendered her small property. Skilfully "turned over" it would have multiplied indefinitely. But James Otis and his wife knew far more about spending money than making it, and to-day nothing was left to commemorate the meteoric and eminently typical career of Gordon Belmont but the ancient structure whose nucleus he had taken over just after his marriage as a "bad debt." His wife, too, had insisted upon living in it, for reasons subsequently understood by her daughter and Mrs. Glait, and complacently enlarged it with all the hideous improvements of the day.