BOOK III

I

When Thorpe left New Orleans his plan was to return on the next steamer but one, then to go North to New York or Boston,--he had friends in both cities,--and amuse himself in new fields until he was permitted to return to California. He sought distraction, for although he was reasonably sure of Nina's power to conquer herself, and intended to marry her whether she did or not, separation and time deepened his passion for her, and he only found peace of mind in filling his hours to the brim. It is doubtful if he would have consented to remain the year out were it not that he wished to admire her as much as she longed to have him. Her pride and confidence in herself would invigorate the happiness of both.

He left orders in New Orleans to have his mail held over until his return. Harold was very ill on the voyage. Almost immediately upon landing in Havana his health began to mend, and he declared himself ready to kiss the soil, as he could not bestow a similar mark of favour on the climate. He announced his intention of sending for his affianced and spending the rest of his life in the West Indies. Thorpe did not take him too seriously, but seeing that there was no prospect of getting away for some time, and believing that Cuba would offer himself entertainment for several months, he sent to New Orleans for his mail, and wrote to Nina announcing his present plans. Whether the letters never left the Havana post-office, or whether the mail sack was lost overboard later, or ignored in the excitement at New Orleans, no one will ever know. Nor does it matter; they were never received, and that is all that concerns this tale. Thorpe and Harold started inland immediately, and finally determined to go to Jamaica and San Domingo before returning to Havana. He knew it was worse than folly to trust letters to the wretched inland post-offices, and he had told Nina in his letter of explanation not to expect another for some time. He should be in New Orleans on the first of May, and, meanwhile, he kept a diary for her future entertainment.

While exploring the mountain forests in the central part of Hayti, their guide was murdered, and they were two months finding their way to San Domingo. They were months of excitement, adventure, and more than one hair-breadth escape. Thorpe would have been in his element had it been possible to communicate with Nina, and could he have been sure of getting out of the West Indies before the rainy season began. They came unexpectedly upon San Domingo; and he learned that war had broken out in the United States during April. They made what haste they could to Havana, Harold as eager to return to civilisation as his brother; for vermin and land-crabs had tempered his enthusiasm, and he had acquired a violent dislike for the negro. At Havana, Thorpe found no letters awaiting him. He also learned from an American resident that postal communication had ceased between the North and South on May 31st. He wondered blankly at his stupidity in not going North while there was yet time, but like many others, he had heard so much talk of war that he had ceased to believe in its certainty. He could only hope that his letter had reached Nina, but knew that it was more than doubtful. The Southern ports were in a state of blockade. He and his brother ran it in a little boat rowed by themselves. In New Orleans he read the packet of letters from Nina, that awaited him.

II

The great change in Nina Randolph's appearance and manner induced no small amount of gossip in San Francisco. Women are quick to scent the sin that society loves best to discuss, and there were many that suspected the truth: her long retirement had prepared them for an interesting sequel. Nina guessed that she was dividing with the war the honours of attention in a small but law-making circle, but was quite indifferent. She rarely went down to the parlour when people called, but sat in her bedroom staring out at the bay; the Lester house was on the summit of Clay Street hill.

Her father was deeply anxious, full of gloomy forebodings. He believed Thorpe to be dead, and shook with horror when he thought of what the consequences might be.

"Wouldn't you like a change?" he asked her one day. "How would you like go to New York? Molly and Mrs. Lester could go with you."

Nina shook her head, colouring faintly.

"I see. You are afraid of missing Thorpe. I wish there were some way of finding out--"

She turned to him with eager eyes. "Would you go, papa,--to New Orleans? I haven't dared to ask it. Go and see what is the matter."

"My child, I could not get there. The ports are blockaded; if I attempted the folly of getting to New Orleans by land, I should probably be shot as a spy. It is for those reasons that he will have great difficulty in getting here, as he did not have the forethought to leave the South in time."

To this Nina made no reply, and as she would not talk to him, he left her.

That evening Miss Shropshire came into Nina's room, and spoke twice before she was answered. The room was dark.

"Look here, Nina!" she said peremptorily. "You've got to brace up. People are talking. I know it!"

"Are they? What does it matter? I have no more use for them. I may as well tell you I have come to the conclusion that Dudley Thorpe ceased to care for me, and that is the reason of his silence. He has gone back to England."

"I don't believe it. You're growing morbid. Women frequently do after that sort of experience. I remember Beatrix sat in one position for nearly a month, staring at the floor: wouldn't even brush her teeth. You have too much brains for that sort of thing."

"I believe it. I have made up my mind. He is in England. He wrote me once that if it were not that I had asked him not to leave the country, he would run over, he was so tired of America. He went, and stayed."

"Well, then, go out in the world and flirt as you used to. Don't let any man bowl you over like this; and, for Heaven's sake, don't mope any more!"

"I hate the thought of every man in San Francisco. When I knew them, I was an entirely different woman. I couldn't adapt myself to them if I wanted to--which I don't."

"But there are always new ones--"

"Oh, don't! Haven't you imagination enough to guess what this last year has made of me? If I got as far as a ball-room I'd stand up in the middle of the floor and shriek out that since I was there last my heart had lived and been broken, that I had lost a husband and buried a baby--"

"Then, for Heaven's sake, stay at home! But I think," with deep meaning, "that you had better try a change of some sort, Nina. If you don't want to risk going East, why not visit some of the Spanish people in Southern California?"

"I shall stay here."

It was during the next night that Nina left her bed suddenly, flung herself into a chair, and pressed her elbows hard upon her knees. She had barely slept for three nights. Her nerves were in a highly irritable state. If any one had entered she would not have been able to control her temper. Black depression possessed her; the irritability of her nerves alternated with the sensation of dropping through space; and her relaxed body cried for stimulant.

She twisted her hands together, her face convulsed. "Why should I fight?" she argued aloud. "In that, at least, I should find temporary oblivion. And what else have I left? Down deep, ever since I got his last letter, I have known that I should never see him again. It is my destiny: that is the beginning and the end of it. This is the second time I have wanted it since the baby died. I _beat_ it out of me the first time. I hoped--hoped--and if he were here I should win. If I could be happy, and go away with him, it would not come again: I know--_I know_. He could have got me some word by this. He is not dead. There is only one other explanation. Men are all alike, they say. Why should I struggle? For what? What have I to live for? I am the most wretched woman on earth."

But she did struggle. The dawn found her sitting there still, her muscles almost rigid. Her love for Thorpe had undergone no change; it took the fight into its own hands. And it seemed to her that she could hear her soul beg for its rights; its voice rose above the persistent clamour of her body.

She went to bed and slept for a few hours; but when she awoke the desire in her nerves was madder than ever. Every part of her cried out for stimulant. She had no love for the taste of liquor; the demand came from her nerve-centres. But still she fought on, materialising the monster, fancying that she held it by the throat, that she cut its limbs off, its heart out; but it shook itself together with magnificent vitality, and laughed in her face.

Days passed. The clamour in her body strove to raise itself above the despairing cry in her soul. But still, mechanically, without hope, she lifted her ear to the higher cry, knowing that if she fell now she should never rise again in her earthly life, nor speak with Dudley Thorpe, should he, perhaps, return.

She invoked the image of her baby, the glory of the few days she had known it. But a bitter tide of resentment overwhelmed the memory of that brief exaltation. If she was to be saved, why had not the baby been spared? Those who shared her secret had attempted to console her by assuring her that its death was a mercy for all concerned. She had not answered them; but her grief was cut with contempt for their lack of vision. The baby might have cost her her social position, but it would have stood between her soul and perdition. It had been taken--by One who was supposed to know the needs of all His creatures. Therefore it was only reasonable to assume that He wished her to be destroyed.

She thought of nothing else, but cunningly pretended to be absorbed in her books.

There came a night when her nerves shrieked until her brain surged with the din of them, and her hands clutched at the air, her eyes hardened and expanded with greed, her lips were forced apart by her panting breath. She jerked the stopper out of a bottle of cologne and swallowed a quarter of the contents, then flung her wraps about her, stole downstairs and out of the house, found a carriage, and was driven to South Park.

III

Two weeks later she sat huddled over the fire in the library. Her face was yellow; her eyes were sunken and dull; her hands trembled. She looked thirty-five.

In her lap lay a letter from Dudley Thorpe. He and his brother, at the risk of their lives, had got through the lines and reached New York. The excitement, fatigue, and exposure had nearly killed Harold, who was in a hospital in a precarious condition. Thorpe could not leave him. He implored her to come on to New York at once; and he had never written a more tender and passionate letter.

Cochrane opened the door, and announced that Dr. Clough had called.

"Tell him to come here," she said.

Dr. Clough wore his usual jaunty air, and he made no comment on her appearance; he had come straight from Miss Shropshire.

"Sit down," said Nina, curtly, interrupting his demonstrations. "You come at the right moment. I was about to send for you."

"My dear cousin Nina! I hope there is no--"

"Let me talk, please. Do you wish to marry me?"

Clough caught his breath. He flushed, despite his nerve. "Of course I do," he stammered. "What a question! Certainly there never was a woman so original. It is like you to settle matters in your own way."

"Don't delude yourself for a moment that I even like you. Of all the men I have ever known, the sort of person I take you to be has my most unmitigated contempt. It is for that reason I marry you. I must marry some one at once to keep myself from ruining the life of Dudley Thorpe. I choose you, because, in the first place, I am so vile a thing that no punishment is severe enough for me; and, in the second, Fate has acquitted herself so brilliantly in regard to my humble self that I feel a certain satisfaction in giving her all she wants."

"My dear Nina, you are morbid." He spoke pleasantly, but he turned away his eyes.

"Possibly; it would be somewhat remarkable if I were not. Do you still wish to marry me?"

"Certainly. I do not take your rather uncomplimentary utterances seriously. In your present frame of mind--"

"It is the only frame of mind I shall ever be in. You will have an unpleasant domestic life; but you will have all the money you want. Don't flatter yourself for a moment that you will either control or cure me. You will be no more in my house than a well-paid butler--after my father has been induced to accept you, which will not be in a hurry. Meanwhile, you will probably beat me: you are quite capable of it; but you may save yourself the exertion."

"I shall not beat you, Nina, dear." He spoke softly, with an assumption of masculine indulgence; but his small pointed teeth moved suddenly apart.

"You will understand, of course, that this engagement must not get to my father's ears. He would lock me up before he would permit me to marry you. He has all the contempt of the gentleman for the cad, of the real man for the bundle of petty imitations: and you are his pet aversion. On the tenth, he is obliged to go to San Jose to attend an important law-suit. He will be detained not less than three days. We shall marry on the eleventh--at Mrs. Lester's. I shall not tell my mother, for I will not give her the pleasure of conspiring against my father. I suppose that I shall break my father's heart; but I don't know that I care. He might have saved me, if he had been stronger, and I am no longer capable of loving any one--"

"Suppose Mr. Thorpe should come out here after you, anyhow, married or not."

"He will do nothing of the sort. One reason you would be incapable of understanding, should I attempt to explain; the other is, that he will no longer want me after I have been the wife of a person of your sort."

"My word, Nina, you are rather rough on a fellow; but give me a kiss, and I'll overlook it."

She lifted her face, and let him kiss her, then struck him so violent a blow that the little man staggered.

"Now go," she said, "and don't let me see you again until the eleventh. If you have anything to say, you can write it to Molly Shropshire."

When he had gone, she drew her hand across her lips, then looked closely at it as if expecting to see a stain. Then she shuddered, and huddled closer to the fire, and in a few moments threw Dudley Thorpe's letter on the coals.

IV

"Well, some women _are_ remarkable!" exclaimed Miss Shropshire to her sister, Mrs. Lester. "The idea of her having a wedding dress,--white satin, train, and all. She even fussed over at least twenty pairs of slippers, and I was almost afraid to bring home that bridal veil for fear it wouldn't suit her."

"I suppose she thinks that weddings, white satin ones, at least, only come once in a lifetime." Mrs. Lester was a tired little woman, quite subservient to her strong-minded sister. The wedding was to take place in her back parlour at an hour when Mr. Lester, occupied and unsuspecting, would be away from home. She did not approve of the plot; but her opinion, much less her consent, had not been asked.

"I'd like to thoroughly understand Nina Randolph, just for once," said Miss Shropshire, meditatively. "It would be interesting, to say the least."

The night before the wedding she went into Nina's room, and found her standing before the mirror arrayed in her bridal finery,--veil, gloves, slippers, all. She had regained her natural hues; but her eyes were still sunken, her face pinched and hard. She was almost plain.

"Nina! Why on earth have you put on those things? Don't you know it's bad luck?"

Nina laughed.

Miss Shropshire exclaimed, "_Umburufen!_" and rapped loudly three times on the top of a chair. "There! I hope that will do some good. I know what you are thinking--you are so unlucky, anyhow. But why tempt fate?" She hesitated a moment. "It is not too late. Put it off for six months, and then see how you feel about it. You are morbid now. You don't know what changes time might--"

"No earthly power can prevent me from marrying Richard Clough to-morrow."

"Very well, I shall stand by you, of course. That goes without saying. But I believe you are making a terrible mistake. I would rather you married almost any one else. There are several gentlemen that would be ready and willing."

"I don't wish to marry a gentleman."

* * * * *

The next afternoon Nina, Mrs. Lester, and Miss Shropshire were in the back parlour awaiting the arrival of Clough, his best man, and the clergyman, when there was a sudden furious pull at the bell of the front door. Nina sprang to her feet. For the first time in many weeks animation sprang to her eyes.

"It is my father!" she said. "Close the folding-doors. Molly, I rely on you! Do you understand? Send him away, and as quickly as possible. Tell a servant to watch outside, and take the others round the back way."

Before she had finished speaking, Mr. Randolph's voice was heard in the hall, demanding his daughter. The servants had been given orders to deny the fact of Miss Randolph's presence in the house to any one but Dr. Clough. Nevertheless, Mr. Randolph brushed past the woman that opened the door, and entered the front parlour. Miss Shropshire joined him at once. Every word of the duologue that followed could be heard on the other side of the folding-doors.

"Why, Mr. Randolph!" exclaimed Miss Shropshire, easily. "Why this unexpected honour? I thought you were in San Jose."

"Is my daughter here?" He was evidently much excited, and endeavouring to control himself.

"Nina? No. Why? Is she not at Redwoods? She was to go down yesterday."

"She is not at Redwoods. I have received private and reliable information that she is to marry Richard Clough this afternoon, and I have reason to think that she is in this house."

"What? Nina going to marry that horrid little man? I don't believe it!" Miss Shropshire was a woman of thorough and uncompromising methods.

"Is Nina in this house or not?"

"Mr. Randolph! Of course she is not. I would have nothing to do with such an affair."

Mr. Randolph swallowed a curse, and strode up and down the room several times. Then he paused and confronted her once more.

"Molly," he said, "I appeal to you as a woman. If you have any friendship for Nina, give her up to me and save her from ruin, or tell me where she is. It is not yet too late. I will risk everything and take her abroad. She is ruining her own life and Thorpe's and mine by a mistaken sense of duty to him, and contempt for herself: I know her so well that I feel sure that is the reason for this act she contemplates to-day. I will take her to Thorpe. He could reclaim her. Clough--you can perhaps imagine how Clough will treat her! Picture the life she must lead with that man, and give her up to me. And, if you have any heart, keep my own from breaking. She is all that I have. You know what my home is; I have lived in hell for twenty-four years for this girl's sake. I have kept a monster in my house that Nina should have no family scandal to reproach me with. And all to what purpose if she marries a cad and a brute? I would have endured the torments of the past twenty-five years, multiplied tenfold, to have secured her happiness. If she marries Richard Clough, it will kill me."

"She is not here," replied Miss Shropshire.

Mr. Randolph trembled from head to foot. "My God!" he cried, "have you women no heart? Are all women, I wonder, like those I have known? My wife, a demon who nursed her baby on brandy! My daughter, repaying the devotion of years with blackest ingratitude! And you--" He fell, rather than dropped to his knees, and caught her dress in his hands.

"Molly," he prayed, "give her to me. Save her from becoming one of the outcast of the earth. For that is what this marriage will mean to her."

Miss Shropshire set her teeth. "Nina is not here," she said.

Mr. Randolph stumbled to his feet, and rushed from the house. He walked rapidly down the hill toward Old Trinity in Pine Street, the church Nina attended, his dislocated mind endeavouring to suggest that he wait for her there. His agitation was so marked that several people turned and looked after him in surprise. He reached the church. A carriage approached, passed. Its occupants were Richard Clough, a well-known gambler named Bell, and a man who carried the unmistakable cut of a parson.

Mr. Randolph rushed to the middle of the street, ordering the driver to stop. The window of the carriage was open. He caught Clough by the shoulder.

"Are you on your way to marry my daughter?" he demanded.

"My dear Uncle James," replied the young man, airily, "you are all wrong. I am on my way to marry--it is true; but the unfortunate lady is Miss McCullum."

Mr. Randolph turned to the gambler, and implored him, as a man of honour, to tell him the truth.

Bell replied: "As a man of honour, I dare not."

Mr. Randolph appealed to the clergyman, but met only a solemn scowl, and mechanically dropped back, with the sensation of having lost the good-will of all men. A moment later the carriage was rattling up the street at double speed, and he cursed his stupidity in not forcing an entrance, or hanging on behind. There was no other carriage in sight.

V

The days were very long to Dudley Thorpe. The invalid recovered slowly, and demanded much of his time. Before an answer to his letter could be expected, Harold was sufficiently mended to be removed to the house of a friend on Long Island. He declared his intention of sailing for California as soon as he could obtain the doctor's permission to travel. The lady to whom he was betrothed came over from England and married him; and Thorpe had little to do but to think.

He bitterly reproached himself that he had asked Nina to come to New York, instead of trusting to his brother's recuperative powers, and starting at once for California. He dared not go now, lest he pass her. But he was beset by doubts, and some of them were nightmares. She would come if her child had lived, and she had weathered her year. If she had not! He knew what she had suffered during that year, would have guessed without the aid of the few letters she had written after letters from him had ceased to reach California. Exposure and shame might have come to her since. If he could have been sure that she believed in him, he would have feared little; but it was not to be expected that she had received a letter he had sent her from the West Indies. The telegraph has averted many a tragedy, but there was none across the United States. With all his will and health and wealth and love, he had been as powerless to help her in the time of her great trouble, was as powerless to help her now, as if he were in the bottom of a Haytian swamp. All that was fine in him, and there was much, was thoroughly roused. He not only longed for her and for his child, but he vowed to devote the rest of his life to her happiness. It seemed to him incredible that he could have committed such a series of mistakes; that no man who loved a woman with the passion of his life had ever so consistently done the wrong thing. But mistakes are not isolated acts, to be plucked out of life and viewed as an art student views his first model, in which he finds only a few bald lines; even when the pressure of many details is not overwhelming it often clouds the mental vision. Years after, Thorpe accepted the fact that the great links in that year's chain of events were connected by hundreds of tiny links as true of form; but not then.

One day a budget of mail got through the lines, and in it was a letter for him. It was from Nina, and was dated shortly after the last he had found awaiting him when he arrived from Cuba.

I don't know where you are, if you will ever get this; but I must write to you. The baby is dead. It was a little girl. It is buried in the forest.

NINA.

The steamer by which he expected her arrived a few days later. It brought him the following letter:

I was married yesterday. My name is Mrs. Richard Clough. My husband is the son of a Haworth cobbler. I received your letter.

NINA RANDOLPH CLOUGH.

VI

Mr. and Mrs. Harold Thorpe sailed on the next steamer for California. Dudley Thorpe worked his way South, offered his services to the Confederacy, fought bitterly and brilliantly, when he was not in hospital with a bullet in him, rose to the rank of colonel, and made a name for himself which travelled to California and to England. At the close of the war, he returned home and entered Parliament. He became known as a hard worker, a member of almost bitter honesty, and a forcible and magnetic speaker. Socially he was, first, a lion, afterward, a steady favourite. Altogether he was regarded as a success by his fellow-men.

It was some years before he heard from his brother. Harold was delighted with the infinite variety of California; his health was remarkably good; and he had settled for life. Only his first letter contained a reference to Nina Randolph. She had lived in Napa for a time, then gone to Redwoods. She never came to San Francisco; therefore he had been unable to call, had never even seen her. All Thorpe's other friends had been very kind to himself and his wife.

Thorpe long before this had understood. The rage and disgust of the first months had worn themselves out, given place to his intimate knowledge of her. Had he returned to California it would have been too late to do her any good, and would have destroyed the dear memory of her he now possessed. He still loved her. For many months the pain of it had been unbearable. It was unbearable no longer, but he doubted if he should ever love another woman. The very soul of him had gone out to her, and if it had returned he was not conscious of it. As the years passed, there were long stretches when she did not enter his thought, when memory folded itself thickly about her and slept. Time deals kindly with the wounds of men. And he was a man of active life, keenly interested in the welfare of his country. But he married no other woman.

It was something under ten years since he had left California, when he received a letter from his sister-in-law stating that his brother was dead, and begging him to come out and settle her affairs, and take her home. She had neither father nor brother; and he went at once, although he had no desire to see California again.

There were rails between New York and San Francisco by this time, and he found the latter a large flourishing and hideous city. The changes were so great, the few acquaintances he met during the first days of his visit looked so much older, that his experience of ten years before became suddenly blurred of outline. He was not quite forty; but he felt like an old man groping in his memory for an episode of early youth. The eidolon of Nina Randolph haunted him, but with ever-evading lineaments. He did not know whether to feel thankful or disappointed.

He devoted himself to his sister-in-law's affairs for a week, then, finding a Sunday afternoon on his hands, started, almost reluctantly, to call on Mrs. McLane.

South Park was unchanged.

He stood for a moment, catching his breath. The city had grown around and away from it; streets had multiplied, bristling with the ugliest varieties of modern architecture; but South Park, stately, dark, solemn, had not changed by so much as a lighter coat of paint. His eyes moved swiftly to the Randolph house. Its shutters were closed. The dust of summer was thick upon them. He stood for fully five minutes staring at it, regardless of curious eyes. Something awoke and hungered within him.

"My vanished youth, I suppose," he thought sadly. "I certainly have no wish to see her, poor thing! But she was very sweet."

He walked slowly round the crescent on the left, and rang the bell at Mrs. McLane's door. As the butler admitted him he noted with relief that the house had been refurnished. A buzz of voices came from the parlour. The man lifted a portiere, and Mrs. McLane, with an exclamation of delight, came forward, with both hands outstretched. Her face was unchanged, but she would powder her hair no more. It was white.

"Thorpe!" she exclaimed. "It is not possible? How long have you been here? A week! Mon Dieu! And you come only now! But I suppose I am fortunate to be remembered at all."

Thorpe assured her that she had been in his thoughts since the hour of his arrival, but that he wished to be free of the ugly worries of business before venturing into her distracting presence.

"I don't forgive you, although I give you a dinner on Thursday. Will that suit you? Poor little Mrs. Harold! We have all been attention itself to her for your sake. Come here and sit by me; but you may speak to your other old friends."

Two of the "Macs" were there; the other was dead, he was told later. Both were married, and one was dressed with the splendours of Paris. Mrs. Earle was as little changed as Mrs. McLane, and her still flashing eyes challenged him at once. Guadalupe Hathaway was unmarried and had grown stout; but she was as handsome as of old.

They all received him with flattering warmth, "treated him much better than he deserved," Mrs. McLane remarked, "considering he had never written one of them a line;" and he felt the past growing sharp of outline. There were several very smart young ladies present, two of whom he remembered as awkward little girls. The very names of the others were unknown to him. They knew of him, however, and one of them affected to disapprove of him sharply because he had "fought against the flag." Mrs. McLane took up the cudgels for her South, and party feeling ran high.

Nina Randolph's name was not mentioned. He wondered if she were dead. Not so much as a glance was directed toward the most momentous episode of his life. Doubtless they had forgotten that he had once been somewhat attentive to her. But his memory was breaking in the middle and marshalling its forces at the farther end; the events of the intervening ten years were now a confused mass of shadows. Mrs. Earle sang a Mexican love-song, and he turned the leaves for her. When he told Guadalupe Hathaway that he was glad to find her unchanged, she replied:--

"I am fat, and you know it. And as I don't mind in the least, you need not fib about it. You have a few grey hairs and lines; but you've worn better than our men, who are burnt out with trade winds and money grubbing."

He remained an hour. When he left the house, he walked rapidly out of the Park, casting but one hasty glance to the right, crossed the city and went straight to the house of Molly Shropshire's sister. It also was unchanged, a square ugly brown house on a corner over-looking the blue bay and the wild bright hills beyond. The houses that had sprung up about it were cheap and fresh, and bulging with bow-windows.

"Yes," the maid told him, "Miss Shropshire still lived there, and was at home." The room into which she showed him was dark, and had the musty smell of the unpopular front parlour. A white marble slab on the centre table gleamed with funereal significance. Thorpe drew up the blinds, and let in the sun. He was unable to decide if the room had been refurnished since the one occasion upon which he had entered it before; but it had an old-fashioned and dingy appearance.

He heard a woman's gown rustle down the stair, and his nerves shook. When Miss Shropshire entered, she did not detect his effort at composure. She had accepted the flesh of time, and her hair was beginning to turn; but she shook hands in her old hearty decided fashion.

"I heard yesterday that you were here," she said. "Take that armchair. I rather hoped you'd come. We used to quarrel; but, after all, you are an Englishman, and I can never forget that I was born over there, although I don't remember so much as the climate."

"Will you tell me the whole story? I did not intend to come to see you, to mention her name. But it has come back, and I must know all that there is to know--from the very date of my leaving up to now. Of course, she wrote me that you were in her confidence."

She told the story of a year which had been as big with import for one woman as for a nation. "Mr. Randolph died six months after the wedding," she concluded, wondering if some men were made of stone. "It killed him. He did not see her again until he was on his death-bed. Then he forgave her. Any one would, poor thing. He left his money in trust, so that she has a large income, and is in no danger of losing it. She lives with her mother at Redwoods. Clough died some years ago--of drink. It was in his blood, I suppose, for almost from the day he set foot in Redwoods he was a sot."

"And Nina?"

"Don't try to see her," said Miss Shropshire, bluntly. "You would only be horrified,--you wouldn't recognise her if you met her on the street. She is breaking, fortunately. I saw her the other day, for the first time in two years, and she told me she was very ill."

"Have you deserted her?"

"Don't put it that way! I shall always love Nina Randolph, and I am often sick with pity. But she never comes here, and one _cannot_ go to Redwoods. It is said that the orgies there beggar description. Even the Hathaways, who are their nearest neighbours, never enter the gates. It is terrible! And if your letter had come six days earlier, it would all have been different. But she was born to bad luck."

Thorpe rose. "Thank you," he said. "Are your sisters well? I shall be here only a few days longer, but I shall try to call again."

She laid her hand on his arm. She had a sudden access of vision. "Don't try to see Nina," she said, impressively.

"God forbid!" he said.

VII

He slept not at all that night. He had thought that his days of poignant emotion were over, that he had worn out the last of it on the blood-soaked fields of Virginia, on nights between days when Death rose with the sun; but up from their long sleep misery and love rose with the vigour of their youth, and claimed him. And the love was for a woman who no longer existed, whose sodden brain doubtless held no memory of him, or remembered only to curse him. He strove to imagine her as she must be. She rose before him in successive images of what she had been: from the night he had met her to the morning of their last interview on the mountain,--a series of images sometimes painful, always beautiful. Then his imagination created her as she must have been during the months of her solitude in the midst of a wild and beautiful country, when in her letters she had sent him so generous and so exquisite a measure of herself; then the last months, when he would have been half mad with love and pity if he had known. Nor was that all: it seemed to him in the torments of that night that he realised for the first time what he had lost, what poignant, enduring, and varied happiness might have been his during the past ten years. Instead, he had had excitement, honours, and mental activity; he had not been happy for an hour. And the possibility of such happiness, of union with the one woman whom he was capable of passionately loving with soul and mind and body, was as dead as his youth, buried with the soul of a woman whose face he would not recognise. She was above ground, this woman, and a different being! He repeated the fact aloud; but it was the one fact his imagination would not grasp and present to his mental vision. It realised her suffering, her morbid despair, her attitude to herself, to the world, and to him, when she had decided to marry Clough; but the hideous metamorphosis of body and spirit was outside its limitations.

In the morning he asked his sister-in-law if she would leave California at the end of the week. She was a methodical and slow-moving little person, and demurred for a time, but finally consented to make ready. Her business affairs--which consisted of several unsold ranches--could be left in the hands of an agent; there was little more that her brother-in-law could do.

Harold's remains had been temporarily placed in the receiving vault on Lone Mountain. Thorpe went out to the cemetery in the afternoon to make the final arrangements for removing them to England.

Lone Mountain can be seen from any part of San Francisco; scarcely a house but has a window from which one may receive his daily hint that even Californians are mortal. Here is none of the illusion of the cemetery of the flat, with its thickly planted trees and shrubbery, where the children are taken to walk when they are good, and to wonder at the glimpses of pretty little white houses and big white slates with black letters. The shining tombs and vaults and monuments, tier above tier, towering at the end of the city, flaunt in one's face the remorselessness and the greed of death. In winter, the paths are running brooks; one imagines that the very dead are soaked. In summer, the dusty trees and shrubs accentuate the marble pride of dead and living men. Behind, higher still, rises a bare brown mountain with a cross on its summit,--Calvary it is called; and on stormy nights, or on days when the fog is writhing in from the ocean, blurring even that high sharp peak, one fancies the trembling outlines of a figure on the cross.

To-day the tombs were scarcely visible within the fine white mist which had been creeping in from the Pacific since morning and had made a beautiful ghost-land of the entire city. The cross on Calvary looked huge and misshapen, the marbles like the phantoms of those below. The mist dripped heavily from the trees, the walks were wet. It is doubtful if there is so gloomy, so disturbing, so fascinating a burying-ground on earth as the Lone Mountain of San Francisco.

The sexton's house was near the gates. Thorpe completed his business, and started for the carriage which had brought him. He paused for a moment in the middle of the broad road and looked up. In the gently moving mist the shafts seemed to leave their dead, and crawl through the groves, as if to some ghoulish tryst. Thorpe thought that it would be a good place for a man, if lost, to go mad in. But, like all the curious phases of California, it interested him, and in a moment he sauntered slowly upward. His own mood was not hilarious, and although he had no wish to join the cold hearts about him, he liked their company for the moment.

Some one approached him from above. It was a woman, and she picked her way carefully down the steep hill-side. She loomed oddly through the mist, her outlines shifting. As she passed Thorpe, he gave her the cursory glance of man to unbeautiful woman. She was short and stout; her face was dark and large, her hair grizzled about the temples, her expression sullen and dejected, her attire rich. She lifted her eyes, and stopped short.

"Dudley!" she said; and Thorpe recognised her voice.

He made no attempt to answer her. He was hardly conscious of anything but the wish that he had left California that morning.

"You did not recognise me?" she said, with a laugh he did not remember.

"No."

He stared at her, trying to conjure up the woman who had haunted him during the night. She had gone. There was a dim flash in the eyes, a broken echo in the voice of this woman, which gave him the impression of looking upon the faded daguerreotype of one long dead, or upon a bundle of old letters.

Her face dropped under his gaze. "I had hoped never to see you again," she muttered. "But I don't know that I care much. It is long since I have thought of you. I care for one thing only,--nothing else matters. Still, I have a flicker of pride left: I would rather you should not have seen me an ugly old sot. I believe I was very pretty once; but I have forgotten."

Thorpe strove to speak, to say something to comfort the poor creature in her mortification; but he could only stare dumbly at her, while something strove to reach out of himself into that hideous tomb and clasp the stupefied soul which was no less his than in the brief day when they had been happy together. As long as that body lived on, it carried his other part. And after? He wondered if he could feel more alone then than now, did it take incalculable years for his soul to find hers.

She looked up and regarded him sullenly. "You are unchanged," she said. "Life has prospered with you, I suppose. I haven't read the papers nor heard your name mentioned for years; but I read all I could find about you during the war; and you look as if you had had few cares. Are you married?"

"No."

"You have been true to me, I suppose." And again she laughed.

"Yes, I suppose that is the reason. At least I have cared to marry no other woman."

"Hm!" she said. "Well, the best thing you can do is to forget me. I'm sorry if I hurt your pride, but I don't feel even flattered by your constancy. I have neither heart nor vanity left; I am nothing but an appetite,--an appetite that means a long sight more to me than you ever did. To-morrow, I shall have forgotten your existence again. Once or twice a year, when I am sober,--comparatively,--I come here to visit my father's tomb. Why, I can hardly say, unless it is that I find a certain satisfaction in contemplating my own niche. I am an unconscionable time dying."

"Are you dying?"

"I'm gone to pieces in every part of me. My mother threw me downstairs the other day, and that didn't mend matters."

"Come," he said. "I have no desire to prolong this interview. There is a private carriage at the gate. Is it yours? Then, if you will permit me, I will see you to it."

She walked beside him without speaking again. He helped her into her carriage, lifted his hat without raising his eyes, then dismissed his carriage, and walked the miles between the burying-ground and his hotel.

VIII

Four days later he received a note from Miss Hathaway:--

"Nina Randolph is dying; I have just seen her doctor, who is also ours. I do not know if this will interest you. She is at Redwoods."

An hour later Thorpe was in the train. He had not stopped to deliberate. Nothing could alter the fact that Nina Randolph was his, and eternally. He responded to the summons as instinctively as if she had been his wife for the past ten years. Nor did he shrink from the death-bed scene; hell itself could not be worse than the condition of his mind had been during the past four days.

There was no trap for hire at the station; he walked the mile to the house. It was a pale-blue blazing day. The May sun shone with the intolerable Californian glare. The roads were already dusty. But when he reached the avenue at Redwoods, the temperature changed at once. The trees grew close together, and the creek, full to the top, cooled the air; it was racing merrily along, several fine salmon on its surface. He experienced a momentary desire to spear them. Suddenly he returned to the gates; he had carried into the avenue a sense of something changed. He looked down the road sharply,--the road up which he had come the last time he had visited Redwoods, choking on a lumbering stage. Then he looked up the wooded valley, and back again. It was some moments before he realised wherein lay the change that had disturbed his introspective vision; one of the great redwoods that had stood by the bridge where the creek curved just beyond the entrance to the grounds, was gone. He wondered what had happened to it, and retraced his steps.

The house, the pretty little toy castle with its yellow-plastered brown-trimmed walls, looked the same; he had but an indistinct memory of it. Involuntarily, his gaze travelled to the mountains; they were a mass of blurred redwoods in a dark-blue mist. But they were serene and beautiful; so was all nature about him.

He rang the bell. Cochrane opened the door. The man had aged; but his face was as stolid as ever.

"Mr. Thorpe, sir?" he said.

"Yes; I wish to see Miss--Mrs. Clough."

"She won't live the day out, sir."

"Show me up to her room. I shall stay here. Is any one else with her?"

"No, sir; Mrs. Randolph has been no good these two days, and the maid that has been looking out for Miss Nina is asleep. I've been giving her her medicine. We don't like strange nurses here. Times are changed, and everybody knows now; but we keep to ourselves as much as possible. There've been times when we've had company--too much; but I made up my mind they should die alone. You can go up, though."

"Thanks. You can go to sleep, if you wish."

Cochrane led him down the hall with its beautiful inlaid floor, scratched and dull, up the wide stair with its faded velvet carpet, and opened the door of a large front room.

"The drops on the table are to be given every hour, sir; the next at twenty minutes to two." He closed the door and went away.

The curtains of the room were wide apart. The sun flaunted itself upon the old carpet, the handsome old-fashioned furniture. Thorpe went straight to the windows, and drew the curtains together, then walked slowly to the bed.

Nina lay with her eyes open, watching him intently. Her face was pallid and sunken; but she looked less unlike her old self. She took his hand and pressed it feebly.

"I am sorry I spoke so roughly the other day," she said. "But I was not quite myself. I have touched nothing since; I couldn't, after seeing you. It is that that is killing me; but don't let it worry you. I am very glad."

Thorpe sat down beside her and chafed her hands gently. They were cold.

"It was a beautiful little baby," she said, abruptly. "And it looked so much like you that it was almost ridiculous."

"I was a brute to have left you, whether you wished it or not. It is no excuse to say that the consequences never entered my head, I was half mad that morning; and after what you had told me, I think I was glad to get away for a time."

"We both did what we believed to be best, and ruined--well, my life, and your best chance of happiness, perhaps. It is often so, I notice. Too much happiness is not a good thing for the world, I suppose. It is only the people of moderate desires and capacities that seem to get what they want. But it was a great pity; we could have been very happy. Did you care much?"

He showed her his own soul then, naked and tormented,--as it had been from the hour he had received her letters upon his return from the West Indies until Time had done its work upon him,--and as it was now and must be for long months to come. Of the intervening years he gave no account; he had forgotten them. She listened with her head eagerly lifted, her vision piercing his. He made the story short. When he had finished, her head fell back. She gave a long sigh. Was it of content? She made no other comment. She was past conventions; her emotions were already dead. And she was at last in that stage of development wherein one accepts the facts of life with little or no personal application.

"It didn't surprise me when you came in," she said, after a moment. "I felt that you would come--My life has been terrible, terrible! Do you realise that! Have they told you? No woman has ever fallen lower than I have done. I am sorry, for your sake; I can't repent in the ordinary way. I have an account to square with God, if I ever meet Him and He presumes to judge me. If you will forgive me, that is all that I care about."

"I forgive you! Good God, I wonder you don't hate me!"

"I did for a time, not because I blamed you, but because I hated everybody and everything. There were intervals of terrible retrospect and regret; but I made them as infrequent as I could, and finally I stifled them altogether. I grew out of touch with every memory of a life when I was comparatively innocent and happy. I strove to make myself so evil that I could not distinguish an echo if one tried to make itself heard; and I succeeded. Now, all that has fallen from me,--in the last few hours, since I have had relief from physical torments,--for I could not drink after I saw you, and I had to pay the penalty. It is not odd, I suppose, that I should suddenly revert: my impulses originally were all toward good, my mental impulses; the appetite was always a purely physical thing; and when Death approaches, he stretches out a long hand and brushes aside the rubbish of life, letting the soul's flower see the light again for a few moments. Give me the drops. Now that you are here, I want to live as long as I can."

He lifted her head, and gave her the medicine. She lay back suddenly, pinioning his arm.

"Let it stay there," she said.

"Are you sure, Nina, that your case is so bad?" he asked. "Couldn't you make an effort, and let me take you to England?"

She shook her head with a cynical smile. "My machinery is like a dilapidated old engine that has been eaten up with rust, and battered by stones for twenty years. There isn't a bit of me that isn't in pieces."

She closed her eyes, and slept for a half hour. He put both arms about her and his head beside hers.

"Dudley," she said, finally.

"Well?"

"I had not thought of the baby for God knows how many years. It was no memory for me. But since the other day I have been haunted by that poor little grave in the big forest--"

"Would you like to have it brought down to Lone Mountain?"

She hesitated a moment, then shook her head.

"No," she said. "In the vault with my mother and--and--_him_? Oh, no! no!"

"If I build a little vault for you and her will you sign a paper giving me--certain rights?"

Her face illuminated for the first time. "Oh, yes!" she said. "Oh, yes! Then I think I could sleep in peace."

Thorpe rang for Cochrane and the gardener, wrote the paper, and had it duly witnessed. It took but a few moments, and they were alone again.

"I wonder if I shall see _her_--and you again, or if my unlucky star sets in this world to rise in the next? Well, I shall know soon.

"I am going, I think," she said a few moments later. "Would you mind kissing me? Death has already taken the sin out of my body, and down deep is something that never was wholly blackened. That is yours. Take it."

It was an hour before she died, and during that hour he kissed her many times.

A FRAGMENT

It was some twelve years later that Thorpe received a copy of a San Francisco newspaper, in which the following article was heavily marked:--

WHAT AM I BID?

AN AUCTION SALE OF FUNERAL AND WEDDING TRAPPINGS

"What am I offered?"

"Oh, don't sell that!" said one or two bidders.

The auctioneer held up a large walnut case. It contained a funeral wreath of preserved flowers.

"Well, I've sold coffins at auction in my time, so I guess I can stand this," replied the auctioneer. "What am I offered?"

He disposed of it, with three other funeral mementos, very cheap, for the bidding was dispirited. It was at the sale yesterday, in a Montgomery Street auction-room, of the personal effects, jewelry, silverware, and household bric-a-brac of a once very wealthy San Francisco family. The head of the family was a pioneer, a citizen of wealth and high social and commercial standing. It was he who, in early days, projected South Park. There was no family in the city whose society was more sought after, or which entertained better, than that of James Randolph.

"What am I offered for this lot?"

He referred to the lot catalogued as "No. 107," and described as "Wedding-dress, shoes, etc."

"Don't sell _that_!" The very old-clo' man remonstrated this time.

It seemed worse than the sale of the funeral wreath. The dress was heavy white satin--had been, that is; it was yellowed with time. The tiny shoes had evidently been worn but once.

"What am I offered? Make a bid, gentlemen. I offer the lot. What am I offered?"

"One dollar."

"One dollar I am offered for the lot--wedding-dress, shoes, etc. One dollar for the lot. Come gentlemen, bid up."

Not an old-clo' man in the room bid, and the outsider who bid the dollar had the happiness to see it knocked down to him.

"What am I bid for this photograph album? Bid up, gentlemen. Here's a chance to get a fine collection of photographs of distinguished citizens, their wives, and daughters."

A gentleman standing on the edge of the crowd quietly bid in the album. When it was handed to him, he opened it, took out his own and the photographs of several ladies, dressed in the fashion of twenty years ago, and tossed the album, with the other photographs, in the stove, remarking: "Well, _they_ won't go to the junk-shop."

"What am I offered, gentlemen, for this? There is just seventeen dollars' worth of gold in it. Bid up."

The auctioneer held up an engraved gold medal. It was a Crimean war medal which its owner was once proud to wear. There was a time in his life when no money could have purchased it. He had risked his life for the honour of wearing it; and after his death it was offered for old gold.

"Twenty dollars."

"Twenty dollars; twenty, twenty, twenty! Mind your bid, gentlemen. Seventeen dollars for the gold, and three for the honour. Twenty, tw-en-ty, and going, going, gone! Seventeen dollars for the gold, and three for the honour."

In this way an ebony writing-desk, with the dead citizen's private letters, was sold to a hand-me-down shop-keeper. A tin box with private papers went to a junk-dealer; and different lots of classical music, some worn, some marked with the givers' names, some with verses written on the pages, were sold to second-hand dealers. "What am I bid?" The sale went rapidly on. Sometimes an old family friend would bid in an article as a souvenir. But the junk-dealers, second-hand men, and hand-me-down shop-keepers took in most of the goods.

The above articles were the contents of a chest, and were the personal effects of Mrs. Richard Clough, the late daughter of the late James Randolph, of San Francisco. She had evidently carefully packed them away at some time before her death; and the chest had been mislaid or overlooked, until it made its way, intact, and twelve years after, into the hands of the public.

And that was the last that Dudley Thorpe heard of Nina Randolph in this world.

* * * * *

Transcriber's note:

Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise, every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and intent.