Part 13

The next day Viola appeared to be herself, though she looked white and listless, and Mrs. Cassidy resolved to impart to her a piece of information that, with great effort of will, she had been hoarding up to cheer a particularly dark hour. It was her habit to bring Viola her tea at six, and during this meal to seat herself and discourse with her lodger in a friendly and cheering spirit. The widow loved a gossip, and it seemed to her that Miss Reed was a person more redolent of romance than any one she had ever known before.

Rocking comfortably back and forth in the plush-covered, ribbon-decked rocking-chair, she watched her lodger as she poured out her tea, and delicately, after the manner of people who are without appetite, broke small fragments off her roll and put them in her mouth. Then, in a voice vibrating with secret exultation, she said:

"You won't always feel so bad as this, honey. Things cheer up sooner 'n we expect, and black clouds have silver linin's. Besides, there's friends of yours that wouldn't let you want for nothin', if they knew you was back."

She saw the piece of roll stop midway between Viola's mouth and the plate, and her eyes fix themselves on the lid of the tea-pot in an arrested stare.

"Who do you mean?" said the girl, the even modulations of her voice not hiding its undertone of apprehension.

"Who do you suppose?" retorted Mrs. Cassidy, teasingly.

"I can't imagine," replied Viola. "I haven't the slightest idea to whom you're referring."

"Oh, yes, you have, now," said Mrs. Cassidy, wagging her head knowingly, and flushing over her broad, buxom face with the pleasure of her secret. "Try and guess."

"Who do you mean, Mrs. Cassidy?" said Viola. Her pretension of indifference had suddenly disappeared. She tried to make her voice commanding, but it was full of a frightened distress.

"Mr. John Gault," announced the other, her narrow eyes, alight with curiosity, fastened on her lodger's face. The change in its expression, quick, inexplicable in its sudden tightening of the muscles and veiling of the eyes, told the watcher, not what the romance was that she so keenly scented, but confirmed her suspicions that there was a romance of some sort or other.

Viola turned back to the tea-things. As she moved them about, the eager eyes of the watcher saw that her hands were trembling.

"He's the finest gentleman I ever set eyes on since I came to California," continued the widow, immensely interested and hardly able to wait for further developments. "I said to Micky, after he'd been here, 'There, Mick Cassidy, is the way they grow real gentlemen. No imitation about him!'"

"Was he _here_?" came the question, in a hardly comprehending voice.

"He was that--and to find out about you. He was that crazy to know where you'd gone that he was at Coggles's, and had the Robsons turned 'most inside out with his questions. When he couldn't get nothing out of them, he got detectives to track out Mick,--'cause, you remember, he'd left that package,--and he was here to find out what I knew. Oh, he's got it bad."

Viola, conscious of the scrutiny fastened upon her, bent her face over the tray. She began to make another cup of tea.

"I couldn't give him no information," continued Mrs. Cassidy--"more's the pity, for I ain't never seen a gentleman that took my fancy more; and just as pleasant and agreeable as if he was no better off than me or Mick. Policeman O'Hara, when I asked him, says to me: 'Rich? Why, Mrs. Cassidy, he's more money in a minute than you'll ever see in your life. He's a capitalist, and not mean, like the rest of 'em, neither.'"

Though the widow's tongue had been busy, her eyes had followed the tea-making closely. It was not a success. Viola had abandoned it, and her hands were now clasped under the edge of the table. But she made no comment, sitting motionless, with her face averted. Nothing daunted, Mrs. Cassidy returned to the charge.

"He was just dead set upon finding you. He says to me as he left, says he, 'If you hear anything of her, Mrs. Cassidy, let me know. Send over Mick the first thing in the morning.'"

It must be confessed that Mrs. Cassidy's imagination had added this last touch; but to Viola, in her fluttered alarm, it carried no suggestion of fiction.

"Mrs. Cassidy," she said, turning on the woman, "you haven't let him know? You haven't sent Mick?"

"Lord love you, no, dear," returned the widow, good-humoredly. "I was waiting till you pulled yourself together a little more. But don't you think, now,"--she leaned forward and spoke in a wheedling tone, but with her eyes full of an avid interest,--"don't you think you might write a little letter, and Mick'll take it over to his office this evening?"

Viola pushed back from the table, her face suddenly suffused with an angry red.

"No--no!" she cried violently. "Don't think of such a thing--don't suggest it! I don't want to see that gentleman again, ever. This is my affair, Mrs. Cassidy; leave it to me."

She rose from the table and walked to the window.

"There's no use gettin' mad about it," retorted the other, somewhat tartly, rising from the rocker and setting the tea-things on the tray. "I'm only tryin' to do the best I can for you. And it don't seem to me just right for a girl like you, young and not over-strong, to be knockin' round this way, when she's got friends ready to black her boots for her. Still, it's your funeral, not mine."

There was no reply, and as she lifted the tray she said in an aggrieved tone:

"I don't want to hurt no one's feelin's, but I want to do my dooty in this world. Well, good night, deary. Don't get down on your luck. You're not so friendless as you think."

After she had left the room, Viola stood motionless, looking out of the window on the gray and soot-grimed back yard. Night was falling, and the washing, still pendulating on its lines after the slovenly fashion of the neighborhood, gleamed white and ghostly through the dusk. A high brick wall shut off the end of the lot, and over this, dark, mournful-looking trails of ivy hung downward, rubbing back and forth in the passing breaths of wind. It was a prospect and an hour conducive to melancholy. But Viola felt none. For the moment a sense of hunted terror had shut out all other feelings.

He had searched for her, employed detectives to try and find a clue to her hiding-place! And now, led by some horrible caprice of destiny, she had walked into the very house where he would soonest find her. She must go to-morrow. Mrs. Cassidy could not be trusted. The expression of her face, with its ugly, half-concealed triumph and its coarsely prying interest, warned the girl that the secret of her whereabouts would not long remain with the widow. In a fever of anxiety she paced up and down the room. Her nerves, broken by the shock and strain of the past two weeks, exaggerated the importance of the situation, till she felt as if Mrs. Cassidy and Gault had spread a net around her, from which, in her weakness, she would never be able to break away.

She fell asleep, only to wake in the dead of the night, shaken into throbbing consciousness by the thought that the widow had already communicated with Gault, and that the conversation of that evening was for the purpose of preparing her for the appearance of her lover. Curled up and trembling under the clothes, she lay staring into the blackness about her. It seemed a reflex, in its impenetrable gloom, of her own surroundings. With the goblin terrors of night weighing upon her overwrought spirit, she felt too helpless and feeble to battle with a life that was so beset with pitfalls. The dreariness of her isolation, the hopelessness of her misplaced love, that should have been the crown of her life, and was instead its direst dread and peril, seemed combining to crush her, and in her despair she pressed her face into the pillow and whispered wild supplications for death.

The next morning life did not look so formidable. Things fell into their proper perspective, and Viola's fears of Mrs. Cassidy as an agent of destruction appeared phantasmagoric. Nevertheless, sunlight and its restoring influences did not allay all her doubts of the woman. She had seen her thoughts and intentions written on her face, and she knew that it would only be a question of time when she would be tempted to communicate with Gault.

She determined to leave Mrs. Cassidy with no clue as to her new place of residence. She had no idea as to where she would go, except that she would try to find a lodging as far from where she was now as possible. This would be an easy matter. The town seemed to be placarded from end to end with the signs of "Furnished Rooms." Viola was brave, now the morning had come, and with it sunlight. Moreover, the thought of moving from the locality every corner of which seemed alive with memories of her father was a sustaining relief.

After breakfast she acquainted Mrs. Cassidy with her intention of leaving, giving as her reason the fact that that portion of the city was too full of painful memories for her to remain in it. The widow received the news with loud lamentations, which ended almost in tears. As soon as she had overcome her surprise and commanded her feelings, she besieged Viola with questions as to where she intended going. The girl, who was not skilful at this sort of duel, found it difficult to evade her hostess's vigilant determination to maintain her surveillance. Viola was soon red and stammering under the widow's persistent and unescapable queries, and her discomfort was not lessened by the realization that Mrs. Cassidy had guessed her real reason for leaving and had resented it.

It was a clear, soft morning, the air still and golden. In its brief Indian summer the city seemed to stretch itself, and lie warm, apathetic, and relaxed, basking in the mellowness of its autumnal quiet. That part of it toward which Viola directed her course was almost as old as the locality where she had passed her uneventful girlhood. Boarding an electric car, she crossed the low basin of the town, where originally the village of Yerba Buena skirted the cove in straggling huts and tents. Here the business life of a metropolis is compressed into an area covered by a few blocks. Women do their shopping one street away from where men are making the money which renders the shopping possible. The car swept Viola through the gay panorama that Kearney Street presents on a sunny morning, out past Portsmouth Square, with a glimpse of Chinese back balconies, where lines of flowering plants, the dip of swaying lanterns, and here and there the brilliant spot of color made by a woman or a child, bring to the scene a whiff of the Orient.

Beyond, where the broken flank of Telegraph Hill rises gaunt and red amid its clinging tenements, she alighted and continued her way on foot. She made a detour round the forbidding steeps of the hill, past narrow alleys where shawled figures slunk along lengths of sun-touched wall, by old verandahed houses brooding under rusty cypress-trees, by straight-fronted, plastered dwellings, the stucco streaked with dark rain-stains like the traces of tears on a face too dejected to care how it looked. Finally the street rose over a spur of the hill, then dipped, sloping down to the hollow of North Beach.

There was a sudden widening of the horizon on every side. Marine views broke on the eye through the spaces between high, cramped, flat buildings, over the tops of decrepit cottages, in the breaks between peeling, vine-draped walls. Vivid bits of sea were set in mosaic-like clearness between the trunks of dark old trees in gardens that were planted when the region was yet suburban. The end of the street's vista was filled with its blue expanse, with the distant hills beyond--all clear lights and shadows on this sun-steeped autumn morning.

Here was spaciousness and room. The torn hill, battered and weather-beaten with the stress and turmoil of the elements, stood up from the lower portions of the city in an eternal wash of air fresh from the ocean. Houses clung to it like barnacles. On its sharper steeps they seemed to be hanging precariously, clutching to irregularities in the soil, cowering down in hollows, or gripping rocky projections. But on its seaboard face the slope was more gradual, and here, in the old days, prosperous families had once built charming villas, where, from rose-shaded balconies, the inmates could look on the bay, sometimes a weltering waste, sometimes a vast sapphire level tracked with the trails of sailing-vessels bending to the trades.

Viola knew that North Beach, like her old home, was a quarter upon which fashion had turned its back. Rents were low there, and, judging by the number of signs of "Furnished Rooms," the inhabitants must be poor. She began her search at the foot of the hill, working up through the streets that struck her as at once clean and respectable-looking. But even her humble requirements were hard to fill.

By noontime, passing back and forth from street to street, she had gained the top of the hill. She had seen nothing at once tolerable to her taste and suitable to her purse. Now, spent with fatigue and disappointment, she climbed a last breathless ascent, and came out upon the slope below the summit. This space of open ground, devoid of streets, and with here and there a hovel squalidly sprawling amid its own debris, slants up the crest of the incline upon which perches the deserted observatory, worn and weather-stained into an appearance of mellow antiquity.

Even at this warm noonday hour the air was pure and balmily clear. Viola sank down, panting, on a broken sod, and several dogs, attracted by the unusual presence of a stranger, rushed upon her from one of the neighboring shanties, barking frenziedly. Some hens joined them, and for a moment they stood in an excited group, evidently meditating a sortie. Presently a tousled woman in a wrapper emerged from the house and threw an old boot at them, at which they scattered--the hens running off in staggering terror, the dogs scuttling away to safer regions, their tails tucked in.

The silence that settled was crystalline. It seemed to place the city at a curiously remote distance. Far below her, Viola could see the wharves and the masts of ships that lay idle by the quays. Men were running about down there with the smooth, sure movements of mechanical toys. Drays passed along the water-front, and little light wagons that sped by in a sudden wake of dust. From there, and from regions unseen, sounds came up to her with clear distinctness. A bell rang, a dog barked, a child cried piercingly--each sound seeming to rise separate and finely accentuated from the muffled roar which broods over the hives of men.

She leaned back against the broken ground behind her and looked sleepily about. The parched sward was lined by little paths that seemed to cross and recross each other in purposeless wanderings. Some led to the edge of a quarry that had torn away a huge chunk of the hill as though a giant lion had struck down and ripped off a piece of its flank. Below her were the roofs and chimneys of houses on the face of the slope. Smoke came from the chimneys and went up straight, and here and there the ragged foliage of eucalyptus-trees that had grown sere and scant in the turmoil of wintry gales hung motionless, resting on this day of grace. It must be near midday, Viola thought, and, even as the thought formed in her mind, all the whistles of the city below seemed to suddenly open their throats and blow together--a long, mellifluous, fluent sound. Then there was a pause, and odd ones, late but determined, took up the cry and poured out their hollow, reverberant roar. From the water-front louder ones came, hoarse, harsh, dominant, riding the tumult like strident talkers, and others, shrill-toned, broke in, high and protesting, and the note of distant whistles, away in the Mission and the Potrero, answered again, faint, thin, and far. It was twelve o'clock.

Viola gathered herself up from her relaxed attitude. She had been hunting now for two hours, and felt tired and discouraged. She wished she could live here, since one must live somewhere--just here, she thought, as she rose stiffly to her feet and dusted her dress. No one would ever find her, and there was something at once inspiring and soothing in all this vast panorama of sea and mountain and this wash of living air. She looked back at the house the woman with the shoe had come from, and wondered if even there they would take her in. The woman had come to a doorway now, and stood there, eying her, it seemed to Viola, with suspicious disfavor; and even as she looked, the dogs, grown brave again, made a spirited rally round the corner, and came yapping about her heels. She turned and, selecting the first path that she saw, walked down over the forward face of the hill.

The fall of the land was so abrupt here that the few householders had had to build steps from the street below to their gates. Some had even gone to the extravagance of a handrail. Viola, making a chary descent, was attracted to glance about her by a sweet, pungent fragrance, and looking to locate its source, found herself at the gate of a house, low, long, and narrow, with a garden on the outward side, terraced to keep the soil from sliding bodily down into the back yard of the house below. From this garden rose the scent that had attracted her. It was the soft, illusive perfume of mignonette, of which the little inclosure, sheltered from the winds by a lattice-work fence, held a goodly store.

The love of flowers was strong in Viola, and pressing her breast against the top of the fence, she stood peering in at the garden with its roughly bordered terraces and pebbled paths. The mignonette was growing in a border that skirted the side of the house. In the parterres below it were many varieties of blossoming annuals and rose-bushes still densely in flower. The cypress-trees from the yard below showed their dark, funereal tops over the outer fence, and a gaunt eucalyptus made a pattern on the pale noonday sky with its drooping foliage. From the garden Viola's gaze turned to the house. It presented its side to the view, its narrow front to the street. Its seaward face was flanked by a balcony, and windows, commanding the enormous sweep of water and distant hills, were set closely along the wall. In one of these windows Viola saw the sign her eyes had grown so accustomed to that morning--"Furnished Rooms."

Half an hour later she made her exit from the house, having completed her arrangement to become a tenant that same day. Its sole occupant at the time was the landlady, Miss Defoe, a spinster of advanced years, who dwelt there with her brother. She was glad of the chance of a lodger, especially one who seemed so gently tractable. The almost inaccessible position of the house made it difficult to rent the rooms, even at the lowest prices. Viola found that the terms offered her were more desirable than those made by Mrs. Cassidy.

In the afternoon, having made her escape from the widow's with guilty stealth, she took up her residence on the high hilltop, in a room from one window of which she could look out through the Golden Gate on the broad bosom of the Pacific, while from the other she could see the dappled sweep of the Alameda hills, with Berkeley and Oakland clustering about their bases.

A life uneventful and monotonous now began for the solitary girl. The days in the house on the hill passed with the even, colorless rapidity of days full of uninteresting duties and bereft of the stimulus of hope. Viola plodded on doggedly, with her head down and her eyes on the furrow before her. Work had cropped up quickly, and she turned to it with dull resolution. In the back of the house some former tenant had built a small greenhouse, which, during the Defoes' occupancy, had been left in dusty desuetude. Being granted the use of it, she cleaned and repaired it, and here once more plied her old graceful trade of raising plants.

Her friend the Kearney Street florist, to whom the colonel in his grand days had given many profitable orders, was glad to help the daughter of his old patron. Once again Viola found herself supplying his shops with the delicate ferns which grew so luxuriantly under her intelligent care. Besides this, he now and then engaged her to assist in making up floral pieces used in decoration and at weddings and funerals. In this branch of the work she displayed so much taste and skill that her services were employed more and more constantly.

She earned enough to supply her small wants, and the remains of the thousand dollars lay untouched in the bottom of her trunk.

As the winter began, with its early darkening of the days, its long gray spells of lowering weather, and its first warm, hesitating rains, Viola spent hours in the small room behind the store in Kearney Street, surrounded by flowers mounted on wire stalks, which she stuck into the mossy mold that filled in the skeleton frames. When the work was heavy she was assisted by the girl who waited in the shop--a self-confident, talkative young woman, whom every one called "Miss Gladys," and who had the most improbably golden hair and the most astonishingly high collars Viola had ever seen. Nevertheless, the confidential chatter of Miss Gladys, which ranged over a variety of topics, not the least of which was Miss Gladys's own conquering charm and its fatal power, had a salutary effect in diverting Viola from her brooding melancholy.

Her hours in the shop and greenhouse acted as preservatives of her physical health and mental freshness. Here she felt safe from observation, and worked on, with mind engrossed and fingers busy, through the long gray afternoons till the dark fell and the early night was spangled with garlands of lamps.

In the off hours, when her plants did not need her attention and there was no work for her at the store, she took long walks. That portion of the city where she had hidden herself grew as familiar to her as the old one on the other side of town. Its charm of a ruinous picturesqueness, of a careless intermingling of alien races, of a sprawling, slovenly serenity through days drenched by sun and swept by rain, was slowly revealed to her. Aspects of it grew to have expressions of almost human attraction or repulsion. This little blue glimpse of sea invited her, with its suggestion of freedom and space. That lowering alley, dark and furtive, with reluctant rays of sunshine slanting down its walls, and the gleam of eyes watching from behind its stealthy shutters, inspired her imagination to strange, soaring flights.

From the summit of the hill she looked down on the crowding, dun-colored city, cut cleanly with streets and decked with feathers of smoke, and tried to reconstruct the village of '49. Here, far back, was the curve of the shore; there, up the California Street incline, tents and shanties were dotted through the chaparral; and below, an open sand-space marked the plaza. The adobe of the Señora Briones lay farther round in the hollow of North Beach; her father had often shown her where it stood. Now the myriad roofs of a metropolis stretched far away, filling the valley and cresting the adjacent hills. Domes and the crosses on church steeples caught the light, and from this great height the girdle of silver water encircled it like a restraining bond.