Part 11

But poor Viola was not of the women who find in the exercise of the brain a method of healing the hurts of a wounded heart. At times a sense of piercing misery possessed her. There were hours when her loneliness pressed upon her like a weight, when the sense of what she had lost was unbearable as a fierce, continuous pain. Then, in the hope of escaping from the torment of "remembering happier things," she went out and, in the blistering heat under which the streets lay sweltering, walked aimlessly. If fatigue overcame her she sat down on one of the benches in the little plazas that dot the city, and there a graceful, listless figure slipped back over the intervening gulf to the days when the sunshine had been bright and her own heart was full of it.

Sometimes rebellion against the fate which had shut her out from happiness rose within her. A beloved companionship, no matter at what cost, was better than this waste of desolation. One life is all of which we are sure; why not, then, seize what we can of that one? How terrible, in the darkness of death, to realize that we have lost all that might have made this world so rich and sweet! Oh, the frightful thoughts of seeing at the end that we have relinquished joy and love for a dream, for nothing! For the first time in a life singularly free from event or developing experience, she met that dark second self which dwells in each of us.

So the tempter whispered his old words. She closed her ears to them with fear and aversion. But they returned, coming upon her persuasively in moments of deadly depression and disgust of life, coming upon her with comforting declarations of harmlessness, coming upon her with challenging queries as to their wrong.

One evening they were more convincing than they had ever been before. Sitting alone in her own room after dinner, Viola listened, for the first time hesitating. Where would be the wrong in writing to him--just a line to tell him she was sorry they had gone without seeing him? Common politeness would seem to suggest that she ought to do that. She would have done it before, only--only-- She rose from her seat and, going to the window, looked down into the dark recesses of the garden, whence small rustling noises rose, then upward to the clear pink of the sunset, cut with black palm-spikes. He, once their best friend! What excuse was there for slighting a friend?

She turned from the window suddenly and went to the table where her writing-materials were kept. A sheet of note-paper lay ready on the blotter. It shone pink in the sunset light as she drew it toward her. Her hand trembled a little as she dipped the pen in the ink, but was firm when she wrote her letter. There were only a few lines, and of the most commonplace description. In the barest words she accounted for their sudden departure, made an apologetic allusion to their not having acquainted him with their intention of leaving, and ended with the words, "I hope we shall some day see you again." At the end of the letter she wrote the address, and upon this expended some care, forming the numbers with exactness, and inscribing the name of the street with slow clearness. She sealed the envelop with nervous haste, and was rising from her chair when the colonel entered.

"Been writing letters?" he asked.

The question was not an idle one, for letter-writing was seldom practised in that small family circle.

Instinctively Viola placed her hand over the envelop as it lay on the table.

"Yes," she said hurriedly, "just a note."

"Whom to?" he asked. "Oh, I suppose your friend at the Woman's Exchange." This was a girl Viola had spoken of writing to anent the relinquishing of her work.

Viola made no answer. The old man, who was lighting the lamp, did not appear to notice her silence.

"Letter-writing's not much in my line," he said absently, "but your mother wrote beautiful letters."

"Whom to?" said the girl, in her turn.

"Me, when we were lovers."

The lamp was lit, and he charily placed the globe on it. As he did so, Viola, from behind him, leaned forward and applied the letter, twisted into a spiral, to the chimney. It smoked, charred, and then went up in a flicker of flame.

"What are you doing?" he asked, staring at her in surprise.

"Burning my letter."

"Why?"

"I don't know. Perhaps because I don't write beautiful ones like my mother."

Her voice trembled, broke, and she burst into wild tears. The door into the room beyond was open, and she ran through the aperture and shut the door behind her.

The colonel stood looking after her, amazed, alarmed, uncomprehending. In the old days he would have followed her. Now he stood listening at the closed door, not daring even to knock. When he heard her sobbing cease he came tiptoeing away as though afraid of reawakening her drowsing grief. Standing by the table, he looked long and ruefully at the lamp-globe.

"Poor little girl!" he whispered; "she's homesick, too."

The old man's own homesickness was an incurable malady. As he had said himself, he was too old for transplanting. He could not shake himself down in the new rut. He could not get accustomed to the strange city and its unfamiliar thoroughfares. Its alien aspect seemed to force in upon him the sense of his insignificance and failure. He walked along the streets and no one knew him. There were no cheery voices to cry out, "So long, colonel," and wave a welcoming hand to a hat-brim. People jostled him to one side, seeing only a thin, threadbare old man in a faded coat. He had no consciousness that they would turn and look at him, and point him out to the stranger from the East whom they were "taking round." He was no more to Sacramento than it was to him. He grew so to dread the feeling of oppressive melancholy that fell upon him in its unfriendly streets that he gave up going out, and spent most of his time in the garden or in Viola's room.

When with her he tried to be bright and to make the best of the situation. He saw in her changed attitude nothing but blame of him, and he would have borne anything uncomplainingly to win back the love he thought she withheld. That another and a deeper feeling could be causing her heaviness of spirit he did not dream. Like many another man, he had no instinct to see into the hidden inner life of the child that was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.

He hardly ever let his thoughts revert to the cause that had made her take her hasty step. He knew he had been to blame, and the colonel was a man who always forgot his own mistakes. In the course of time they ceased to be mistakes, and, in his eyes, assumed the proportions of worthy attempts that an unjust fate had frustrated. Just what he had meant by using his daughter's name in his intercourse with Gault he himself hardly knew--nothing to her actual detriment, that was certain. If any one had breathed a word of blame against her, or tried to harm one hair of her head, he would have been quick to rise in her defense, wrathful as a tiger. The wrongs that do not come directly back, like boomerangs, were wrongs the responsibility of which the colonel readily shifted from his shoulders. He had wanted money for Viola, and he used the readiest means to his hand to get it. The jingling of gold in his pocket, the gladness of her face when he brought her some trifling gift, made everything outside the pleasure of the moment count for naught.

And now they were estranged. A veil of indissoluble coldness separated them. Yet she was never curt or sharp or cross to him. Sometimes it seemed to him that she was the same in word and voice and manner as she had always been, only something had gone from her--light, cheer, gaiety, some inexpressible, loving, lovely thing that had made her the star of his life. Once, taking his courage in both hands, he had asked her if she was angry with him, and then shrank like a whipped dog before the startled negation of her eyes and her quick "Why, no, father! How could I be?"

The one diversion of the colonel's life was the society of his fellow-boarders. Though he abused them roundly up-stairs to Viola, he took undoubted satisfaction in regaling them with the stories of his past greatness. Night after night he bestrode his hobby, and entertained an admiring circle with its evolutions. It was many years since he had had so large and so attentive an audience, and he profited by the occasion, giving even more remarkable accounts of the men he had made than those with which he had once amused John Gault.

For some time his listeners awarded him a half-credulous attention; but soon their interest in the garrulous old man died away. Miss Mercer expressed the opinion that the colonel was "no better than an old, worn-out fake," a sentiment which found an echo in the breasts of every other inmate of the house--even Mrs. Seymour quietly, in her own mind, relegating him to the ranks of harmless frauds. The traditions of San Francisco were not known of all men in Sacramento. The colonel found that he was singing the songs of Zion in a strange land. No one believed him. When he spoke of his friendship with Adolphus Maroney, and how thirty years before he had laid the foundation of Jerry McCormick's fortune, the listeners made little attempt to hide their disbelief, and Mr. Betts and Charley Ryan took much delight in openly "joshing the old man." Bart Nelson did not indulge in this pastime, as he had conceived a violent, if secret, regard for Viola.

One evening after dinner the "joshing" reached a climax against which even the colonel's egotistical infatuation was not proof. Viola was up-stairs, according to her custom; Mrs. Seymour was absent on her never-ending household duties; and Bart Nelson was out. There was no one to restrain the old man's foolish flights, and inspired by the ironically flattering queries of his listeners, his reminiscences became more vaingloriously brilliant than they had ever been before.

His completion of an elaborate account of his patronage of Adolphus Maroney called forth from Mr. Betts the remark:

"I don't see, colonel, how he can get on at all without you. Once you got from under him, it's a miracle he didn't entirely collapse."

"No, not quite that," the colonel modestly deprecated. "Maroney was no fool--no fool; only speculative and lacking in foresight. When I got him on his feet he was able to go his way alone."

"Well, that was smart of him, wasn't it?" commented Charley Ryan, with a sagacious wag of his head.

There was something in the tone of his remark that disturbed the colonel's complacency. For a moment he eyed Charley with a side glance, then he said:

"I'm always willing to admit that Maroney was no fool."

"Now, how do we know," said Miss Mercer, letting her eyes give a preliminary sweep over the faces about her, "that you're not still doing all the work and making all the money for those San Francisco millionaires? You know, I believe that's just what you're up to, and you're too sly to tell."

She looked at him with an air of bright challenge. The colonel was pleased.

"No, my dear young lady," he answered; "that was in the past, when I was one of them myself."

"Are you sure you are not one of them still?" said Charley Ryan. "Come, now, colonel; make a clean breast of it. Here's the family album; can you swear upon this book that you haven't got a few loose millions lying round in tea-pots and stockings up in your room?"

The colonel flushed. He did not mind alluding to his poverty himself, but he resented having others treat it as a jest.

"I can swear without family albums that the fortune I once had is a thing of the past," he answered, "and I rather fancy that you know all about its magnitude and its loss. Most people do."

This was too much. Mr. Betts, who was afflicted by an irrepressible sense of humor, burst into loud laughter.

"Well, colonel," he said, "now that you remind me, I believe I have heard that there was a hitch about your millions. So there is about mine. Yours are gone, and mine ain't come. Brothers in misfortune! Shake on that!"

He held out a large fist, and the colonel, not quite comprehending, but feeling the derision about him in an inward sense of heated discomfort, put his hand in it. Mr. Betts gave it a vigorous clasp, and holding it aloft, said:

"The Corsican Brothers!--as they appeared at that fatal moment when one had just lost and the other not yet found his pile."

There was a shout of laughter, and the old man drew his hand away. His face was deeply flushed, and a feeling of tremulous indignation was rising in him.

"Don't despond, colonel," said Miss Mercer, cheerily. "Lots of men have made two fortunes. There's a chance for you yet."

"I guess there's about as much chance for him," said Mrs. Betts, who was an acidulous lady of a practical turn, "as there is for Mr. Betts. I'm sorter tired of this talk of making millions, and then never having an extra dollar."

"Stick close to the colonel, Mrs. Betts," said Charley Ryan, "and you'll have your extra dollar. He'll make it for you same way as he did for Jerry McCormick."

"Now, colonel," said Mr. Betts, "there's a chance for you. Here's Mrs. Betts wants an extra dollar, and here are you, just the man to make it for her. No gentleman can resist the appeal of a female in distress. Send my henchman for ink and paper." He drew a stub of pencil from his pocket and began writing on the back of an envelop, reading as he wrote: "Colonel Reed, the multi-millionaire, will before the present witnesses sign a contract to make for the hereinbefore-mentioned Mary Louise Betts the sum of one dollar, the same payable on--"

He paused with raised pencil.

"What date did you say?"

The colonel rose. He was pale and almost gasping with anger. He had at last realized that these barbarians were making sport of him.

"I did not state any date," he said slowly; "nor did I--that I can remember--say that I would make any specified sum of money for any one here. But since you seem to insist that I did so, I will fulfil my obligations without any more unnecessary talk. Here is the dollar."

He drew a dollar from his pocket and flung it on the table with the gesture of one throwing a bone to a dog.

"Ladies," he said, bowing deeply to the two women, "I have the honor to wish you good evening."

There was a moment of silence after his withdrawal, during which they all sat staring rather foolishly at the dollar. But if he had thought to humiliate them, he had mistaken his audience.

"There, now!" was the opening remark, contributed by Mrs. Betts; "you've gone and rubbed him up the wrong way. And I don't see what satisfaction you get from it."

"Well," said Mr. Betts, "I'll get the dollar, anyway."

He made a playfully frenzied lunge for the coin. But Charley Ryan had anticipated the movement, and his hand struck it first. An animated tussle ensued, during which Miss Mercer averted a catastrophe by removing the lamp.

"Lord! Lord!" cried Mrs. Betts, querulously, "what under the canopy possesses them? It's like living in a bear-garden."

The struggle ended with the triumph of Charley Ryan, who, with an exaggerated bow and an affectation of the colonel's manner, presented his trophy to Mrs. Betts. She took it, threw it into her work-basket, and said snappishly:

"The old man gets that to-morrow. I ain't goin' into the hold-up business."

After this the colonel's attitude toward his fellow-boarders was of the stillest and most repelling sort. They were a good deal surprised at it at first; then, as days passed and it did not soften, they came to regard it as a joke, and though by tacit consent he was let alone, they seemed to harbor no ill feeling toward him. He, on his side, was filled with unappeasable rage. He often passed a meal without speaking to one of them, and never again spent an evening in the parlor.

Up-stairs he abused them to Viola with a violence of phrase that would have amazed them. Even to Mrs. Seymour he permitted himself to indulge his wrath to the extent of biting sarcasms at their expense. The landlady soothed him by assuring him that they were of an inferior class to himself. This was some consolation to the colonel, but he avoided their society with a hauteur which was quite thrown away on them, and his life became lonelier and more purposeless than ever.

Cut off still further from his fellows, longing for, yet afraid to court, the society of his daughter, the old man found himself in a position of distressing isolation. In his dreariness he turned for amusement and solace to the one person left in the house who had neither the self-consciousness to bore, the experience to judge by, nor the cruelty to mock. This was Corinne, Mrs. Seymour's little girl, a grave, large-eyed, lean-shanked child of eight.

The alternate spoiling and scolding that the boarders awarded her had developed in Corinne a chill disbelief in human nature. As a rule she held off from those about her who would one day buy her kisses with a bag of candy, and the next, when she was singing to her doll on the balcony, would box her ears for making a noise. The vagaries of humanity were a mystery to her, and she had already acquired a cautious philosophy, the main tenet of which was to go her own way without demand or appeal to her fellow-creatures.

Corinne, if not as experienced as her mother, was possessed of those intuitive faculties which distinguish many neglected children. She knew after the first week that neither the colonel nor Viola would blow hot and cold upon her little moods. Still, there was a prudent reticence in her acceptance of their overtures, and she took the colonel's first gifts of fruit and candy with a wary apprehension of the next day's rebuffs. But they never came, and the prematurely grave child and the lonely old man established friendly relations, grateful and warming to both. Finally, when the other boarders drove the colonel back into the citadel of his wounded pride, the tie between them was strengthened. Each felt the isolation of the other as a secret bond of sympathy and understanding.

The colonel, sore, homesick, repulsed on every side, turned to the child with a pitiful eagerness, and lavished upon her the discarded affections of his hungry heart. He greeted her entrance into Viola's sitting-room--a noiseless entrance, hugging up to her breast her doll and her pet black kitten--with expressions of joy that to an outsider would have seemed laughably extravagant. But they were not, for she had come to represent to him tenderness, tolerance, appreciation. He felt at ease and contented with her, for he knew that she would not criticize him, would never find fault with him. She flattered and sustained the last remnant of his once buoyant vanity. He was not afraid that her eyes would meet his with a sad reproach. On the contrary, their absorbed unconsciousness was one of the most soothing and delightful things about her. Corinne would not have cared what he did. She liked him for himself, and accepted him unmurmuringly as he was.

It was holiday-time, and she spent many afternoons in the colonel's society, generally squatted on the floor in Viola's sitting-room. She spoke little, but had the appearance of listening to all the old man said, and at times made solemnly sagacious comments. He, on his part, talked to her as if she had been a woman, expatiating to her on the strange capriciousness of affection that marked her sex. Once or twice he alluded sadly to the apparent estrangement between himself and his daughter.

"Seems almost as if she didn't like me, Corinne; doesn't it?" he asked anxiously, watching the child, who was trying to put her doll's skirt on the kitten.

"I don't think so," Corinne responded gravely, holding the cat on its hind legs while she shook down the skirt; "I think she likes you a lot."

"What makes you think that? She doesn't ever talk to me much, or tell me things, the way she used."

"She doesn't talk to anybody much," said Corinne. "Mr. Nelson said she was the most awful quiet girl he ever knew." Here the cat gave a long, protesting mew, and Corinne's attention became concentrated on its toilet.

"She usen't to be quiet like that. She was the brightest girl! You ought to have seen her, Corinne--just like a picture, and always laughing."

"She don't laugh much now," said Corinne; "I don't think I ever heard her laugh--not once. Keep quiet now, deary"--coaxingly to the cat; "you're nearly dressed."

"And all because I only tried to please her. I just tried to do my best to make her happy. There's no good trying to please a woman. You're all the same. Be kind to them, be loving, break your heart trying to give them pleasure--and that's the way it is."

"What's the way it is?" asked Corinne, sitting up on her heels and feeling over her person for a pin to fasten the waistband of the skirt.

"The way it is now with me and Viola--coldness, indifference, maybe dislike." Then, half to himself: "There's no understanding women. What were they made for, anyway?"

Corinne seemed to think this remark worthy of attention. Her search for the pin was arrested and she pondered for a moment. Then she looked at the colonel and said tentatively, not quite sure of the reasonableness of her reply:

"I suppose so that people can have mothers, colonel."

"So that people can have love, Corinne," he answered sadly.

Corinne, feeling that her solution of the problem had not been the right one, returned to the pin. She found it, and bending over the patient kitten, inserted it carefully into the band. But her calculations were not true, the pin pricked, and the cat, with an angry mew, broke away and went scuttling across the room inclosed in the skirt. Her appearance was so funny that Corinne sat back on her heels and, punching the colonel's knee, cried in a burst of laughter:

"Oh, look, colonel, look! Ain't she cunning?"

The colonel looked. The cat turned, still in the skirt, and eyed them both with a look of hurt protest. It appealed to the colonel's humor as it had to Corinne's. Their combined laughter filled the room and greeted Viola as she came up the passage from one of her long walks.

"What are you laughing at?" she asked, as she opened the door and entered like a pale vision wilted with the heat and light outside.

The colonel's laughter died away immediately. Her listless air of delicacy struck him anew with the silent reproach which her mere presence now seemed to suggest. All amusement faded from his face, and he looked guiltily conscious, like a child found in mischief.

A short time after this a hot spell struck the city. Though it was September, the heat was stifling. For three days the mercury stood so high that even Corinne's engrossingly arduous play with the doll and the kitten was listlessly performed, and she spent most of her time in the sitting-room with Viola and the colonel, where, behind closed shutters, they gasped away the hours. The old man seemed to feel the heat less than before; at least, he said little about it, and occupied himself in teaching Corinne to play solitaire, a game for which she evinced a precocious aptitude. Viola, sitting by the window, where now and then a fine edge of warm air sifted in between the slats in the shutters, watched them. Her father seemed as much interested as the child, and the girl wondered how in this oppressive exile he could have spirit for so trivial an amusement.

After three days the heat broke, and was succeeded by a soothing, balmy coolness, under the influence of which the city seemed to relax and rest inert in the torpor of recuperation. The freshened airs that flowed through the overheated old house extracted every odor left from years of bad cooking and insufficient ventilation. The musty hangings of the rooms closed in and held the oven-like atmosphere. Dusty curtains and grease-stained carpets added their contributions to the closeness left by years of untidy occupancy.