Part 10

Before Miss Reed had left the city she had given the package to the boy, with the instructions that he should not deliver it till the day set by her, some time after her departure. Of her own volition Mrs. Cassidy stated that she thought Miss Reed did not want any one to know where she went. Mrs. Cassidy had conferred with others of her kind in the locality, and the silent and hasty departure of the Reeds had been matter of comment. The shrewd Irishwoman saw that there was a mysterious romance here, and her glance dwelt with compassionate curiosity upon the gentleman who was sufficiently interested in the pretty girl they had all known by sight to employ detectives to hunt for her.

The finding of the boy and the interview with Mrs. Cassidy broke down the last of Gault's hopes. He now knew that Viola had intentionally fled from him. At first, when no word came from her, and Mrs. Robson's description of her as ill was fresh in his mind, he had a terrible fear that she might have died. But a later judgment convinced him that had this been the case he would have heard from the colonel. Viola was living--hiding somewhere from him, restraining her father from communicating with him, which, Gault knew, would be the old man's wish and intention.

And now, with the blankness of her absence deadening his heart, for the first time he began to understand what she must have thought and felt--began to see the situation with her eyes. He thought of her, loving and believing in him as he knew she had always done, suddenly waking to the knowledge that he had suspected her. He saw her living over again those conversations in which he had half revealed his groundless doubts, had tried to find confirmation of them in the halting admissions of her puzzled ignorance. And with her comprehension of the light in which he had been regarding her came that _coup de grâce_ of all doubts in his favor--the giving of the money.

With a clearness of vision that was like clairvoyance, he seemed to be able to read down into the depths of her consciousness, to see into the hidden places of the nature he had once thought so jealously secretive. In the gnawing bitterness of his remorse he realized that she had believed herself tricked, that the hand she had thought stretched to her in kindly fellowship in reality concealed a trap. Where she had looked for protection, support, and love, she had found what now presented itself to her as a sinister and cruel craftiness. Her best friend had turned out to be her most unrelenting enemy.

In the loneliness of that long summer he came face to face with despair. He had lost her by his own mad folly. Remorse for the wrong he had done her alternated in his thoughts with an unquenchable longing to see her again. His heart craved for her, even if only for a single moment's glimpse. A younger man would have shaken off the gloom of his first great disappointment, have told himself that there were other eyes as sweet and hearts as true. But with him the elasticity of youth was gone. There was no forming of new ties, no delight in fresh faces. Life had offered him supreme happiness, and he had let it pass by him. Like the base Indian, he had "thrown a pearl away richer than all his tribe."

The summer held the city in its spell of wind and fog. Acquaintances who encountered one another on its wide thoroughfares said town was empty--not a soul left in it. The Mortimer Gaults took themselves away for rest and recuperation to balsamic mountain gorges among the redwoods. Letitia returned to the hotels and the Hacienda del Pinos. John Gault was left alone with his empty heart. If she had died it would have been bearable. The inevitableness of death makes us bow to its blows with broken submission. But she was alive--poor, sick, her love disprized, her pride trampled on, driven away from all that was familiar and friendly to her by fear of him.

The winds beat and tore through the city, buffeting the passers-by and sweeping street and alley. Then, as the color deepened toward evening, their stress and clamor suddenly ceased, a burst of radiance ran from the Golden Gate up the sky, glazing the level floor of the bay and flaring on all the western windows. It stayed for a space, seeming to immerse the town in an atmosphere of beaten gold, as if for one brief half-hour it was transformed into the glistening El Dorado of the early settlers' dreams. Then the fog stole noiselessly in, and the houses crowding to the summits of the hills, the rose-red clouds, and the clear purple distances were blotted out.

That went on day by day till the autumn came. The winds dropped and the sun shone all day. In the country the air was clear and heavy with sweet, aromatic scents. All the fields were parched and sun-dried like hemp; only the thick-growing, bushy trees defied the drought, remaining green and hardy. The great hills were scorched to a smooth yellow, with a few green tree-tufts slipped down into their valleys where the watercourses were not quite dry.

In town it was all still and golden and hot. The city, queening it on its hills, rose in an atmosphere of crystal clearness from a girdle of sapphire sea. In the evening the smoke lay lightly over it, and the sun glared through like a great, inquisitive eye. Poor people in the old districts were ill from lack of rain and from unclean sewers. Rich people were coming back, looking sunburnt and healthy from their summer in the open air.

The Gaults came up out of their lounging-place in the redwoods, robust and blooming, Mortimer quite restored to health, and Maud two shades darker with her country tan. Letitia, with three trunks of ruined millinery, appeared from the hotels, and the town house was once more alive.

They had seen little of John since they left for the country, and it was not strange that Maud Gault, after his first visit, should have said to her husband:

"What's the matter with John? All of a sudden he looks quite old."

"Nothing," said the loyal Mortimer; "only a fellow can't be expected to look young forever. John's not like a woman: he doesn't keep the same age for twenty years."

VI

The selling of the house and the subsequent flight of the Reeds had been, as Gault had guessed, Viola's idea. When, the morning after those two soul-destroying interviews, she had come down, white and apathetic, and had told her father that she wanted to leave the city, the old man, in a desperate desire to reinstate himself in her regard, had been willing to accede to anything.

Pressed by Viola, he had hurried through the sale, had taken the small sum Robson had offered without demur, and, driven by her feverish anxiety, had paid off all their household debts and handed to her the remaining money. This, with himself, he had placed entirely in her hands. As the girl locked it into the small tin box in which she kept such valuables as they possessed, she had suddenly looked at it, and then at him, and finally said:

"But the mortgage? Wasn't there interest or something to pay on that?"

"Mortgage!" said the colonel, in innocent surprise. "What mortgage?"

Viola looked away from him and murmured something about being mixed up. She saw that he had forgotten the story by which, three years ago, he had accounted to her for the first sudden era of prosperity. She felt, with a dreary indifference, that she did not care where that money had come from. She, at least, had not been put forward as a means of procuring it.

The breathless hurry of their departure, and the quantity of work that accumulates about the breaking up of even so small a household, gave her no time for the indulgence of her own bitter thoughts. The days passed in a turmoil of noise and movement. In a nightmare atmosphere of dust and strange faces she haggled with the Jews from the second-hand stores on Mission Street, listened to their sarcastic comments on the old pieces of furniture she had passed her life among, watched them with dull eyes as they tested the springs of the colonel's chair and rubbed between appraising fingers the curtains his young bride had bought twenty-four years before. At night she crept into her bed, too exhausted for thought, to lose herself in blessed gulfs of sleep.

She was possessed by a wild desire to escape from the house and the city. The scene of her humiliation had become intolerable to her, and deep in her heart lay the terror that if she remained it would be the scene of her downfall. The thought of Gault's reappearance filled her with dread. She was confident of his return, and his return as the conqueror who had gauged her weakness and his own power. All her trust in him had been shattered at a blow. Suddenly he had appeared to her, not as the lover whose highest wish was for her happiness, but as the master, cruel and relentless, the owner who had bought and paid for her. The shame of the thought that she still loved him caused her to bow her face upon her breast, hiding it from the eyes of men and the light of day. All she could whisper in her own justification was the words, "But when I grew to love him I never knew--I never guessed for a minute what he meant."

She wanted to begin all over again, to be another person in another place. The charm of home had vanished from the little house. She longed to put it behind her, to be a different woman from the Viola Reed who once within its narrow walls had known the taste of happiness.

She was so engrossed in her own sorrows that she thought nothing of her father, heretofore the first consideration of her life. She told him what he should do, and he did it unquestioningly. Though no more angry words had passed between them, it seemed to the frightened old man as if every day she receded further from him. His only thought was to repair the damage he had done, to climb back somehow into his old position. He tried to anticipate her every wish, and followed her about with humble offers of help. But when, during those days of work and hurry, her eyes met his, they seemed to him to have a hard and alien gleam. It struck upon his somewhat vague contrition like an icy wind. If she had been gay and talkative he would have forgotten the wrong he had done her in twenty-four hours, and been ready to laugh with her at Gault. But she seemed now to have suddenly ranged herself against him on Gault's side, and to have left him, chilled and solitary, out in the cold.

So when she told him they would go to Sacramento, though the thought of change turned his heart to lead, he agreed with a good grace. He also acquiesced in all her injunctions about keeping their place of refuge a secret. When she told him of her plan to return Gault's money, he controlled his desire to disagree with it, and accepted her decision without open murmur. It seemed to him an unnecessary waste. What were the few paltry hundreds to the rich man? The colonel had been rich, too, and had aided hundreds of needy ones without ever thinking of repayment. By some obscure mental processes he had come to believe that Gault wanted the money. Now that the younger man had come between him and Viola, his feeling for him had become sharply hostile. It was only fear of reopening a disagreeable subject that prevented him from abusing his former friend to his daughter.

They left the city with very different feelings. To the colonel his departure was as the dragging out of every fiber. The roots of his life seemed to have struck deep down into that sandy soil. His horizon had always been bounded by the long lines of gray houses, by the girdling blue of the bay. To the girl it seemed a flight from shame and misery. She was not escaping from it: part of it would go with her always; but she was putting behind her her own weakness and the temptation and despair that the weakness of others had brought upon her.

As the train carried them farther away, as the bay faded out of sight, and the scarred and dwarf scrub-oaks gave place to the stately trees of the valleys, she felt her breath come with the sigh of a deep relief, and to her blank heart whispered the consolation, "It's over and done. I shall never see him again."

At Sacramento they found shelter in a cheap boarding-house. It was a large old house on a side street, set back from the publicity of the thoroughfare in an extensive garden. The garden was so far cared for that it was watered, and the palms and aloes and fig-trees had reached a mighty growth; but its paths were weed-grown, and the statues and urns raised by its original owners lay overturned in the rank grass.

The house itself, dropping fast into peeling, unpainted decay, was commodious, with the high, airy rooms that were built in the days when all Californians seemed to be prosperous, and space was not too valuable to be sacrificed to comfort. The rooms still showed traces of their fine beginnings. There were exceedingly bad and elaborate frescos on the lofty ceilings of the lower floor, and great mirrors incased in gold moldings crowned the mantelpieces. In the musty, unaired parlors, where the puckered inside shades of faded silk were always down to keep the sun from revealing the threadbare secrets of the pale old carpets and the frayed satin arm-chairs, the colonel felt as if he were having a nightmare of the old days. It was all so like in its largeness, its rich stiffness, its obvious expensiveness, but so terribly unlike in its stuffy, squalid, unclean penury.

In the evening at dinner they met their fellow-boarders. The wide dining-room, with long windows opening on one of the many balconies that projected from the walls, showed the same frescos, the same pale, rose-strewn carpet, the same cumbrous pieces of furniture, that, forty years back, some mining prince had brought round the Horn in a sailing-ship. The smell of hundreds of boarding-house dinners hung in the folds of the dingy lace curtains. From a crystal chandelier, lacking most of its pendants, a garish burst of light fell over the table, where much plated ware and pressed glass made a glittering array on a dirty cloth.

At the head of the board sat Mrs. Seymour, the landlady, and beside her her only child, Corinne, a sharp-faced little girl of eight, who, leaning with her elbows on the table, let her glance, shrewd, penetrating, and amused, pass from face to face. Mrs. Seymour, a large woman of a countenance originally buxomly pleasant, but hardened by contact with the world as the boarding-house keeper meets it, introduced the newcomers. They presented a curious contrast to their fellows. The colonel, whose social tastes had not fallen with his fortunes, was a trifle puzzled by the society in which he found himself. At the same time his gregarious spirit was cheered to see that there were other people in the house. He bowed to the lady on his right, introduced as Miss Mercer, with elaborate gallantry, and drawing out her chair, stood waiting for her to seat herself. The recipient of this unexpected courtesy did not know how to take it, for the moment suspecting some joke.

To Viola the strange faces seemed unlovely and forbidding. She had met few people in her life, and this sudden plunge into society was a portentous experience. Pale and silent under the glare of the chandelier, she nibbled at her food, having neither heart nor courage to speak. When she raised her eyes she saw the young man opposite--Mrs. Seymour had presented him as "Bart Nelson, our prize young man"--staring at her over his plate with a steady, ruminating air. As he met her eyes for the second time, he said:

"Off your feed?"

And then, in reply to the colonel's look of uneasy inquiry, jerked his head toward Viola and said:

"Mrs. Seymour ain't goin' to lose anything by her."

Mrs. Seymour replied that she wanted somebody like that to even things off against such an appetite as Mr. Nelson's.

The laugh then was on the prize young man, and he joined in it as heartily as the others.

Miss Mercer, who, it appeared, was a school-teacher, and who had the tight-mouthed visage and dominant voice of those who habitually instruct the young, said she guessed Miss Reed was trying to put Mrs. Seymour off her guard; it was a case of making a good impression in the beginning.

The voice of the little girl here rose with penetrating suddenness:

"She don't ever eat much. She's too thin."

Viola, suddenly the objective point of interest of the table, felt herself growing red and embarrassed. That she might hide her face from this alarming concentration of attention, she pretended to drop her napkin, and bent down to get it. The landlady, with a tact that her appearance belied, saw that the girl was uncomfortable, and diverted the conversation.

It swelled, and was tossed back and forth about the table with much laughter and jest of a personal nature. There were but six people in the house besides Mrs. Seymour, and these seemed intimately conversant with one another's histories and individual foibles. The school-teacher was attacked about an admirer known as "Little Willie," and after a moment of confusion she made a spirited return on the young man beside her, whom every one called Charley, but who had been presented to Viola as Mr. Ryan. Charley's infatuation for a lady who had ridden a bicycle in a recent vaudeville performance seemed to be a subject of gossip, and the school-teacher added further poignancy to the tale by relating how this lady, having made an appointment to lunch with Charley, had failed to keep the tryst. The glee roused over Charley's discomfiture was loud and deep. A heavily bearded man who sat at the foot of the table, and was ceremoniously addressed as Mr. Betts, lay back in his chair and roared.

"Oh, Charley!" he gasped, when he had recovered his composure, "she got you straight in the slats that time."

His wife, at the other end of the table, said with a prim air: "What I'd like to know is where Miss Mercer hears all these stories."

"Little birds tell them to her," said the child, in her sudden, piercing voice. "I guess they're trained birds."

After dinner, when they had gone up-stairs, the colonel stopped with Viola at her door. The passage was dimly lit by a gas-jet at the farther end, which was turned economically low. From the parlor bursts of laughter ascended.

"Well, good night, honey," said the colonel. "I'm sorry you're so tired." Then, somewhat uneasily, "Do you think you'll like it here?"

"Oh, I think so," said Viola.

The door swung back, and the dark, stuffy interior of the room opened before her like a long-closed cave. She turned her cheek and the colonel kissed it.

"Do you think you'll be able to stand those people?" he asked, in the low tone of confidential criticism.

"I dare say they'll be very nice when we get to know them. Everybody's strange at first. Good night, father."

She went in and closed the door. The aloofness of her manner had never been more marked. It seemed to place the colonel in the position of a stranger to whom she preserved an attitude of polite reticence. Feeling shrunk and chilled, he crept away to his own room.

So the new life began. Everything was very strange, and the weather was very hot. The colonel, who had not for fifty years known a warmer climate than San Francisco, wilted in the furnace-like airs of the interior city. The first burning week exhausted him as a serious illness might have done. Viola, who had never seen her father ill, was frightened, and sent for a doctor. The doctor came, asked questions, and looked wise. He said the colonel's heart was weak, and that he seemed in a very debilitated condition. A trip to the seaside would do him good; cooler weather would brace him up.

When the man had gone there was a silence between the father and daughter. Through the drawn blinds the golden cracks of intruding sunshine cut the dimness that Viola had made by closing all the shutters in a futile attempt to keep the room cool.

Presently she said, in a voice that she tried to make cheerful:

"As soon as you get stronger we will go on. It's too hot and uncomfortable here for any one to stay."

"Go on where?" the colonel asked, with the light of interest in his eyes.

"Farther east. It will be cool enough there. We can go to one of those seaside places you read about in the papers--a cheap one, I mean. We have plenty of money for the trip."

The colonel moved restlessly in his chair, and finally twitched open one of the shutters. The hot breath of the garden, laden with heavy exotic scents, puffed in through the opening like incense.

"Don't take me farther away, Viola," he said suddenly, in a tone like that of a querulous child; "don't take me out of California."

"Do you want to stay here?" she asked.

"If we can't go back," he answered, looking at her wistfully.

"I didn't think you minded," she said; "I thought you'd like the change."

There was something of the old gentle fellowship in her tone, and it made the colonel's heart expand. He held out his hand to her, and taking her fingers, rubbed them against his cheek.

"I'm too old to be transplanted now."

She stood beside him, looking down, evidently troubled.

"Some day, perhaps," he went on, watching her, "we can go back. They'll have forgotten us there in a few more weeks."

He saw her face change at once, and dared go no further.

"Yes--some day," she answered, and the conversation ended.

The long summer burned itself on through July into August. Glaring, golden mornings melted into breathless noons, which smoldered away into fiery sunsets. The leafage in the garden hung motionless, and exhaled strange, aromatic perfumes. In the evenings the palms stood black against the rose-red west like paintings of sunset in the desert. The city they had left, wrapped in its mantle of fog, appealed to the memories of the exiles as a dim, lost paradise.

To the girl whose simple life had passed in a seclusion almost cloistral, but at its loneliest marked by refinement, the sudden intimacies, the crude jovialities, of the boarding-house were violently repelling. She shrank from contact with her fellow-boarders, touched by, but unresponsive to their clumsy overtures of friendship, alarmed by their ferociously playful personalities. Fortunately her coolness was set down as shyness, and she suffered from none of that rancor which the boarder who is suspected of "putting on frills" is liable to rouse.

The long, idle days seemed interminable to her. At first she had found occupation in an attempt to beautify the two rooms she and her father rented. Of hers she had made a sitting-room, transforming the bed into a divan covered with a casing of blue denim and a heap of shaded blue cushions. Under one of the balconies she discovered a quantity of forgotten flower-pots, and in these she had planted cuttings of gay-colored geraniums, and set them along the window-sills and the balcony-railing. But the work was soon completed, and a second interval of terrifying vacant hours faced her. This time she tried to seek intellectual diversion, and joined the free public library. She had often secretly deplored her own ignorance; now was the time to repair this defect; and she carried home many serious works, great thoughts of great minds with whom she had never before had an opportunity of becoming acquainted.