Part 2

But he crossed over to Los Angeles occasionally. At a soirée he met the daughter—and only child—of one of the largest landholders in Southern California, and danced with no one else that night. She married the scholarly innkeeper with the blessing of her father, who was anxious to pass his declining years in peace with a young wife. The bride, for coincident if not similar reasons, was glad to move to Catalina. She was the belle of her time, this Madelina Joyce, and her dark beauty came down to her from Indian ancestors. Her New England great-grandfather had come to California long before the discovery of gold, bought, for a fraction, two hundred thousand acres from the Mexican government, and married, despite the protests of his Spanish friends, an Indian girl of great beauty, both of face and character.

The Pueblo bride had lived but two years to receive the snubs of the haughty ladies of Santa Barbara, her ardent young husband had shot himself over her grave, and the boy was brought up by the padres of the mission. Fortunately, he came to man’s estate shortly before the United States occupation, and managed to save a portion of his patrimony from the most rapacious set of scoundrels that ever followed in the wake of a victorious army. This in turn descended to his son, who, in spite of Southern indolence and a hospitality as famous as his cellar, his liberal appreciation of all the good things of life, and a half-dozen lawsuits, still retained fifty thousand of the ancestral acres, and had given his word to his daughter that they should go to her unencumbered. This promise he kept, and when Catalina was ten years old he died, at good-will with all the world. His widow moved to San Francisco with her freedom and her liberal portion, and Mrs. Shore announced that she must give the ranch her personal attention. The ten years had been happy, for the husband and wife loved each other and were equally devoted to their beautiful, unsmiling baby. But there were deep wells of laughter in Mrs. Shore, and much energy. She wept for her father, but welcomed the change in her life, not only because she had reached the age when love of change is most insistent, but because she had begun to dread the hour of confession that life on an island, even with the man of one’s choice, was insufficient.

Mr. Shore himself was not averse to change so long as it did not take him out of California, although he refused to sell the little property on the island where he had spent so many happy years.

From the hour Mrs. Shore settled down in the splendid old adobe ranch-house she watched no more days lag through her fingers. Attended by Catalina she rode over some portion of the estate every day, and if a horse had strayed or a cow had calved she knew it before her indolent vaqueros. She personally attended, each year, to the sheep-shearing and the cattle-branding, the crops and the stock sales. Once a year she gave a great barbecue, to which all within a radius of a hundred miles were invited, and once a week she indulged herself in the gossip, the shops, and the dances of Santa Barbara.

In the vast solitude of the ranch Catalina grew up, carefully educated by her father, petted and indulged by her mother, hiding from the society that sought Mrs. Shore, but friendly with the large army of Mexican and Indian retainers. When she was persuaded by her mother to attend a party in Santa Barbara she rooted herself in a corner and glowered in her misery, snubbing every adventurous youth that approached her. She adored books, her out-door life, her parents, and asked for nothing further afield.

When she was eighteen her father died. She rode to the extreme confines of the ranch and mourned him, returning to her life at home with the stolidity of her Indian ancestors. Mrs. Shore grieved also, but by this time she was too busy a woman to consort with the past. Moreover, she was now at liberty to take Catalina to San Francisco and give her the proper tutors in languages and music. Incidentally, she made many new friends and enjoyed with all her vivid nature the life of a city which she had visited but twice before. She returned in the following winter and extended her fame as a hostess. Catalina found San Francisco society but little more interesting than that of the South, and enjoyed the reputation of being as rude as she was beautiful. Here, however, her Indian ancestress had her belated revenge. Her brief and tragic story cast a radiant halo about the indifferent Catalina, whose strain of aboriginal blood was extolled as the first cause in a piquant and original beauty; all her quaint eccentricities—which were merely the expression of a proud and reticent nature anxious to be let alone—were traced to the same artless source, and when one day in the park she sprang from her horse and shook the editor of a personal weekly until his teeth rattled in his head, her unique reputation was secure.

The greater part of the year was spent on the ranch. Mrs. Shore loved the world, but she was a woman of business above all things, and determined that the ranch should be a splendid inheritance for her child. Her time was closer than she knew. In all the vigor of her middle years, with the dark radiance of her beauty little dimmed, and an almost pagan love of mere existence, she was done to death by a bucking mustang, unseated for the first time since she had mounted a horse, and kicked beyond recognition.

Catalina resolutely put the horror of those days behind her, and for several months was as energetic a woman of business as her mother had been. She was mistress of a great tract of land, of herself, her time, her future. When her stoical grief for her mother subsided she found life interesting and stimulating. She rode about the ranch in the morning, or conferred with her lawyer, who drove out once a week; the afternoons she spent in the great court of the old house, with its stone fountain built by the ancestors who had learned their craft from the mission fathers, its palms and banana-trees, its old hollyhocks and roses. Here she read or dreamed vaguely of the future. What she wanted of life beyond this dreaming Southern land, where only an earthquake broke the monotony, was as vague of outline as her mountains under their blue mists, but its secrets were a constant and delightful well of perplexity. For two years she was contented, and at times, when galloping down to the sea in the early dawn, the old moon, bony and yellow, sinking to its grave in the darkest canyon of the mountain, and the red sun leaping from the sea, she was supremely happy.

Then, in a night, discontent settled upon her. She wanted change, variety; she wanted to see the world—Europe above all things; and when her Eastern relatives, with whom she corresponded, in obedience to a last request of her father, again pressed her to visit them, and mentioned that they were contemplating a trip abroad, she started on three hours’ notice, leaving the ranch in charge of a trusted overseer and the executors of her mother’s will.

She found her relatives living in a suburb of New York, their social position very different from that her mother had given her in California. Nothing saved them from the narrow routine of the suburban middle class but the intellectual proclivities of Mr. Moulton, who was reader for a publishing house and the literary adviser of the pseudo-intellectual. Through the constant association of his name with moral and non-sensational fiction, his well-balanced attitude of piety tinctured by humor, the pleasant style with which he indited irreproachable and elevated platitudes, his stern and invariable denunciation of the unorthodox in religion, in ideas, and in style, and his genially didactic habit of telling his readers what they wished to hear, he had achieved the rank of a great critic. As he really was an estimable man and virtuous husband, of agreeable manners, sufficiently hospitable, and extremely careful in choosing his friends, his position in the literary world was quite enviable. The great and the safe took tea on his lawn, and if the great and unsafe laughed at both the tea and the critic that was the final seal of their unregeneracy.

When Catalina arrived, after lingering for a fortnight in Boston with a friend she had made on the train, she liked him at once, unjustly despised Mrs. Moulton, who was the best of wives and copied her husband’s manuscripts, hated Jane, and recognized in Lydia a human being in whom one could find a reasonable amount of companionship, in spite of the magnetism of the mirror—or even the polished surface of a panel—for her complacent eyes. Lydia was innocently vain, and, being the beauty of the family, believed herself to be very beautiful indeed. She always made a smart appearance, and was frankly desirous of admiration. Like many family beauties, she had a strong will and was reasonably clever. When the first opportunity to go to Europe arrived she had reached what she called a critical point in her life. She confided to Catalina that she was becoming morbidly tired of mere existence and hated the sight of every literary man she knew, particularly the young ones.

“Of course, they are more or less the respectable hangers-on that give us the benefit of their society,” she said, gloomily. “Those that scurry about writing little stories for the magazines and weekly papers—it seems to me a real man might find something better to do. We know all the big ones, but they are too busy to come out here often, and father sees them at the Century and Authors’ clubs, anyhow. We hardly know a man who isn’t a publisher, an editor, or a writer of something or other—perhaps an occasional artist. For my part, I’d give my immortal soul to be one of those lucky girls that go to Mrs. Astor’s parties; that’s my idea of life. If a millionaire would only fall in love with me—or any old romance, for that matter!”

“Have you never been in love?” asked Catalina, afraid of the sound of her own voice but deeply interested.

“Not the least little bit, more is the pity. I wouldn’t mind even being heart-broken for a while.”

It was this frankness that endeared her to Catalina. “Jane is third rate, and tries to conceal the fact from herself and others by an affectation of such of the literary galaxy as make the least appeal to the popular taste, and cousin Lyman is no critic,” she informed herself three days after her arrival. “Cousin Miranda is just one of those American women who are invalids for no reason but because they want to be, and I suppose even Lydia would get on my nerves in time. Thank Heaven, when they do I can leave at a moment’s notice.”

After four months of the friction of travel, Catalina had half hoped her relatives would reject her startling proposal and abandon her to a future full of dangers and freedom.

IV

She brushed her hair viciously in the solitude of her bedroom in Barcelona; fortunately, the composition of the party always gave her a room to herself.

“To-morrow morning I’ll be up and out before they are awake,” she announced to her sulky image. “This evening I suppose I must walk with them on the Rambla. Of course, if I had come alone I should have had to find a chaperon for such occasions, but it would be some quaint old duenna I could hire. I’ve never wanted my liberty as I do here in Spain, and Cousin Lyman will barely let me wash my own face. I never was so taken care of in my life—”

She ground her teeth, but nodded as Mr. Moulton put his head in at the door and asked her if she were sure she was comfortable, if her room was quite clean and her keys in proper order. Then he adjured her not to drink the water until he had ascertained its reputation, and to be careful not to lean over the railing of the balcony, as it might be insecure; the Spanish were a shiftless people, so far as his observation of them went.

Catalina flung her hair-brush at the door as he pattered down the hall to examine the welfare of his daughters.

“I’ve a mind to go up and dance on the roof,” she cried, furiously. “One would think I was four years old. Papa was just like that when we travelled, and if all American men are the same I’ll marry an Englishman.”

After dinner Mr. Moulton, having seen his wife safely into bed and conscientiously determined to observe every respectable phase of foreign life, drew Lydia’s arm within his, and, bidding Catalina take Jane’s and follow close behind him, went out upon the Rambla. Upon these occasions he always took his youngest carefully under his wing. A wag had once said of her, while commenting upon the infinite respectability of the Lyman T. Moultons, that on a moonlight night, in a boat on a lake, Lydia might develop possibilities; and it may have been some dim appreciation of these possibilities that prompted Mr. Moulton to favor the beauty of the family with more than her share of attention. But Lydia had a coquettish pair of eyes, and under her father’s formidable wing had indulged in more than one innocent flirtation. Catalina raged that she was to take her first night’s pleasure in Spain in the companionship of Jane, and ignored her protector’s mandate. Jane, whose sense of duty increased in proportion to her dislikes, took a firm hold of the Californian’s rigid and vertical arm, and marched close upon her father’s heels.

They promenaded with all Barcelona, in the very middle of the Rambla, that splendid avenue of many names above the vaulted bed of the river. For nearly a mile on either side the hotels and cafés and many of the shops and side streets were brilliantly alight. Under the double row of plane-trees were kiosks for the sale of newspapers, post-cards of the bull-fight, fans, and curios; and passing and repassing were thousands of people. All who were not forced to work this soft southern night strolled there indolently, to take the air, to see, now and again to be seen. Doubtless, there were other promenades for the poor, but here all appeared to have come from the houses of the aristocracy or wealthy middle class. Many were the duennas, elderly, stout, or shrunken, always in black, with a bit of lace about the head, immobile and watchful. Perhaps they towed one maiden, but more frequently a party.

The girls and young matrons were light and gay of attire; occasionally their millinery was Parisian, but more often they wore the mantilla or rebosa. Their eyes were bright, demure, inviting, rarely indifferent; and making up the other half of the throng were officers, students, men of the world, murmuring compliments as they passed or talking volubly of politics and war. Two young aristocrats behind Catalina were laughing over the recent visit of the young king, when, simply by the magic of his boyish personality, eager to please, he had transformed in a moment the most hostile and anarchistic city in his kingdom, determined to show its insolent contempt, into a mob of cheering, hysterical madmen. The socialists and anarchists might be sailing their barks on the hidden river beneath, they were forgotten, the mayor hardly dared to show his face, and the women kissed their fingers to the pictures of the gallant little king hanging on every kiosk; the men lifted their hats.

It was the most brilliant and animated picture of out-door life that Catalina had seen in Europe, and the general air of good breeding, of mingled vivacity and perfect dignity, the picturesque beauty of many of the women, the constant ripple of talk and laughter, the flare of light and the dim shades of the old trees, appealed powerfully to the girl from the most picturesque portion of the United States, and in whom scenes of mere fashion and frivolity aroused a resentment as passionate as if fed by envy and privation. She had stood one morning not a fortnight since on a corner of the Rue de Rivoli and watched carriage after carriage, automobile after automobile roll round the corner of the Place de la Concord, each framing women in the extravagant uniform of fashion—American women, all come from across the sea for one purpose only, the purpose for which they lived their useless, idle lives—more clothes. For this they spent two wretched weeks on the ocean every year—the ship’s doctor had told Catalina that the pampered American was the most unheroic sailor on the Atlantic—and they looked unnormal, exotic, mere shining butterflies whose necks would be twisted with one turn of a strong wrist in the first week of a revolution; a revolution of which, unindividual as they were, they would be a precipitating cause. But here there was no exotic class, none but legitimate causes of separation from the masses; it was the charming faces one noted, the lively expression of pleasure in mere living; the garments might be Parisian, but, being less than the woman, and worn without consciousness, they barely arrested the eye, and were no part of the picture, as was the mantilla or the rebosa.

Catalina for once hated no one in the world, and even became oblivious of the grip on her arm. She looked about her with the wide, curious eyes of youth. Few gave her more than a passing glance, for her stiff hat threw an ugly shadow on her face and every line of her figure was hidden under her loose coat. But she noted that Lydia, who in the evening wore a small hat perched coquettishly on her fluffy hair, was receiving audible admiration. Suddenly she glanced out of the corner of her eye at Jane, but that severe virgin was staring moodily at the ground; her head ached and she longed for bed. Mr. Moulton, doing his best to be interested and stifle his yawns, was glancing in every direction but his immediate right, and consequently no one but his pretty daughter, and finally Catalina, noticed the handsome young Spaniard who had established communication with the blue eyes of the north. Finally the youth whispered something in which only the word _adorado_ was intelligible to Lydia, who clung to her father’s arm with a charming scowl.

“Don’t be frightened,” whispered Catalina.

“They don’t mean anything—not like Frenchmen.”

Not only was the crowd so great that many a flirtation passed unnoticed, but heretofore Catalina had not observed that the cavalier was companioned. When he whispered to Lydia, however, she saw a man beside him frown and take his arm as if to draw him away, but when she reassured the coquette, this man turned suddenly, his brows still knit but relaxing with a flash of amusement. Then Catalina took note of him and saw that he was not a Spaniard, although nearly as dark as Lydia’s conquest. He was an Englishman, she made sure by his expression, so subtly different from that of the American. He might have been an officer, from his carriage, and he was extremely thin and walked slowly, rather than sauntered, as if the effort were distasteful or painful. His thin, well-bred face looked as if it recently might have been emaciated, but its pervading expression was humorous indifference, and his eyes had almost danced as they met hers. He did not look at her a second time, evidently seeing no profit in the idle flirtations that delighted his neighbors, and Catalina, a trifle piqued, watched him covertly, and decided that he was a nobleman, had been in the Boer War, was doubtless covered with scars and medals.

V

He did not haunt her dreams, however, and she had quite forgotten him as she watched the sunrise next morning from the long ridge of the Montjuich. Her cabman was refreshing himself elsewhere and she had given herself up to one of the keenest delights known to the imaginative and ungregarious mind, the solitary contemplation of nature. She watched the great, dusky plains and the jagged whiteness of Montseny’s lofty crest turn yellow. Spain is one of those rare, dry countries where the very air changes color. The whole valley seemed to fill slowly with a golden mist, the snow on the great peak and on the Pyrenees beyond glittered like the fabled sands, and even the villas clinging to the steep mountain-side, the palaces in their groves of palm-trees and citron, orange, and pomegranate, all seemed to move and sway as in the depths of shimmering tides. Catalina had the gift to see color in atmosphere as apart from the radiance that falls on sky and mountain, a gift which is said to belong only to people so highly civilized as to be on the point of degeneration. Catalina, with her robust youth and brain, was well on the hither side of degeneration, but in her lonely life and dislike of humankind she had cultivated her natural appreciation of beauty until it had not only developed her perceptions to acuteness but empowered them, when enchanted, to rise high above the ego.

She stood with her head thrown back, her mouth half open as if to quaff deeply of that golden draught, fancying that just beyond her vision lay all cosmos waiting to reveal itself and the mystery of the eternal. When she heard herself accosted she was bewildered for a moment, not realizing that she was actually in the world of the living.

“You will ruin your eyes, Miss Shore,” a calm but genial voice had said. “The scene is worth it, but—”

“How dare you speak to me!” cried Catalina, furiously. She advanced swiftly, willing to strike him, not in the least mollified to recognize the Englishman upon whom she had bestowed her infrequent approval the night before.

His eye lit with interest and a pardonable surprise. But he continued, imperturbably: “Of course, I should not have been so rude as to speak to you if I hadn’t happened to know Mr. Moulton rather well. I had a talk with him last night in the hotel and he was good enough to tell me your name.”

“How on earth did you ever know Cousin Lyman?” She forgot her anger. “You are an Englishman, and I am sure Cousin Lyman—” She stopped awkwardly, too loyal to continue, but her eyes were large with curiosity. Where could Lyman T. Moulton have known this Englishman with his unmistakable air of that small class for whose common sins society has no punishment? “He usually knows only literary people,” she continued, lamely.

“And you are sure I am not!” His laugh was abrupt, but as good-natured as his voice. “You are quite right. I can’t even write a decent letter. But literary men often belong to good clubs, you know, and one of the most distinguished of our authors happened to bring Mr. Moulton to one of mine. He was over some years ago.”

“Oh, I remember.” She also recalled the curious boyish pleasure which illumined Mr. Moulton’s face whenever he alluded to this visit to England. It had been his one vacation from his family in thirty years.

“What is your name?” demanded Catalina, with an abruptness not unlike his own, but unmodified by his careless good-humor.

“Over.” Then, as she still looked expectant, “Captain James Brassy Over, if it interests you.”

“Oh!” She was childishly disappointed that he was not a lord, never having consciously seen one, then was gratified at her perspicacity of the night before.

“How have I disappointed you?”

“Disappointed me?” Her eyes flashed again. “All men are disappointing and are generally idiots, but I could not be disappointed in a person to whom I had never given a thought.”

“Oh!” he said, blankly. He was not offended, but was uncertain whether she were affected or merely a badly brought up child. Belonging to that order of men who have something better to do than to understand women, he decided to let her remark pass and await developments.

“I’m rather keen on Mr. Moulton,” he announced, “and have half a mind to join your party. I was going to cut across to Madrid, but he says you have made out rather a jolly trip down the coast and then in to Granada.”

“But we are travelling third class,” she stammered, with the first prompting of snobbery she had ever known. “We—we thought it would be such an experience.”

“So Mr. Moulton told me. I always travel third.”

“You? Why?”