Part 4

As they retraced their steps the broad, yellow glow of the sunset deepened behind them, and before them burned on the windows of houses that climbed the hillsides still farther on. The water and its low-lying shores--flat lands where silver creeks lay embedded like the metal wires in cloisonné ware--were already veiled in a soft, purplish twilight which exhaled a creeping chilliness. At a high point, unobstructed by buildings, they turned to watch the sun drop into the sea. For a moment it seemed to hesitate, resting on the horizon like a spinning copper disk; then it slipped out of sight, and the darkness rushed up from unexpected places and swept over the prospect, blotting out all distinctions of color. Only in the west there was a great gold radiance, against which little red clouds floated like bits of raveled silk.

John Gault, as was his Sunday custom, dined with his brother's family. After dinner he left early, before the usual callers appeared--generally young men come to bow the knee at Letitia's shrine.

For a space he walked down the street with a quick, decided step. Then, of a sudden, he stopped, and stood looking at the pavement, uncertain and irresolute. The car which had borne him to the other side of town on the last evening that he had dined with the Mortimer Gaults glided across the avenue some blocks farther down. He heard its bell and saw the long funnel of light from its lantern pierce the darkness before it.

He stood for a moment watching it, then turned in the opposite direction and stopped. As he hesitated, he heard in the distance the bell of the next car. With a smothered ejaculation, he wheeled about and ran for it. He caught the car and swung himself to a front seat.

"Kismet!" he said to himself, as he sank down panting.

III

At this period of his history the colonel's exchequer must have been in a particularly depleted condition, for it was not a week after John Gault's visit that he again appeared at the office, and this time requested a loan of forty dollars.

Had the colonel, during this interview, exhibited some of that shamefaced and conscious embarrassment that the most hardened borrowers will show, his benefactor would have felt less miserably ill at ease. But the old man was as suave and affably benignant as if he were conferring a long-solicited favor. That there was something of shame in his barefaced assaults upon the purse of his daughter's friend seemed an idea that had never entered his mind. No disconcerting scruples marred his appreciation of his sudden good fortune. Pride was evidently a possession of which he was as poorly supplied as he was with the tangible goods of this world.

He was in the best of spirits; indeed, to John Gault's suspicious eye he had the triumphant air of a man who had found a good thing. He came into the office with a jaunty tread and an alert, all-embracing glance, and left it showering smiles and bows on its chief and his clerks. The sun of his prosperity seemed to have warmed and brightened him in every way. He told inimitable stories of the early days, which--unhampered by the presence of his daughter--were less egotistical, and not always so conventional, as those he regaled Gault with at home. He was as pressing as ever in his invitations to call, and into these introduced Viola's name as being a participator with himself in the desire of seeing their mutual friend as often as his time and inclination would lead him to the house near South Park.

After this visit the vague irritation and moodiness that Gault had felt gave place to a poignant sense of uncertainty and doubt. Naturally of a suspicious nature, the life he had led, the surroundings in which he had passed from youth to maturity, the large experience of evil gained in a twenty years' residence in a thoroughly loose and lawless city, had intensified his original tendency till he was now prone to suspect where suspicion was either a folly or an insult. He had the vain man's dread of being fooled, imposed upon, made ridiculous, and he was proud of his keenness in detecting such intentions.

At twenty-two he had come from Harvard to San Francisco, had plunged into the fashionable life of the day, and being the son of wealthy and well-known parents, had quickly learned the bitter lessons which society teaches its followers. People said John Gault had never married because he believed in no woman. This was an aspersion upon his sound, if narrow, common sense. He was afraid of marriage, of a terrible disillusionment, followed by a life-time of conventionally correct misery. What he feared in it was himself. He dreaded that he might not make the woman he married happy, and deep in his soul he cherished the same dream as Balzac, who once wrote: "To devote myself to the happiness of a woman has been my ceaseless dream, and I suffer because I have not realized it." With the passage of the years he had grown narrower and more ambitionless. When he met Viola Reed he was sinking into the dull apathy of a self-engrossed and purposeless middle age.

Her attraction for him was sudden and compelling. He often wondered why he liked her so much. He had known hundreds of women who were prettier and quite as clever. About Viola there was a curious, distinguishing touch of refinement that he did not find in many of the beauties and belles who were so ready to smile on him at the fortnightly cotillions and subscription germans. The delicate modesty of her beauty satisfied his exacting eye. There was something subtle and rare about her, a suggestion of romance in her wide, pondering eyes, a charm of mystery behind the face that looked so youthful and yet was so femininely secretive. She always seemed to say the right thing, and that and the soft tones of her voice were keenly pleasing to his fastidious taste.

At first he had merely sought her society for the passing pleasure he had derived from it. He was reaching that stage of life when he found it difficult to be interested in new people, and where the long tedium of a dinner next a handsome and pretentious partner was beginning to assume the aspect of a martyrdom. There was nothing irksome or commonplace or tedious in the evenings spent in the house near South Park; even the colonel ceased to be a bore when his daughter sat by listening. Gault began to like going there better than going anywhere else. On the days when he decided that he would spend the evening at the Reeds', he found himself looking forward to the visit all the afternoon. The anticipation of it lay like a glad thought at the bottom of his heart. On the night that Letitia had asked him about Colonel Reed's daughter, he had nearly arrived at a conclusion--that Viola Reed was the one woman in the world for him.

Nearly, but not quite. The next day Colonel Reed had come and borrowed the first fifty dollars.

This simple action had disturbed John Gault's serenity. The second and third visits tore the fabric of his dream to pieces. If the old man had only made his request once, he would have thought no more of it than of the numberless other loans which he had contributed to the human wreckage left by the receding tides of San Francisco's several booms. But the colonel's subsequent appearances, so closely following on Gault's visits, awoke a sudden swarm of suspicions that began buzzing their importunate warnings into his ears. Why had the old man been so effusive in the beginning? Why had he invited him, insisted even, upon his calling? Was he so determinedly hospitable merely to secure a listener to his reminiscences? And if he had acted upon his own impulses at first,--which certainly seemed the case,--Viola could have stopped him later on. Gault had noticed that her word seemed law to her father.

In the pain of his doubts he surreptitiously made inquiries, and discovered that Colonel Reed's penury was of the past five years' duration. Up to that time he had still held small properties and realized on them at intervals. People who knew said that since then his circumstances had been desperate, and yet it was known of all men that he was engaged in no paid employment. It was the one point upon which the pride of the erstwhile millionaire was firm. Viola did no work, either. In the West, the woman laboring to help sustain the ruined fortunes of her family is so common a spectacle that the strong man, secure in his riches and his health, felt a species of fierce indignation against the girl for her seeming idleness.

Yet it must take so little to keep them. They owned the house they lived in, and employed no servant, Viola doing all the work of the small menage. He had tried to persuade himself that the colonel was using him for his banker without the girl's knowledge, and then Letitia, with her heavy feminine common sense, had laid her finger on the weak spot in that argument. How could a sudden influx of money enter into so small a household without the cognizance of the person who managed it all? It was nonsensical to think of. She knew--and if she knew, was she not party to the whole sordid, ugly plot?

But here he always stopped. It was impossible. It could not be. The image of her face rose before him, as it often did now, making him feel disgusted and ashamed that even in thought he should have done her an injury. There was a mistake somewhere. It would explain itself. But he knew that until it did explain itself he would know no peace; for he could not live without seeing her, and at every visit he felt her charm penetrate deeper into his heart, despite his lurking doubts.

He spent hours in pondering as to the best way to silence these doubts without letting her suspect their existence. Even if she were cognizant of it, he could hardly speak to her of her father's borrowing. Yet in his thought she always seemed so simple, so girlish, so young, that he was sure if he could see her alone, and perhaps turn the conversation upon some analogous subject, her ignorance would speak from every feature. He had grown to know all the varying expressions of her face, and he felt that he could detect the slightest change of color or tremor of consciousness on its pale innocence.

He did not, however, know at what hour he was likely to find her by herself. He had always gone in the evening, as it was the colonel who asked him, and who invariably designated that time. Gault fancied that his visits were the old man's chief amusement and recreation, and that he so particularly insisted upon the evening in the desire not to miss them. Upon this hypothesis he concluded that he ran a better chance of finding Viola alone in the second half of the day, and on his first disengaged afternoon he left his office early, with the intention of walking across town to South Park.

It was not late enough in the season for the summer winds to have begun, and the straw, dust, paper, and general refuse that they sweep away with their steady, cold breath lay thick on the pavements. In the hard light of afternoon the dreary quarter looked even meaner and more squalid than it did by night. The wayfarer could see the dirt on the little shop-windows, the dinginess of the wares displayed. The small, open stands, where shell-fish and oyster cocktails were sold, were thick with flies. Behind the grimed glass of the pawnbroker's windows lay the relics of vanished days of splendor and extravagance. Old-fashioned pieces of jewelry, broken ornaments, rusted pistols, gold-mounted spectacles, mother-of-pearl opera-glasses, were heaped together in neglected disorder. Now and then the entrance of a second-hand clothes store gave a glimpse of a dark interior hung with clothes, between which the sharp Jewish faces of the patron and his wife peered out eagerly.

John Gault's eyes passed over this with slow disgust. What might not the constant sight of such naked poverty breed in the most sensitive soul! Day after day Viola must have passed this way, must have seen the human spiders waiting in their dark web, perhaps might have chaffered with them, or recognized her own jewelry among the tarnished relics in the pawnbroker's window.

He turned into the wider avenue, where gentility had once dwelt in its bulky palaces. They seemed to stare with wide, unshuttered windows, drearily speculating on the desolation of the street and their own decay. Around them gardens stretched unkempt and parched, here and there an aloe or some vigorously growing shrub striking a note of color in the uniform grayness. High iron gates, richly wrought, but eaten into by rust, hung open from broken hinges, or were tied together with ravelings of rope. One of the most imposing, still standing upright, was held ajar with a piece of broken brick. It gave entrance to a circular sweep of driveway and a large garden full of rankly growing shrubs and vines and headless statues, with a rusty fountain-basin in the center, and urns still showing the corpses of geraniums. Inside Gault saw some of the children of the neighborhood playing games, and realized that the broken brick was evidently of their introduction. This was the house which had been built by Jerry McCormick thirty-odd years before. It had the appearance of having been deserted for a century.

A few turns down narrower streets brought the wayfarer to the Reeds' home. He had only seen it once before by daylight, and now eyed it with curiosity. Though age and poverty showed in its peeling stucco walls, in the untended vines that hung about the bay-window, in the rotting woodwork of the old gate, it still had the air of a place that is lived in and cared for. Inside the gate the pathway of black-and-white marble was clean and bright. Round the root of the dracæna there was a flower-bed planted with mignonette. On the other side of the flagged walk fuchsias and heliotrope were trained against the high fence which separated the house from its next-door neighbor.

In answer to his ring Viola opened the door. She was dressed in a blue-and-white gingham dress, the sleeves of which were rolled up to the elbows, and showed arms slightly rounded and white as milk. She wore an apron and had a pair of scissors in her hand. When she saw who it was the color of joy ran in a beautiful flush over her face.

"You never came at this time before," she said in the hall, hastily pulling down her sleeves. "I never thought for a moment it was you, or I shouldn't have come to the door with my sleeves this way."

Then they passed into the drawing-room. The afternoon light streamed through the bare emptiness of this once stately apartment, revealing the long crack that zigzagged across the mirror, and the rents in the colonel's arm-chair. In the rear half of the room there were only one or two pieces of furniture, evidently seldom used, and pushed back into the corners. The double doors leading from here were open, and vouchsafed the visitor a view of one of those long and spacious dining-rooms, with an outer wall of glass, often seen in old San Francisco houses. Fronting this glass wall were tiers of plants, some mounted on rough boxes, some on tables. They were of many sizes and sorts, but the feathery foliage of the maidenhair was most in evidence. It seemed to be growing in every kind of receptacle, from the ordinary flower-pot to a tomato-can on one side and a huge kerosene-oil tin on the other. Near the dining-table was a chair, and the table itself was littered with brown paper, cut neatly into circular pieces about three inches in diameter.

Viola moved forward to close the doors, but was arrested by her visitor.

"Why, you've a regular conservatory in there. What beautiful plants!"

She held the door open and let him look in, though apparently not quite at her ease.

"Yes," she said; "I have great luck with ferns. Some people have, you know. It's just because we take more care of them than others."

"My sister-in-law would die of envy if she could see those," said Gault, indicating the maidenhairs; "she's always buying that sort of thing, and they're always dying."

Viola looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. The color deepened in her cheeks, and then she looked away and began to play with the lock of the door.

"She must buy a great many," she said, with a questioning inflection.

"Cart-loads," said he, absently, wondering what had caused her augmented color, and watching her as he would always now watch her whenever there was the slightest deviation from her normal manner.

"And I suppose," she said, "she spends a great deal on them?"

"I suppose so," he answered, "judging by the number that I've seen wither in their prime and disappear, and new ones take their places the next day."

Viola pressed the lock in and shot it out.

"Are any of them dead just now?" she asked, in rather a small voice.

"Dozens, probably. It seems to me some of them are always dead, only they're considerate enough not to all die at the same time."

There was a moment's pause. Gault's gaze was diverted from her face to the high, old-fashioned room, with its marble mantel carved in fruits and flowers and its bare sideboard. Then Viola said:

"Your sister-in-law always gets her plants from the large florists, doesn't she? Some one on Kearney or Sutter Street?"

"I dare say she does; but I'm sure I don't know. I can't control my curiosity any further--what were you going to do with those round bits of paper you were cutting when I came in?"

She looked at him quickly, a look of sharp, dubious inquiry; then, as she met the amused curiosity of his glance, she gave a little laugh and said:

"I was going to make jam."

"But you don't make jam out of paper?"

"No; those are for the tops of the glasses. I soak them in brandy and put them on, and they preserve it."

He looked at the papers, then back at her. As their eyes met the delight each felt in the other's presence found expression in a simultaneous burst of laughter. For a moment they stood facing each other, laughing in foolish but happy lightness of heart.

"Now, you know," he said, "I'm a credulous person, but isn't that going too far? Why, if you used all those things you'd have jam enough to feed the American army."

Her laughter died, and looking slightly confused, she put out her hand, seized the other door, and drew them together with a bang.

"There!" she said, dropping the catch; "you can't see any more. You're too curious, in the first place, and you don't believe me, which is worse."

"I've found out the skeleton in the closet," he said, as they walked back into the front room. "It's the colonel's passion for jam. I've heard of a passion for pie running in families, but jam's something new."

The bare austerity of this bleak apartment seemed to cast a sudden chill over their high spirits. Gault, sitting in the colonel's chair, reverted in thought to the object of his visit, and wondered how he could turn the conversation in the direction he had intended. His preoccupation, and the sense of shame he felt at the mean part he contemplated playing, made him respond to her conversational attempts with dry shortness. She grew constrained and embarrassed, and finally, in a desperate attempt to arrest a total silence, said:

"Don't you like my new cushion? You've never noticed it!"

The visitor's slow glance moved in the direction indicated, and rested on a cretonne cushion in one of the wicker chairs.

"It's a perfect beauty," he said, with as much enthusiasm as he thought the occasion required.

"I'm glad you think it's pretty," she answered, evidently much pleased. "I ought not to have bought it, I suppose, but I do love pretty things."

"Why oughtn't you to have bought it? What is the matter with it?"

"Nothing; I mean it was an extravagance. I sometimes think how perfectly delightful it would be to be able to go into stores and buy furniture and ornaments and curtains just whenever you wanted."

This remark dispelled Gault's preoccupation. He remained in the same position and continued staring at the cushion, but his glance had changed from its absent absorption to a fixed and listening intentness.

Viola saw that she had interested him, and continued with happy volubility:

"Sometimes, when I have nothing to do and am here alone, I think how I would furnish this room if I could buy anything I saw, and could just say to some outside person, the way princesses do, 'I have bought so much; please pay the bill.' I've done it in white and gold, and in crimson with black wood, teak or ebony, very plain and heavy; and also in striped cretonnes with bunches of flowers, and little chairs and sofas with spindle legs. There's a great deal of satisfaction in it. It's almost as good as having it really happen."

"It sounds very amusing," said Gault, as she paused; "but then, castles in the air," he added, turning to look at her, "are never quite the same as the real thing."

"If you can't get the real thing, you take the castles in the air," she answered, smiling.

"Tell me some more of yours."

"Oh, they're just silly dreams, and mercenary ones, too. My castles are all built on a foundation of money. It's a dreadful thing to have to acknowledge, but I'm afraid I am mercenary. And it's such a horrid fault to have."

"But isn't it rather a useful one?" he could not forbear asking.

"Not so far. Once I had my palm read by a palmist, and he told me I was going to be very prosperous--to have great riches. That's one of my best castles in the air. I'm all the time wondering about it, and where my great riches are coming from."

She spread both hands, palms up, on the table, and studied them as if trying to elicit further secrets from their delicately lined surfaces.

"Great riches!" she repeated. "Where could a person suddenly find great riches? The mining booms are over, and in California people don't strike oil-wells in their gardens. I'm afraid it will have to be either begging, borrowing, or stealing. I wonder which I would succeed best in."

With the last words she raised her bent head, and her eyes, diminished in size by her laughter, rested full on his. Their glance was clear, candid, and innocently mirthful as that of a merry child.

As he stared at her, almost vacantly, the notes of a clock, striking somewhere in the back of the house, fell with crystalline distinctness upon the silence.

"One--two--three--four--five," she counted absently, with each number touching the table with a finger-tip.

Gault rose to his feet, remarking with unfeigned surprise on the lateness of the hour. She looked suddenly confused and annoyed at the realization of her unintentional rudeness, and asked him if he would not remain till her father's return. But he pleaded an engagement he had made to attend the tea given that afternoon by Mrs. Jerry McCormick, and, with a hand pressure and the conventional words of farewell, brought his visit to a close.

Outside, he turned to the right and walked slowly forward toward where the rumble of traffic indicated one of the large and populous thoroughfares of the district. Before him, at the end of the street's long vista, the sunset glowed pink, barred by a delicate scoring of telegraph-wires. Even as he looked it deepened and burned higher and higher up the sky, while at the far end of the vista it concentrated into a core of brightness, as though a conflagration were in progress there.

What was he to think? He felt his mind confused and full of warring images. He had been almost afraid of what she might say--she who was to him the ideal of all that was gentlest and truest and most maidenly. And yet what had she said to disturb or annoy him? It was only the foolish prattle of a girl who is happy and in high spirits. And even as he made these assurances to himself, sentences from the past interview surged up to the surface of his mind: "I'm afraid I'm mercenary, and it's such a horrid fault to have." "Where are my riches coming from? It will have to be either begging, borrowing, or stealing."