Twenty-three years before the opening of this desultory tale its heroine was born on the island of Santa Catalina, a fragment of Southern California. Her father had begun life as a professor of classics in a worthy Eastern college, but, his health breaking down, he betook himself and his small patrimony to the State which electrifies the nerves in its northern half and blunts them in its southern. Jonathan Shore wrote to his cousin, Lyman T. Moulton:
“I haven’t a nerve left with a point on it; have recovered some measure of health and lost what little ambition I ever possessed. I am going to open an inn for sportsmen on the island of Santa Catalina, so that I shall be reasonably sure of the society of gentlemen and make enough money to replenish my library now and then—my books are on the way. Here I remain for the rest of my natural life.”
But he crossed over to Los Angeles occasionally. At a soirée he met the daughter—and only child—of one of the largest landholders in Southern California, and danced with no one else that night. She married the scholarly innkeeper with the blessing of her father, who was anxious to pass his declining years in peace with a young wife. The bride, for coincident if not similar reasons, was glad to move to Catalina. She was the belle of her time, this Madelina Joyce, and her dark beauty came down to her from Indian ancestors. Her New England great-grandfather had come to California long before the discovery of gold, bought, for a fraction, two hundred thousand acres from the Mexican government, and married, despite the protests of his Spanish friends, an Indian girl of great beauty, both of face and character.
The Pueblo bride had lived but two years to receive the snubs of the haughty ladies of Santa Barbara, her ardent young husband had shot himself over her grave, and the boy was brought up by the padres of the mission. Fortunately, he came to man’s estate shortly before the United States occupation, and managed to save a portion of his patrimony from the most rapacious set of scoundrels that ever followed in the wake of a victorious army. This in turn descended to his son, who, in spite of Southern indolence and a hospitality as famous as his cellar, his liberal appreciation of all the good things of life, and a half-dozen lawsuits, still retained fifty thousand of the ancestral acres, and had given his word to his daughter that they should go to her unencumbered. This promise he kept, and when Catalina was ten years old he died, at good-will with all the world. His widow moved to San Francisco with her freedom and her liberal portion, and Mrs. Shore announced that she must give the ranch her personal attention. The ten years had been happy, for the husband and wife loved each other and were equally devoted to their beautiful, unsmiling baby. But there were deep wells of laughter in Mrs. Shore, and much energy. She wept for her father, but welcomed the change in her life, not only because she had reached the age when love of change is most insistent, but because she had begun to dread the hour of confession that life on an island, even with the man of one’s choice, was insufficient.
Mr. Shore himself was not averse to change so long as it did not take him out of California, although he refused to sell the little property on the island where he had spent so many happy years.
From the hour Mrs. Shore settled down in the splendid old adobe ranch-house she watched no more days lag through her fingers. Attended by Catalina she rode over some portion of the estate every day, and if a horse had strayed or a cow had calved she knew it before her indolent vaqueros. She personally attended, each year, to the sheep-shearing and the cattle-branding, the crops and the stock sales. Once a year she gave a great barbecue, to which all within a radius of a hundred miles were invited, and once a week she indulged herself in the gossip, the shops, and the dances of Santa Barbara.
In the vast solitude of the ranch Catalina grew up, carefully educated by her father, petted and indulged by her mother, hiding from the society that sought Mrs. Shore, but friendly with the large army of Mexican and Indian retainers. When she was persuaded by her mother to attend a party in Santa Barbara she rooted herself in a corner and glowered in her misery, snubbing every adventurous youth that approached her. She adored books, her out-door life, her parents, and asked for nothing further afield.
When she was eighteen her father died. She rode to the extreme confines of the ranch and mourned him, returning to her life at home with the stolidity of her Indian ancestors. Mrs. Shore grieved also, but by this time she was too busy a woman to consort with the past. Moreover, she was now at liberty to take Catalina to San Francisco and give her the proper tutors in languages and music. Incidentally, she made many new friends and enjoyed with all her vivid nature the life of a city which she had visited but twice before. She returned in the following winter and extended her fame as a hostess. Catalina found San Francisco society but little more interesting than that of the South, and enjoyed the reputation of being as rude as she was beautiful. Here, however, her Indian ancestress had her belated revenge. Her brief and tragic story cast a radiant halo about the indifferent Catalina, whose strain of aboriginal blood was extolled as the first cause in a piquant and original beauty; all her quaint eccentricities—which were merely the expression of a proud and reticent nature anxious to be let alone—were traced to the same artless source, and when one day in the park she sprang from her horse and shook the editor of a personal weekly until his teeth rattled in his head, her unique reputation was secure.
The greater part of the year was spent on the ranch. Mrs. Shore loved the world, but she was a woman of business above all things, and determined that the ranch should be a splendid inheritance for her child. Her time was closer than she knew. In all the vigor of her middle years, with the dark radiance of her beauty little dimmed, and an almost pagan love of mere existence, she was done to death by a bucking mustang, unseated for the first time since she had mounted a horse, and kicked beyond recognition.