She ate her supper with a hearty appetite. Her mother’s lapses, being accepted as part of the routine of existence, rarely depressed her spirits. Nevertheless she frowned heavily as turbulent sounds pierced the thin partition, not so much at her mother’s iniquity, as at the prospect of being obliged to wash the supper dishes. The expected crash came, and she ran into the kitchen. Her mother lay prone. Two of the men lifted her immediately and carried her up the narrow stair. Patience sullenly attacked the dishes. She dumped them into a large pan of hot water, stirred them gingerly with a cloth fastened to a stick, drained the water off, poured in a fresh pailful, and dried them hastily. She filled the frying-pan with water and set it on the hottest part of the stove to cook itself clean. Occasionally she coughed with angry significance: the men in the next room were invisible behind a grey fog of their own puffing. She spattered her clean pinafore, blackened her hands, and devoutly wished herself alone on a desert island where she could live on cocoanuts and bananas. At such times she forgot the few compensations of her unfortunate life and felt herself only the poverty-stricken drudge, the daughter of Madge Sparhawk.
III
Who Madge Sparhawk was before she married the Yankee rancher had at one time been an absorbing topic for dispute in Monterey. One gossip averred that she had been the dashing leader of the lower ten thousand of San Francisco, another that she had come from the Eastern States as the mistress of a wealthy man who had wearied and cast her off; a third confidently affirmed that she had been a brilliant New York woman of fashion who had gone wrong through love of drink, and been sent under an assumed name to California by her afflicted family; a fourth swore that she had been an actress, a fifth that she had been the high-tempered queen of a gambling house. On one point all agreed: she was disreputable, and John Sparhawk was a fool to marry her. However, they were somewhat disappointed that they saw so little of her. They were not called upon to snub nor tolerate her. She rarely came into the town; never excepting on horseback with her husband, when her splendid beauty drew masculine Monterey from its perch on the fence tops,—where it sat and smoked and murmured the hours away,—and gathered it about her, stirring the diluted rill of caballero blood.
As far as the little world of Monterey could learn through the gossip of servants, she was a helpful wife to a devoted husband who patiently strove with the fiend that possessed her. When he was killed by the accidental discharge of a gun her grief was so violent that only a prolonged carouse could assuage it. Subsequently she recovered, and with occasional advice from Mr. Foord attempted to run the farm. As John Sparhawk had made no will, she was her child’s legal guardian, the absolute mistress for eight years of what property her husband had left. There was a little ready money, the dairy was remunerative, and the ranch well stocked. But that was five years ago. Her habits had grown upon her; the ranch was mortgaged and run down, the stock decreased by half.
Patience had rebelled heavily at her father’s death, and wondered, with childish logic, why, if one parent had to die, it could not have been her mother. Her father’s manner had been cold, repellent, like her own; but that his nature was deep and passionate even her young mind had never doubted. She felt it in the close clasp of his arms as he held her before him on his horse when galloping about the ranch; in his sudden infrequent caress; in the strong pressure of his hand as they wandered through the woods or along the shore at night, not a word spoken between them.
It was not until after his death that she made acquaintance with her social separateness. He had begun her education himself. Her only girl companion was Rosita Thrailkill, the niece of a neighbour, whom her father would not permit her to visit in Monterey. John Sparhawk’s only friends were the Thrailkill brothers and Mr. Foord, an elderly gentleman, who had lived in Monterey under the old régime, lost his fortune in the great Bonanza time, and returned to the somnolent town to end his days with his library, the memory of his dead Spanish wife, and a few old friends, world-forgotten like himself. He lived in the dilapidated Custom House on the rocks at the edge of the town, and Patience had ruled his establishment since her baby days. It was the only house in Monterey she was permitted to enter, and she entered it as often as she could. A hundred times she had sat with the old gentleman on the upper corridor and listened to the story of the capture of Monterey by the United States fleet in 1846; stared breathlessly at the crumbling fort—the castillo—on the hill above Junipero Serra’s cross, as Mr. Foord verbally restored its former impregnability.
He told her tales of the days of light and life and joy when Monterey was the capital of the Californians, and the Americans were not yet come,—stories of love and revenge and the great free play of the primitive passions, unpared by modern civilisation. For her those old adobe houses in the town were alive once more with dark-eyed doñas and magnificently attired caballeros. Behind the high walls of the old gardens fans fluttered among the Castilian roses and dueñas stealthily prowled. The twisted streets were gay again with the court life of the olden time, the grand parades of the governors, the triumphant returns from the race on the restless silver-trapped steeds.
Every house had its history, and Patience knew them all. She wandered with Mr. Foord along the dusty streets, lingered before the garden walls, over which she could see and smell the nasturtiums and the sweet Castilian roses. But gone were the caballeros and the doñas. They lay in the little cemetery of the padres on the hill, over beyond the yellow church which marked a corner of the old presidio, and well on the road to a great hotel whose typical life was vastly different from that old romantic time. They lay under their stones, forgotten. The thistles and wild oats rioted under the gnarled old oaks. The new-comer never paused to glance at the worn carvings on the thick rough slabs.
Behind the garden walls a few brown old women lived alone, too practical to brood upon an enchanted past. Cows nibbled in the plaza where once the bull and the bear had fought while the gay jewelled people screamed with delight. Gone was the tinkle of the guitar, the flutter of fan, the graceful woman hastening down the street half hidden in her mantilla, the lovely face behind the grating. The screaming of the sea-gulls, the moaning of the pines, the roar of the surf, alone remained the same, careless of change or decay. Wooden houses crowded between the old adobes. Most of the Spanish families were half American: their women had preferred the enterprising intruder to the indolent caballero. Arcadia was no more. The old had kissed the hand of the new, and spawned a hybrid.
After John Sparhawk’s death, Mr. Foord persuaded his widow to send Patience to the public school. The little girl was delighted. She had looked with envious longing at the stone building, painted a beautiful pink, which stood well up on the hill at the right of the town and was still known by the imposing name of Colton Hall; it had been built by the first American alcalde, and was a court house for a brief while.