Part 2

"Oh, they don't know Viola," said the colonel--not with bitterness, but as one who states a simple and natural fact; "the old woman's educated them out of all that. But, as I was saying, I made their father. He'd managed to scrape together a little pile, put it all in a small prospect, and lost every nickel. He was just about dead broke, and came to me crying--yes, crying--and said, 'Colonel Reed, there's only one man in California whose advice I'd follow and whose opinion I'd trust.' 'Who's that?' said I, intending to help the poor devil to the best of my ability. 'It's Ramsay Reed,' said he. 'Well,' said I, 'if you'll just put yourself in my hands, and do what I tell you, I'll set you on your feet.' 'Colonel,' said he, 'say the word, and whatever it is, it goes. You've got more financial ability in your little finger than all the rest of 'em have in their whole bodies.' So I took him in hand."

The colonel paused, a reflective smile wrinkling the skin at the corners of his eyes.

"You certainly seem to have made a success of his case," said Gault, feeling that some comment was expected of him.

"Yes, yes," said the colonel; "I may say a great success. The poor fellow's confidence in me made me determined to do my best. I used to give him points--those were the days when I could give points. Told him if he would follow the lead west of the Little Bertha--people had hardly heard of the Little Bertha then--he'd strike it. He was broke, and I gave him the money. Three months later he'd struck pay dirt. That was the beginning of the Alcade Mine, but he didn't have sense enough to hold on to it, and sold out for a few thousands. I saw then that I'd have to do more than give him an occasional boost, and stood behind him, off and on, for years. Even when we ran into the Virginia City boom he never bought without my advice. He hadn't any discrimination. I'd just say to him, 'Save your money and buy five feet next to the Best and Belcher,' and he'd do what I said every time. Without me he'd have been working in the mines in Tuolumne yet."

In the absorption of his recollections the colonel crossed his knees, bringing one foot, with a torn slipper dropping from the heel, into a position of prominence.

"Oh, those were days worth living in!" he said, running a long, spare hand through his hair--"great days! Men that weren't grown then don't know what life is. I meet Jerry sometimes, but we don't talk much about old times. He knows that he owes everything to me, and it goes against the grain for him to acknowledge it. I hear his daughters are handsome girls."

"Perhaps--I don't know," said Gault, recalling the occasions when he had sat next to the Miss McCormicks at dinners, and suffered exceedingly in the effort known as "making conversation."

"I heard that they were fine, handsome girls, large, and with black hair like their mother. She was a beauty in her day--a hot-tempered Irish girl that Jerry married from the wash-tub. The youngest daughter is about Viola's age--twenty-three."

John Gault turned and looked at Viola with some surprise.

"You thought I was younger, didn't you?" she said, smiling. "Everybody does."

He was about to answer when the colonel once more took up the thread of his reminiscences.

"Maroney was down then--'way down; not even on the lowest rung of the ladder--he wasn't on the ladder at all. I gave him the first lift he had. No one would look at Maroney in those days. He was a thin, consumptive-looking fellow, full of crazy schemes, forever coming to you and borrowing money for some wild-cat stock that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. I took a fancy to him, and every dollar he made was through my help and advice. It was when I had my offices on Montgomery Street, and he'd have a way of dropping in about lunch-time and hanging round looking poor and sick. I used to take him out to lunch, and give him a square meal and a few points that he'd sense enough to follow. He wasn't like Jerry; he was smart. Why, I almost fed that man for years. When he'd get down on his luck--and he was always doing that--I'd say, 'You know, when you want, my check-book's at your disposal.' And it was, more times than I can remember."

The colonel paused, smiling at his thoughts. The visitor, who had been looking idly on the ground, raised his eyes and let them dwell in curious scrutiny upon the old man's profile, cut like a cameo against the dim walls with their fine gold traceries. John Gault, like all Californians, knew every vicissitude in the life of Adolphus Maroney, one of the great bonanza kings, a man whose career was quoted as an example of what could be done by brains and energy in the California of the Comstock era.

Wondering, as he had done many times before, what Viola thought of her father's vainglorious imaginings, he turned now and suddenly looked at her. She was sitting with her elbow on the table and her chin resting in the palm of her hand. Her eyes were on the colonel, and her expression was one of appreciative interest. It was possible that she believed in him, absolutely and unquestionably. Yet her face, in its placid, restful gravity, gave no clue to the thoughts within. She was not to be read by every casual comer. Even the practised eye of the man of much worldly experience was baffled by the quiet reserve of this young girl who was nearly half his age.

"I haven't seen Maroney for nearly eight or nine years," continued the colonel. "The last time it was in the lobby of the Palace. He was with some capitalists from England, with a millionaire or two from New York thrown in. He saw me and looked uncomfortable, but he shook hands and introduced me. I got away as quickly as I could. I didn't want to embarrass him."

"Why should you embarrass him?" asked Viola.

The colonel looked at Gault, and gave the forbearing laugh of the man who treats with good-humored tolerance the ignorance of the woman.

"Why, he was always uneasy for fear I'd give away the fact that it was I who made his money for him. But, God bless my soul!" said the old man, throwing back his head and going off into a sonorous laugh, "he needn't be afraid. I wouldn't rob him of any of his glory. Only I took it pretty hard, when Mrs. Maroney was here last winter, that she didn't go out of her way to be kind to you."

Viola gave a little exclamation, Gault could not make out whether of annoyance or protest. That the colonel should have expected his daughter to be the object of Mrs. Maroney's attention and patronage was only another evidence of his painful self-delusion. Mrs. Maroney was a lady who aspired to storm the fashionable citadels of New York and London, and troubled herself little with those of whom she could make no practical use in the campaign.

"You're unjust to Mrs. Maroney," Viola said gently, and rather weariedly, the visitor thought; "she was only here for two months, and she had quantities of friends to see and people to entertain."

"Oh, my dear, my dear," answered the old man, "that's just your amiable way of looking at it. She was like her husband--she wanted to forget."

He turned his eyes, still bright under their thick white brows, upon the younger man, and looking at him with an expression of mingled pride and patience, said:

"That is the way with the Californians. Once fall, and the procession passes you, and the men that were beside you don't wait to turn and see where you dropped. You stay where you fall and you watch the others sweep on. That's what I have done."

"Don't talk that way, father," said Viola; "Mr. Gault will think you feel unhappy about it."

The old man smiled, and leaning forward, clasped her hand and held it.

"Mr. Gault," he said, with quite a grand air, "knows better than that. The opinions of other people don't affect our happiness. I don't resent the prosperity of my old mates, nor feel any discouragement at our present--er--temporary embarrassments."

Viola stirred uneasily, and said quickly:

"No--no; of course not. Why should you?"

John Gault rose here, and she rose, too. Her embarrassment, which had vanished during the evening's conversation, now returned, and she plucked nervously at the paper flower on the lamp-globe. It seemed to him that she was anxious for him to go.

With the colonel it was otherwise. Rising and standing upright in the patched limpness of his dressing-gown, he affected incredulity at the thought that his guest contemplated such an early departure. Then, being politely assured that this was unavoidable, and that, for the matter of that, it was now close upon eleven, he urged him to repeat the visit at an early date.

"We are always here, Viola and I," he said. "We have not many engagements, as you see--just a friend here and there. But we value our friends more highly than the people do who count them by dozens."

He had followed John Gault out into the hall, and from here his voice called:

"The lamp, Viola. Mr. Gault can't put on his overcoat in the dark."

She came out quickly, carrying the smaller of the two lamps, divested once more of its paper flower shade. To give a better light she held it up and looked at him, smiling a little from under the halo made by her hair. In answer to his good night she gave him her hand, which he pressed with a warm, strong grip.

As he went down the few steps from the porch the colonel stood in the doorway, his figure in sharp silhouette against the light within.

"Don't be a month finding your way down here again," he said. "People say it's out of the beaten tracks, but we prefer it to any other locality in the city. Viola and I like the old associations, and I've struck my roots here too deep to have them pulled up. Well, good night! So long!"

The door closed, and as John Gault opened the gate, the light vanished from the two long panes of glass that edged it on both sides, and gleamed out through the cracks and crevices between the blinds of the bay-window.

It was a warm night, soft and still, and Gault decided to walk. With his head bent down he walked slowly, striking the cracks in the pavement with the tip of his cane. From small gardens still tended and watered in this unkempt wilderness of brick and stucco, whiffs of delicate fragrance drifted out across the pavements, only to be stifled by the sickly odors that rose from the open sewer-mouths.

When he turned into the wide avenues where the old mansions stood, the air was fresher and the silence heavier. Desertion and darkness seemed to claim as their own this relic of a life that had already passed away. The dim, bulky shapes of the great houses stood back from the street, sullen, black, and morose, like the visions in a dream. Vines shrouded their solemn forms, and here and there clung to the support of an iron balcony-rail, hanging down in the darkness like a veil that swayed and whispered in the breeze. In one porch a hall lamp was lit, and cast a pale and faltering light over an entrance that looked as full of menace and evil mystery as the opening to some bandit's cavern.

But Gault passed their iron gates, high between supporting pillars, without looking up. A man's dreams held him in a trance-like reverie. A man's perplexities destroyed the content of many serenely selfish years. He had come to what seemed to him the fateful moment of his destiny. Had he been a younger man he would have said with a rush of reckless ecstasy, "I love her!" Now, walking slowly home under the solemn stars, he queried to himself:

"Shall I let myself love her? Do I dare?"

II

Letitia's surprise at the discovery that Colonel Reed had an unknown daughter was an unconscious compliment to the prominence and conspicuousness still enjoyed by that gentleman.

Hundreds of men who had made their fortunes in the great days of the Comstock, and lost them in the depression that followed, had daughters and sons that the friends of their prosperity neither knew nor cared about. The Californian is shy of all sad, unsuccessful things. Failures in the race in which so many won a prize were quickly forgotten, and crept away to hide their chagrin in distant quarters of the city or in the smaller towns. The procession had passed them by, and men who had been underlings when they were kings reigned in their stead. Even their names were no longer heard, and their children grew up separated by the chasm of poverty and obscurity from the children of their old mates.

That Colonel Reed had not been overlooked was partly accidental and partly owing to his inability to realize that such a state of affairs could be anything but a public misfortune. The colonel had the distinction of having collapsed in a most tremendous and complete manner, and he was proud of it. His case was quoted to inquiring tourist and ambitious native as a star example of money-getting and money-losing in the State of California. His passage from affluence to poverty was still a story worth telling and hearing. It was all in the superlative degree, for the colonel had never done anything by halves. His prosperity had been as extravagantly splendid as his adversity was characteristically complete.

He had made the bulk of his fortune in those years of the fat kine from 1870 to 1875. Before that he had been well-to-do, as every man could be in the San Francisco that developed between the days when "the water came up to Montgomery Street" and the inauguration of the Comstock boom. He had been a figure in the city from the earliest times, had known San Francisco when it was a straggling line of houses edging the muddy shores of the bay, with a trail winding through the chaparral over the dunes to the Mission Dolores. He had climbed the lupine-covered slopes of what is now California Street, and looked down on the hundreds of deserted ships that lay rotting in the cove. He had seen the city of tents swept by fire, and the city of wood follow it in a few months. He had been one of those who had held a ticket for the Jenny Lind Theater on the night it was burned down. He had witnessed the trial of Jansen's assailants, and had served on the two great Vigilance Committees, and from the windows of Fort Gunnybags had seen Casey and Cora go to their last accounts.

Of his journey across the isthmus in '49 he could tell thrilling stories. Only those of iron physique and reckless courage had the hardihood to accomplish the trip. The weak in health and feeble in spirit were left behind at the Chágres or turned back at Panama. The fittest survived to become those giants of the far West, the California pioneers. Of these the colonel had been a leading figure. Blood ran red in the veins in those days, and ginger was hot in the mouth. The present was too full and tumultuous to allow of even the briefest glimpse of the future. He became a part of the seething life of the city, felt its heart-beats as his own, lived greatly as it lived, loved, hated, sinned, and rejoiced with it.

He often said afterward that at this period of his life money was his last consideration. There was too much outside to make the question of sordid gain an engrossing one. The pecuniary side of things was never one that had bothered the colonel much. And, true to the old adage, Fortune knocked at the door of him who seemed most indifferent to her. His riches came suddenly. It was toward the seventies, when the Comstock was pouring its streams of wealth into hundreds of purses. The colonel held his open and it was filled. It was dazzling, wonderful, bewildering. His fortune rose by bounds that he could hardly follow. The figures of it seemed to grow overnight. In the wild exhilaration of the period he pressed his luck with unvarying success. He became intoxicated, the fever of money-getting seized him, and he believed equally in his star as a man of destiny and his genius as a financier.

Such a sudden and unexpected rise to opulence might have dazed another man, but the colonel rose to it like a race-horse to the spur. He was born with a natural instinct for luxury. Formerly he had been merely one of a thousand good fellows. Now he became a prince. Nothing was too whimsically extravagant for the pioneer who had crossed the isthmus in 1849. He could be traced by the trail of squandered money. He bought a country place near San Mateo, raised a palace on it, and entertained such celebrities as then drifted to California in a way that made them tell astonishing stories of the "Arabian Nights" existence of the bonanza kings. In the heyday of his prosperity he had married a young actress, who had enjoyed the splendors of her sudden elevation for three years, and had then died, leaving her husband but one legacy--a baby daughter.

Very shortly after her death the colonel's fortunes began to decline. He put on a bold front and was more lavish in his expenditures than ever, for his belief in himself was unshakable. Then stories of his reverses got abroad, and people said the whole brief span of his glory had been a piece of pure and unmerited luck; as a financier he had no ability. The misfortune which attended all his later investments seemed to prove this assertion. His money melted like wax before fire. He bought largely of land about South Park and Rincon Hill when it was at its highest, refused to sell out, and saw the tide of popularity move to the other side of the city, leaving him overweighted with real estate upon which he could not pay the taxes. He mortgaged it to its full value, speculated with the money, and lost it. Ten years after his wife's death he was ruined. Twenty years after saw him living in the house near South Park, the sole possession left him.

The colonel took his defeat bravely. He held his head as high as ever and accepted patronage from no man. When some one suggested that he should apply for aid to the Society of Pioneers he looked as haughtily amazed as though they had told him to stand and beg on the corner of Kearney and Sutter streets. Fate had forced him into the little house on the far side of town, but that was no reason why he should remain hidden there. Nearly every day he could be seen striding down Montgomery Street and mingling with the world of men where he had once been a leading figure. He seemed to feel no shame on the score of his old clothes turning green about the shoulders, and greeted his comrades, now lords of the street, with a cheery word and a wave of his hand to his hat-brim.

He always had a busy air as of the man of affairs. Men who did not know him well wondered what scheme he had on hand that caused him so much hurry and preoccupation. But there was no scheme. It was only the colonel's way of defying destiny and satisfying the thirst and longing for the old excitement that carried him back to the scenes of his triumphs. He hung round Pine Street a good deal, telling those who would listen to him stories of the early days--of the men he had made, and of the women who had been the reigning beauties. Sometimes he was accorded an amused attention, for he could be excellent company when he chose, and many of his stories of the ups and downs of 1868 and 1870 had become classics.

There was just one subject upon which, in his Montgomery Street peregrinations, he preserved silence. This was his daughter. He said to himself, with a sudden squaring of his gaunt shoulders, that he only mentioned her to his intimates, and as his intimates existed mainly in his own imagination, Viola Reed's name was almost unknown.

John Gault, who belonged to a later era of California's prosperity than the colonel, had heard that there was such a person, but had never seen her. He did not fraternize with the old man, whom he regarded as a painful landmark in the city's record of blighted hopes and ruined careers. Like many of his kind, he had an intense, selfish dislike for all that played upon his sympathies or moved him to an uncomfortable and discomposing pity.

One afternoon in the past winter he had gone across town to South Park to see some houses left him by his father, for which he had received a reasonable offer. On the way home, passing through one of the small cross-streets that connect the larger thoroughfares, he had encountered Colonel Reed and a lady. He would have passed them with the ordinary salutation, had not the lady, who had been gazing into the wayside gardens, turned her head as he approached and looked indifferently at him with what he thought were the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen.

He stopped and greeted the colonel with the polite friendliness to be expected of wayfarers who encounter one another in such distant localities. The colonel, who was always childishly flattered by the notice of well-known men, was expansive, and, after a few moments of casual talk, introduced the younger man to his daughter. Then they walked together to the old man's house, which was some little distance away. The colonel, stopping at the gate, invited the stranger in. John Gault noticed that the girl did not second the invitation, and excused himself on the ground of pressing business. But the colonel, who had never got over the hospitable habits of his _beaux jours_, urged him to come some evening.

"Viola," said the old man, smiling proudly on his daughter, "will be glad to see you, too. She's the housewife--runs everything, myself included."

Thus appealed to, she added her invitation to her father's, and Gault said he would come.

As he walked away, he wondered if she wanted him to come. It had seemed to him as if she had spoken under pressure and reluctantly, though she had been perfectly polite. But it was impossible to tell what a woman thought, or when she was pleased or displeased, and the next week he went.

Three months had passed since then. The visit had been repeated many times, each time under almost exactly similar circumstances. Evening after evening Gault had listened to the colonel, wondering why he came, why he subjected himself to this absurd imposition, why he sat meek and generally mute under the conversational assaults of the garrulous old man. And yet, the day after his seventh visit, he sat in his private office wondering how soon he could go again to the little house near South Park without causing surprise to its inmates or breaking the rules of conventionality and deliberation that governed his life.

In the midst of his cogitations the door was opened by one of his clerks, who acquainted him with the fact that Colonel Reed was without and wanted to see him.

The announcement came upon him so unexpectedly that his color rose, and it was with an effort that he composed his face to greet the visitor. A disturbing presentiment of something unpleasant seized upon him. Never before had Colonel Reed entered or suggested entering his office. "What does the old man want?" he thought testily, as he bade the clerk show him in.

A moment later the colonel entered. He was suave and smiling. There was nothing of the broken financier, the ruined millionaire, in his buoyant and almost patronizing manner. His old black coat, faded and many years behind the mode, but well brushed and carefully mended, was buttoned up closely, and still sat upon his thin but sinewy figure with something of its old-time elegance. In one hand he carried a little black lacquer cane.

Sitting down opposite John Gault, where the light of the long window fell full upon his face, he had all the assurance of manner of a man whose bonanza has not become a memory and a dream.

"I was going by, and I thought I'd drop in and pass the time of day," he said. "Things aren't as lively with me just now as they have been. It's an off season."

"It's that with most of us," said the other, regarding him intently and wondering what he had come for.

"All in the same coffin, are we?" said the colonel, airily. "I'm generally on the full jump down here of a morning; but lately--"