Hard-Pan/Chapter 6
THE selling of the house and the subsequent flight of the Reeds had been, as Gault had guessed, Viola's idea. When, the morning after those two soul-destroying interviews, she had come down, white and apathetic, and had told her father that she wanted to leave the city, the old man, in a desperate desire to reinstate himself in her regard, had been willing to accede to anything.
Pressed by Viola, he had hurried through the sale, had taken the small sum Robson had offered without demur, and, driven by her feverish anxiety, had paid off all their household debts and handed to her the remaining money. This, with himself, he had placed entirely in her hands. As the girl locked it into the small tin box in which she kept such valuables as they possessed, she had suddenly looked at it, and then at him, and finally said:
"But the mortgage? Was n't there interest or something to pay on that?"
"Mortgage!" said the colonel, in innocent surprise. "What mortgage?"
Viola looked away from him and murmured something about being mixed up. She saw that he had forgotten the story by which, three years ago, he had accounted to her for the first sudden era of prosperity. She felt, with a dreary indifference, that she did not care where that money had come from. She, at least, had not been put forward as a means of procuring it.
The breathless hurry of their departure, and the quantity of work that accumulates about the breaking up of even so small a household, gave her no time for the indulgence of her own bitter thoughts. The days passed in a turmoil of noise and movement. In a nightmare atmosphere of dust and strange faces she haggled with the Jews from the second-hand stores on Mission Street, listened to their sarcastic comments on the old pieces of furniture she had passed her life among, watched them with dull eyes as they tested the springs of the colonel's chair and rubbed between appraising fingers the curtains his young bride had bought twenty-four years before. At night she crept into her bed, too exhausted for thought, to lose herself in blessed gulfs of sleep.
She was possessed by a wild desire to escape from the house and the city. The scene of her humiliation had become intolerable to her, and deep in her heart lay the terror that if she remained it would be the scene of her downfall. The thought of Gault's reappearance filled her with dread. She was confident of his return, and his return as the conqueror who had gaged her weakness and his own power. All her trust in him had been shattered at a blow. Suddenly he had appeared to her, not as the lover whose highest wish was for her happiness, but as the master, cruel and relentless, the owner who had bought and paid for her. The shame of the thought that she still loved him caused her to bow her face upon her breast, hiding it from the eyes of men and the light of day. All she could whisper in her own justification was the words, "But when I grew to love him I never knew—I never guessed for a minute what he meant."
She wanted to begin all over again, to be another person in another place. The charm of home had vanished from the little house. She longed to put it behind her, to be a different woman from the Viola Reed who once within its narrow walls had known the taste of happiness.
She was so engrossed in her own sorrows that she thought nothing of her father, heretofore the first consideration of her life. She told him what he should do, and he did it unquestioningly. Though no more angry words had passed between them, it seemed to the frightened old man as if every day she receded further from him. His only thought was to repair the damage he had done, to climb back somehow into his old position. He tried to anticipate her every wish, and followed her about with humble offers of help. But when, during those days of work and hurry, her eyes met his, they seemed to him to have a hard and alien gleam. It struck upon his somewhat vague contrition like an icy wind. If she had been gay and talkative he would have forgotten the wrong he had done her in twenty-four hours, and been ready to laugh with her at Gault. But she seemed now to have suddenly ranged herself against him on Gault's side, and to have left him, chilled and solitary, out in the cold.
So when she told him they would go to Sacramento, though the thought of change turned his heart to lead, he agreed with a good grace. He also acquiesced in all her injunctions about keeping their place of refuge a secret. When she told him of her plan to return Gault's money, he controlled his desire to disagree with it, and accepted her decision without open murmur. It seemed to him an unnecessary waste. What were the few paltry hundreds to the rich man? The colonel had been rich, too, and had aided hundreds of needy ones without ever thinking of repayment. By some obscure mental processes he had come to believe that Gault wanted the money. Now that the younger man had come between him and Viola, his feeling for him had become sharply hostile. It was only fear of reopening a disagreeable subject that prevented him from abusing his former friend to his daughter.
They left the city with very different feelings. To the colonel his departure was as the dragging out of every fiber. The roots of his life seemed to have struck deep down into that sandy soil. His horizon had always been bounded by the long lines of gray houses, by the girdling blue of the bay. To the girl it seemed a flight from shame and misery. She was not escaping from it: part of it would go with her always; but she was putting behind her her own weakness and the temptation and despair that the weakness of others had brought upon her.
As the train carried them farther away, as the bay faded out of sight, and the scarred and dwarf scrub-oaks gave place to the stately trees of the valleys, she felt her breath come with the sigh of a deep relief, and to her blank heart whispered the consolation, "It 's over and done. I shall never see him again."
At Sacramento they found shelter in a cheap boarding-house. It was a large old house on a side street, set back from the publicity of the thoroughfare in an extensive garden. The garden was so far cared for that it was watered, and the palms and aloes and fig-trees had reached a mighty growth; but its paths were weed-grown, and the statues and urns raised by its original owners lay overturned in the rank grass.
The house itself, dropping fast into peeling, unpainted decay, was commodious, with the high, airy rooms that were built in the days when all Californians seemed to be prosperous, and space was not too valuable to be sacrificed to comfort. The rooms still showed traces of their fine beginnings. There were exceedingly bad and elaborate frescos on the lofty ceilings of the lower floor, and great mirrors incased in gold moldings crowned the mantelpieces. In the musty, unaired parlors, where the puckered inside shades of faded silk were always down to keep the sun from revealing the threadbare secrets of the pale old carpets and the frayed satin arm-chairs, the colonel felt as if he were having a nightmare of the old days. It was all so like in its largeness, its rich stiffness, its obvious expensiveness, but so terribly unlike in its stuffy, squalid, unclean penury.
In the evening at dinner they met their fellow-boarders. The wide dining-room, with long windows opening on one of the many balconies that projected from the walls, showed the same frescos, the same pale, rose-strewn carpet, the same cumbrous pieces of furniture, that, forty years back, some mining prince had brought round the Horn in a sailing-ship. The smell of hundreds of boarding-house dinners hung in the folds of the dingy lace curtains. From a crystal chandelier, lacking most of its pendants, a garish burst of light fell over the table, where much plated ware and pressed glass made a glittering array on a dirty cloth.
At the head of the board sat Mrs. Seymour, the landlady, and beside her her only child, Corinne, a sharp-faced little girl of eight, who, leaning with her elbows on the table, let her glance, shrewd, penetrating, and amused, pass from face to face. Mrs. Seymour, a large woman of a countenance originally buxomly pleasant, but hardened by contact with the world as the boarding-house keeper meets it, introduced the newcomers. They presented a curious contrast to their fellows. The colonel, whose social tastes had not fallen with his fortunes, was a trifle puzzled by the society in which he found himself. At the same time his gregarious spirit was cheered to see that there were other people in the house. He bowed to the lady on his right, introduced as Miss Mercer, with elaborate gallantry, and drawing out her chair, stood waiting for her to seat herself. The recipient of this unexpected courtesy did not know how to take it, for the moment suspecting some joke.
To Viola the strange faces seemed unlovely and forbidding. She had met few people in her life, and this sudden plunge into society was a portentous experience. Pale and silent under the glare of the chandelier, she nibbled at her food, having neither heart nor courage to speak. When she raised her eyes she saw the young man opposite—Mrs. Seymour had presented him as "Bart Nelson, our prize young man"—staring at her over his plate with a steady, ruminating air. As he met her eyes for the second time, he said:
"Off your feed?"
And then, in reply to the colonel's look of uneasy inquiry, jerked his head toward Viola and said:
"Mrs. Seymour ain't goin' to lose anything by her."
Mrs. Seymour replied that she wanted somebody like that to even things off against such an appetite as Mr. Nelson's.
The laugh then was on the prize young man, and he joined in it as heartily as the others.
Miss Mercer, who, it appeared, was a school-teacher, and who had the tight-mouthed visage and dominant voice of those who habitually instruct the young, said she guessed Miss Reed was trying to put Mrs. Seymour off her guard; it was a case of making a good impression in the beginning.
The voice of the little girl here rose with penetrating suddenness:
"She don't ever eat much. She 's too thin."
Viola, suddenly the objective point of interest of the table, felt herself growing red and embarrassed. That she might hide her face from this alarming concentration of attention, she pretended to drop her napkin, and bent down to get it. The landlady, with a tact that her appearance belied, saw that the girl was uncomfortable, and diverted the conversation.
It swelled, and was tossed back and forth about the table with much laughter and jest of a personal nature. There were but six people in the house besides Mrs. Seymour, and these seemed intimately conversant with one another's histories and individual foibles. The school-teacher was attacked about an admirer known as "Little Willie," and after a moment of confusion she made a spirited return on the young man beside her, whom every one called Charley, but who had been presented to Viola as Mr. Ryan. Charley's infatuation for a lady who had ridden a bicycle in a recent vaudeville performance seemed to be a subject of gossip, and the school-teacher added further poignancy to the tale by relating how this lady, having made an appointment to lunch with Charley, had failed to keep the tryst. The glee roused over Charley's discomfiture was loud and deep. A heavily bearded man who sat at the foot of the table, and was ceremoniously addressed as Mr. Betts, lay back in his chair and roared.
"Oh, Charley!" he gasped, when he had recovered his composure, "she got you straight in the slats that time."
His wife, at the other end of the table, said with a prim air: "What I 'd like to know is where Miss Mercer hears all these stories."
"Little birds tell them to her," said the child, in her sudden, piercing voice. "I guess they 're trained birds."
After dinner, when they had gone up-stairs, the colonel stopped with Viola at her door. The passage was dimly lit by a gas-jet at the farther end, which was turned economically low. From the parlor bursts of laughter ascended.
"Well, good night, honey," said the colonel. "I 'm sorry you 're so tired." Then, somewhat uneasily, "Do you think you 'll like it here?"
"Oh, I think so," said Viola.
The door swung back, and the dark, stuffy interior of the room opened before her like a long-closed cave. She turned her cheek and the colonel kissed it.
"Do you think you 'll be able to stand those people?" he asked, in the low tone of confidential criticism.
"I dare say they 'll be very nice when we get to know them. Everybody 's strange at first. Good night, father."
She went in and closed the door. The aloofness of her manner had never been more marked. It seemed to place the colonel in the position of a stranger to whom she preserved an attitude of polite reticence. Feeling shrunk and chilled, he crept away to his own room.
So the new life began. Everything was very strange, and the weather was very hot. The colonel, who had not for fifty years known a warmer climate than San Francisco, wilted in the furnace-like airs of the interior city. The first burning week exhausted him as a serious illness might have done. Viola, who had never seen her father ill, was frightened, and sent for a doctor. The doctor came, asked questions, and looked wise. He said the colonel's heart was weak, and that he seemed in a very debilitated condition. A trip to the seaside would do him good; cooler weather would brace him up.
When the man had gone there was a silence between the father and daughter. Through the drawn blinds the golden cracks of intruding sunshine cut the dimness that Viola had made by closing all the shutters in a futile attempt to keep the room cool.
Presently she said, in a voice that she tried to make cheerful:
"As soon as you get stronger we will go on. It 's too hot and uncomfortable here for any one to stay."
"Go on where?" the colonel asked, with the light of interest in his eyes.
"Farther east. It will be cool enough there. We can go to one of those seaside places you read about in the papers—a cheap one, I mean. We have plenty of money for the trip."
The colonel moved restlessly in his chair, and finally twitched open one of the shutters. The hot breath of the garden, laden with heavy exotic scents, puffed in through the opening like incense.
"Don't take me farther away, Viola," he said suddenly, in a tone like that of a querulous child; "don't take me out of California."
"Do you want to stay here?" she asked.
"If we can't go back," he answered, looking at her wistfully.
"I did n't think you minded," she said; "I thought you 'd like the change."
There was something of the old gentle fellowship in her tone, and it made the colonel's heart expand. He held out his hand to her, and taking her fingers, rubbed them against his cheek.
"I 'm too old to be transplanted now."
She stood beside him, looking down, evidently troubled.
"Some day, perhaps," he went on, watching her, "we can go back. They 'll have forgotten us there in a few more weeks."
He saw her face change at once, and dared go no further.
"Yes—some day," she answered, and the conversation ended.
The long summer burned itself on through July into August. Glaring, golden mornings melted into breathless noons, which smoldered away into fiery sunsets. The leafage in the garden hung motionless, and exhaled strange, aromatic perfumes. In the evenings the palms stood black against the rose-red west like paintings of sunset in the desert. The city they had left, wrapped in its mantle of fog, appealed to the memories of the exiles as a dim, lost paradise.
To the girl whose simple life had passed in a seclusion almost cloistral, but at its loneliest marked by refinement, the sudden intimacies, the crude jovialities, of the boarding-house were violently repelling. She shrank from contact with her fellow-boarders, touched by, but unresponsive to their clumsy overtures of friendship, alarmed by their ferociously playful personalities. Fortunately her coolness was set down as shyness, and she suffered from none of that rancor which the boarder who is suspected of "putting on frills" is liable to rouse.
The long, idle days seemed interminable to her. At first she had found occupation in an attempt to beautify the two rooms she and her father rented. Of hers she had made a sitting-room, transforming the bed into a divan covered with a casing of blue denim and a heap of shaded blue cushions. Under one of the balconies she discovered a quantity of forgotten flower-pots, and in these she had planted cuttings of gay-colored geraniums, and set them along the window-sills and the balcony railing. But the work was soon completed, and a second interval of terrifying vacant hours faced her. This time she tried to seek intellectual diversion, and joined the free public library. She had often secretly deplored her own ignorance; now was the time to repair this defect; and she carried home many serious works, great thoughts of great minds with whom she had never before had an opportunity of becoming acquainted.
But poor Viola was not of the women who find in the exercise of the brain a method of healing the hurts of a wounded heart. At times a sense of piercing misery possessed her. There were hours when her loneliness pressed upon her like a weight, when the sense of what she had lost was unbearable as a fierce, continuous pain. Then, in the hope of escaping from the torment of "remembering happier things," she went out and, in the blistering heat under which the streets lay sweltering, walked aimlessly. If fatigue overcame her she sat down on one of the benches in the little plazas that dot the city, and there a graceful, listless figure slipped back over the intervening gulf to the days when the sunshine had been bright and her own heart was full of it.
Sometimes rebellion against the fate which had shut her out from happiness rose within her. A beloved companionship, no matter at what cost, was better than this waste of desolation. One life is all of which we are sure; why not, then, seize what we can of that one? How terrible, in the darkness of death, to realize that we have lost all that might have made this world so rich and sweet! Oh, the frightful thoughts of seeing at the end that we have relinquished joy and love for a dream, for nothing! For the first time in a life singularly free from event or developing experience, she met that dark second self which dwells in each of us.
So the tempter whispered his old words. She closed her ears to them with fear and aversion. But they returned, coming upon her persuasively in moments of deadly depression and disgust of life, coming upon her with comforting declarations of harmlessness, coming upon her with challenging queries as to their wrong.
One evening they were more convincing than they had ever been before. Sitting alone in her own room after dinner, Viola listened, for the first time hesitating. Where would be the wrong in writing to him—just a line to tell him she was sorry they had gone without seeing him? Common politeness would seem to suggest that she ought to do that. She would have done it before, only—only— She rose from her seat and, going to the window, looked down into the dark recesses of the garden, whence small rustling noises rose, then upward to the clear pink of the sunset, cut with black palm-spikes. He, once their best friend! What excuse was there for slighting a friend?
She turned from the window suddenly and went to the table where her writing-materials were kept. A sheet of note-paper lay ready on the blotter. It shone pink in the sunset light as she drew it toward her. Her hand trembled a little as she dipped the pen in the ink, but was firm when she wrote her letter. There were only a few lines, and of the most commonplace description. In the barest words she accounted for their sudden departure, made an apologetic allusion to their not having acquainted him with their intention of leaving, and ended with the words, "I hope we shall some day see you again." At the end of the letter she wrote the address, and upon this expended some care, forming the numbers with exactness, and inscribing the name of the street with slow clearness. She sealed the envelop with nervous haste, and was rising from her chair when the colonel entered.
"Been writing letters?" he asked.
The question was not an idle one, for letter-writing was seldom practised in that small family circle.
Instinctively Viola placed her hand over the envelop as it lay on the table.
"Yes," she said hurriedly, "just a note."
"Whom to?" he asked. "Oh, I suppose your friend at the Woman's Exchange." This was a girl Viola had spoken of writing to anent the relinquishing of her work.
Viola made no answer. The old man, who was lighting the lamp, did not appear to notice her silence.
"Letter-writing 's not much in my line," he said absently, "but your mother wrote beautiful letters."
"Whom to?" said the girl, in her turn.
"Me, when we were lovers."
The lamp was lit, and he charily placed the globe on it. As he did so, Viola, from behind him, leaned forward and applied the letter, twisted into a spiral, to the chimney. It smoked, charred, and then went up in a flicker of flame.
"What are you doing?" he asked, staring at her in surprise.
"Burning my letter."
"Why?"
"I don't know. Perhaps because I don't write beautiful ones like my mother."
Her voice trembled, broke, and she burst into wild tears. The door into the room beyond was open, and she ran through the aperture and shut the door behind her.
The colonel stood looking after her, amazed, alarmed, uncomprehending. In the old days he would have followed her. Now he stood listening at the closed door, not daring even to knock. When he heard her sobbing cease he came tiptoeing away as though afraid of re-awakening her drowsing grief. Standing by the table, he looked long and ruefully at the lamp-globe.
"Poor little girl!" he whispered; "she 's homesick, too."
The old man's own homesickness was an incurable malady. As he had said himself, he was too old for transplanting. He could not shake himself down in the new rut. He could not get accustomed to the strange city and its unfamiliar thoroughfares. Its alien aspect seemed to force in upon him the sense of his insignificance and failure. He walked along the streets and no one knew him. There were no cheery voices to cry out, "So long, colonel," and wave a welcoming hand to a hat-brim. People jostled him to one side, seeing only a thin, threadbare old man in a faded coat. He had no consciousness that they would turn and look at him, and point him out to the stranger from the East whom they were "taking round." He was no more to Sacramento than it was to him. He grew so to dread the feeling of oppressive melancholy that fell upon him in its unfriendly streets that he gave up going out, and spent most of his time in the garden or in Viola's room.
When with her he tried to be bright and to make the best of the situation. He saw in her changed attitude nothing but blame of him, and he would have borne anything uncomplainingly to win back the love he thought she withheld. That another and a deeper feeling could be causing her heaviness of spirit he did not dream. Like many another man, he had no instinct to see into the hidden inner life of the child that was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.
He hardly ever let his thoughts revert to the cause that had made her take her hasty step. He knew he had been to blame, and the colonel was a man who always forgot his own mistakes. In the course of time they ceased to be mistakes, and, in his eyes, assumed the proportions of worthy attempts that an unjust fate had frustrated. Just what he had meant by using his daughter's name in his intercourse with Gault he himself hardly knew—nothing to her actual detriment, that was certain. If any one had breathed a word of blame against her, or tried to harm one hair of her head, he would have been quick to rise in her defense, wrathful as a tiger. The wrongs that do not come directly back, like boomerangs, were wrongs the responsibility of which the colonel readily shifted from his shoulders. He had wanted money for Viola, and he used the readiest means to his hand to get it. The jingling of gold in his pocket, the gladness of her face when he brought her some trifling gift, made everything outside the pleasure of the moment count for naught.
And now they were estranged. A veil of indissoluble coldness separated them. Yet she was never curt or sharp or cross to him. Sometimes it seemed to him that she was the same in word and voice and manner as she had always been, only something had gone from her—light, cheer, gaiety, some inexpressible, loving, lovely thing that had made her the star of his life. Once, taking his courage in both hands, he had asked her if she was angry with him, and then shrank like a whipped dog before the startled negation of her eyes and her quick "Why, no, father! How could I be?"
The one diversion of the colonel's life was the society of his fellow-boarders. Though he abused them roundly up-stairs to Viola, he took undoubted satisfaction in regaling them with the stories of his past greatness. Night after night he bestrode his hobby, and entertained an admiring circle with its evolutions. It was many years since he had had so large and so attentive an audience, and he profited by the occasion, giving even more remarkable accounts of the men he had made than those with which he had once amused John Gault.
For some time his listeners awarded him a half-credulous attention; but soon their interest in the garrulous old man died away. Miss Mercer expressed the opinion that the colonel was "no better than an old, worn-out fake," a sentiment which found an echo in the breasts of every other inmate of the house—even Mrs. Seymour quietly, in her own mind, relegating him to the ranks of harmless frauds. The traditions of San Francisco were not known of all men in Sacramento. The colonel found that he was singing the songs of Zion in a strange land. No one believed him. When he spoke of his friendship with Adolphus Maroney, and how thirty years before he had laid the foundation of Jerry McCormick's fortune, the listeners made little attempt to hide their disbelief, and Mr. Betts and Charley Ryan took much delight in openly "joshing the old man." Bart Nelson did not indulge in this pastime, as he had conceived a violent, if secret, regard for Viola.
One evening after dinner the "joshing" reached a climax against which even the colonel's egotistical infatuation was not proof. Viola was up-stairs, according to her custom; Mrs. Seymour was absent on her never-ending household duties; and Bart Nelson was out. There was no one to restrain the old man's foolish flights, and inspired by the ironically flattering queries of his listeners, his reminiscences became more vaingloriously brilliant than they had ever been before.
His completion of an elaborate account of his patronage of Adolphus Maroney called forth from Mr. Betts the remark:
"I don't see, colonel, how he can get on at all without you. Once you got from under him, it 's a miracle he did n't entirely collapse."
"No, not quite that," the colonel modestly deprecated. "Maroney was no fool—no fool; only speculative and lacking in foresight. When I got him on his feet he was able to go his way alone."
"Well, that was smart of him, was n't it?" commented Charley Ryan, with a sagacious wag of his head.
There was something in the tone of his remark that disturbed the colonel's complacency. For a moment he eyed Charley with a side glance, then he said:
"I 'm always willing to admit that Maroney was no fool."
"Now, how do we know," said Miss Mercer, letting her eyes give a preliminary sweep over the faces about her, "that you 're not still doing all the work and making all the money for those San Francisco millionaires? You know, I believe that's just what you 're up to, and you 're too sly to tell."
She looked at him with an air of bright challenge. The colonel was pleased.
"No, my dear young lady," he answered; "that was in the past, when I was one of them myself."
"Are you sure you are not one of them still?" said Charley Ryan. "Come, now, colonel; make a clean breast of it. Here 's the family album; can you swear upon this book that you have n't got a few loose millions lying round in tea-pots and stockings up in your room?"
The colonel flushed. He did not mind alluding to his poverty himself, but he resented having others treat it as a jest.
"I can swear without family albums that the fortune I once had is a thing of the past," he answered, "and I rather fancy that you know all about its magnitude and its loss. Most people do."
This was too much. Mr. Betts, who was afflicted by an irrepressible sense of humor, burst into loud laughter.
"Well, colonel," he said, "now that you remind me, I believe I have heard that there was a hitch about your millions. So there is about mine. Yours are gone, and mine ain't come. Brothers in misfortune! Shake on that!"
He held out a large fist, and the colonel, not quite comprehending, but feeling the derision about him in an inward sense of heated discomfort, put his hand in it. Mr. Betts gave it a vigorous clasp, and holding it aloft, said:
"The Corsican Brothers!—as they appeared at that fatal moment when one had just lost and the other not yet found his pile."
There was a shout of laughter, and the old man drew his hand away. His face was deeply flushed, and a feeling of tremulous indignation was rising in him.
"Don't despond, colonel," said Miss Mercer, cheerily. "Lots of men have made two fortunes. There 's a chance for you yet."
"I guess there 's about as much chance for him," said Mrs. Betts, who was an acidulous lady of a practical turn, "as there is for Mr. Betts. I 'm sorter tired of this talk of making millions, and then never having an extra dollar."
"Stick close to the colonel, Mrs. Betts," said Charley Ryan, "and you 'll have your extra dollar. He 'll make it for you same way as he did for Jerry McCormick."
"Now, colonel," said Mr. Betts, "there 's a chance for you. Here 's Mrs. Betts wants an extra dollar, and here are you, just the man to make it for her. No gentleman can resist the appeal of a female in distress. Send my henchman for ink and paper." He drew a stub of pencil from his pocket and began writing on the back of an envelop, reading as he wrote: "Colonel Reed, the multi-millionaire, will before the present witnesses sign a contract to make for the hereinbefore-mentioned Mary Louise Betts the sum of one dollar, the same payable on—"
He paused with raised pencil.
"What date did you say?"
The colonel rose. He was pale and almost gasping with anger. He had at last realized that these barbarians were making sport of him.
"I did not state any date," he said slowly; "nor did I—that I can remember—say that I would make any specified sum of money for any one here. But since you seem to insist that I did so, I will fulfil my obligations without any more unnecessary talk. Here is the dollar."
He drew a dollar from his pocket and flung it on the table with the gesture of one throwing a bone to a dog.
"Ladies," he said, bowing deeply to the two women, "I have the honor to wish you good evening."
There was a moment of silence after his withdrawal, during which they all sat staring rather foolishly at the dollar. But if he had thought to humiliate them, he had mistaken his audience.
"There, now!" was the opening remark, contributed by Mrs. Betts; "you 've gone and rubbed him up the wrong way. And I don't see what satisfaction you get from it."
"Well," said Mr. Betts, "I 'll get the dollar, anyway."
He made a playfully frenzied lunge for the coin. But Charley Ryan had anticipated the movement, and his hand struck it first. An animated tussle ensued, during which Miss Mercer averted a catastrophe by removing the lamp.
"Lord! Lord!" cried Mrs. Betts, querulously, "what under the canopy possesses them? It 's like living in a bear-garden."
The struggle ended with the triumph of Charley Ryan, who, with an exaggerated bow and an affectation of the colonel's manner, presented his trophy to Mrs. Betts. She took it, threw it into her work-basket, and said snappishly:
"The old man gets that to-morrow. I ain't goin' into the hold-up business."
After this the colonel's attitude toward his fellow-boarders was of the stiffest and most repelling sort. They were a good deal surprised at it at first; then, as days passed and it did not soften, they came to regard it as a joke, and though by tacit consent he was let alone, they seemed to harbor no ill feeling toward him. He, on his side, was filled with unappeasable rage. He often passed a meal without speaking to one of them, and never again spent an evening in the parlor.
Up-stairs he abused them to Viola with a violence of phrase that would have amazed them. Even to Mrs. Seymour he permitted himself to indulge his wrath to the extent of biting sarcasms at their expense. The landlady soothed him by assuring him that they were of an inferior class to himself. This was some consolation to the colonel, but he avoided their society with a hauteur which was quite thrown away on them, and his life became lonelier and more purposeless than ever.
Cut off still further from his fellows, longing for, yet afraid to court, the society of his daughter, the old man found himself in a position of distressing isolation. In his dreariness he turned for amusement and solace to the one person left in the house who had neither the self-consciousness to bore, the experience to judge by, nor the cruelty to mock. This was Corinne, Mrs. Seymour's little girl, a grave, large-eyed, lean-shanked child of eight.
The alternate spoiling and scolding that the boarders awarded her had developed in Corinne a chill disbelief in human nature. As a rule she held off from those about her who would one day buy her kisses with a bag of candy, and the next, when she was singing to her doll on the balcony, would box her ears for making a noise. The vagaries of humanity were a mystery to her, and she had already acquired a cautious philosophy, the main tenet of which was to go her own way without demand or appeal to her fellow-creatures.
Corinne, if not as experienced as her mother, was possessed of those intuitive faculties which distinguish many neglected children. She knew after the first week that neither the colonel nor Viola would blow hot and cold upon her little moods. Still, there was a prudent reticence in her acceptance of their overtures, and she took the colonel's first gifts of fruit and candy with a wary apprehension of the next day's rebuffs. But they never came, and the prematurely grave child and the lonely old man established friendly relations, grateful and warming to both. Finally, when the other boarders drove the colonel back into the citadel of his wounded pride, the tie between them was strengthened. Each felt the isolation of the other as a secret bond of sympathy and understanding.
The colonel, sore, homesick, repulsed on every side, turned to the child with a pitiful eagerness, and lavished upon her the discarded affections of his hungry heart. He greeted her entrance into Viola's sitting-room—a noiseless entrance, hugging up to her breast her doll and her pet black kitten—with expressions of joy that to an outsider would have seemed laughably extravagant. But they were not, for she had come to represent to him tenderness, tolerance, appreciation. He felt at ease and contented with her, for he knew that she would not criticize him, would never find fault with him. She flattered and sustained the last remnant of his once buoyant vanity. He was not afraid that her eyes would meet his with a sad reproach. On the contrary, their absorbed unconsciousness was one of the most soothing and delightful things about her. Corinne would not have cared what he did. She liked him for himself, and accepted him unmurmuringly as he was.
It was holiday-time, and she spent many afternoons in the colonel's society, generally squatted on the floor in Viola's sitting-room. She spoke little, but had the appearance of listening to all the old man said, and at times made solemnly sagacious comments. He, on his part, talked to her as if she had been a woman, expatiating to her on the strange capriciousness of affection that marked her sex. Once or twice he alluded sadly to the apparent estrangement between himself and his daughter.
"Seems almost as if she did n't like me, Corinne; does n't it?" he asked anxiously, watching the child, who was trying to put her doll's skirt on the kitten.
"I don't think so," Corinne responded gravely, holding the cat on its hind legs while she shook down the skirt; "I think she likes you a lot."
"What makes you think that? She does n't ever talk to me much, or tell me things, the way she used."
"She does n't talk to anybody much," said Corinne. "Mr. Nelson said she was the most awful quiet girl he ever knew." Here the cat gave a long, protesting mew, and Corinne's attention became concentrated on its toilet.
"She use n't to be quiet like that. She was the brightest girl! You ought to have seen her, Corinne—just like a picture, and always laughing."
"She don't laugh much now," said Corinne; "I don't think I ever heard her laugh—not once. Keep quiet now, deary"—coaxingly to the cat; "you 're nearly dressed."
"And all because I only tried to please her. I just tried to do my best to make her happy. There 's no good trying to please a woman. You 're all the same. Be kind to them, be loving, break your heart trying to give them pleasure—and that's the way it is."
"What 's the way it is?" asked Corinne, sitting up on her heels and feeling over her person for a pin to fasten the waistband of the skirt.
"The way it is now with me and Viola—coldness, indifference, maybe dislike." Then, half to himself: "There 's no understanding women. What were they made for, anyway?"
Corinne seemed to think this remark worthy of attention. Her search for the pin was arrested and she pondered for a moment. Then she looked at the colonel and said tentatively, not quite sure of the reasonableness of her reply:
"I suppose so that people can have mothers, colonel."
"So that people can have love, Corinne," he answered sadly.
Corinne, feeling that her solution of the problem had not been the right one, returned to the pin. She found it, and bending over the patient kitten, inserted it carefully into the band. But her calculations were not true, the pin pricked, and the cat, with an angry mew, broke away and went scuttling across the room inclosed in the skirt. Her appearance was so funny that Corinne sat back on her heels and, punching the colonel's knee, cried in a burst of laughter:
"Oh, look, colonel, look! Ain't she cunning?"
The colonel looked. The cat turned, still in the skirt, and eyed them both with a look of hurt protest. It appealed to the colonel's humor as it had to Corinne's. Their combined laughter filled the room and greeted Viola as she came up the passage from one of her long walks.
"What are you laughing at?" she asked, as she opened the door and entered like a pale vision wilted with the heat and light outside.
The colonel's laughter died away immediately. Her listless air of delicacy struck him anew with the silent reproach which her mere presence now seemed to suggest. All amusement faded from his face, and he looked guiltily conscious, like a child found in mischief.
A short time after this a hot spell struck the city. Though it was September, the heat was stifling. For three days the mercury stood so high that even Corinne's engrossingly arduous play with the doll and the kitten was listlessly performed, and she spent most of her time in the sitting-room with Viola and the colonel, where, behind closed shutters, they gasped away the hours. The old man seemed to feel the heat less than before; at least, he said little about it, and occupied himself in teaching Corinne to play solitaire, a game for which she evinced a precocious aptitude. Viola, sitting by the window, where now and then a fine edge of warm air sifted in between the slats in the shutters, watched them. Her father seemed as much interested as the child, and the girl wondered how in this oppressive exile he could have spirit for so trivial an amusement.
After three days the heat broke, and was succeeded by a soothing, balmy coolness, under the influence of which the city seemed to relax and rest inert in the torpor of recuperation. The freshened airs that flowed through the overheated old house extracted every odor left from years of bad cooking and insufficient ventilation. The musty hangings of the rooms closed in and held the oven-like atmosphere. Dusty curtains and grease-stained carpets added their contributions to the closeness left by years of untidy occupancy.
Viola had spent the morning in the garden, sitting under the great fig-tree, sewing. The house was unbearable to her, and she wondered why her father had chosen to remain there, working methodically over an old solitaire he was trying to recall. Late in the afternoon, her work done, she resolved to go out for a walk. Entering the sitting-room with her hat and gloves in her hand, she found the colonel still sitting at the table, upon which the cards were arranged in twelve neat piles. He had mastered the solitaire, and now refused to accompany her on the ground that he had an engagement to teach it to Corinne, who had that day gone to school for the first time. He seemed to be looking forward to the few hours of the child's society that the afternoon would give him, and had set forth on a corner of the table a little feast of cookies and fruit with which to regale her when the solitaire became irksome. Viola was not sorry that he would not come. She liked being alone, with nothing to interrupt the aimless flow of her thoughts.
The air was clear, fresh, and fine. The languor of the warm weather was gone, and the girl, as she fared toward one of the little plazas which at intervals interrupt the passage of the long streets, felt the promise of autumn. Sitting on a bench in the plaza, she looked out over the city, and caught a glimpse of the sparkle of the river at the end of an open vista, and, cutting into the thin pink of the sunset sky, roof beyond roof and chimney over chimney. The golden dreaminess of summer was over, with its brooding, purposeless inaction. The haze of churned-up yellow dust was dispersed by a breath that held a prophecy of coming cold, sharp and imperious. There was a stir in the air, a promise in the flaring sky. Its light fell on Viola's face, and seemed to suddenly send a shaft into her deadened heart. She moved and looked up, almost as if some one had spoken to her. On the pallor of her lifted face the reflected glow shone like gilding.
The dead lethargy that had held her all summer seemed to be breaking. As she sat staring at the illuminated sky, her mind sprang back like a mended spring, past all the despair and struggle of the past three months to the life behind it, and then forward to the future. A rousing of energy, a sense of work to do, a return of force and will, ran through her in a brisk, revivifying current. The checked stream of her life seemed to burst the barrier that had held it and to move onward again.
There was work for every one, and work was the purpose of existence. She had claimed happiness as a right, demanded what is not to be; then, when the inexorable ruling will had interposed, had dropped from the ranks in the passion of a thwarted child. The glory and the dream—who realized them? Who of the millions about her had touched the happiness she had expected to seize and hold? Why should she be exempt from the grinding that forces the grain from the chaff? All yearned, aspired, dreamed, and yet, never achieving, lived on, learning their lesson of obedience. Only some bowed their necks to the yoke more quickly than others.
There was a second plane of life—a plane to which some were rudely hurled and some crept by degrees. Here you went sternly on, and did the work before you for its own sake, not for yours. And thus, in time, self might be conquered and its insistent cry for recognition be stifled. There was a corner in the world for every one, where they took their broken idols and set them up, and some day would look at them and smile over the anguish there had been when they fell.
The sunset deepened to a fine, transparent red, which looked as if it had been clarified of all denser matter. It gave a flush to Viola's upward-looking face. Her thoughts turned from the vague lines they had been following to closer personal ones. The love for her father, that had seemed frozen, gushed up in her heart. His face, with its wistful glance, came before her; a hundred instances of her past coldness rose in accusing memory. There was something better yet than work. Love—that was the axis of the world; that made life possible, and the sacrifice of self full of use and meaning; that was the key-note of the whole structure of existence.
She rose to her feet, and rapidly, with her old firm alertness of step, moved out through the plaza. She wanted to run, to find the old man and, taking his head in her arms, whisper her contrition. Through street after street her swift footfall woke sharp, decisive echoes. Her face had lost its look of dejection and was set in lines of firmness and resolution. People, as she passed, turned to look at her—at the young face so full of a steady purpose, at the eyes deep with a woman's aspirations. Her thoughts flew forward, high-strung, exalted, beating against the confining limits of time and space. She would take him back to San Francisco. They would go together. How had she had the heart to hurt him so! Now, all blindness swept away by the breaking down of her egotism, she knew what he had suffered.
It was almost dark when she reached the house, and as she went up the path from the gate she saw lights springing out here and there in the upper windows. In the passage to her own room she came upon Mrs. Seymour lighting the gas, her back toward the stair-head. The elder woman, hearing the girl's light step, turned with the match in her hand. Viola, still engrossed in her own thoughts, mechanically smiled a greeting. Mrs. Seymour's face, with the crude gaslight falling on it, was unresponsively grave.
"I 'm glad that 's you," she said; "I 've had a sort of scare about your father."
"Scare!" exclaimed Viola, stopping with a start. "What do you mean?"
"Nothing for you to get frightened about. It 's all over now. He had a sort of a sinking spell, that was all, when he was playing them cards with Corinne. She come out and hollered for me, and I come up and found him looking white and kind o' queerish. He said he 'd only lost his breath. I gave him some brandy, and it seemed to pull him together all right. But I did n't, some way or other, like his looks. I sorter wished you was here."
Viola looked relieved.
"Oh, he 's had that several times before. It 's his heart, the doctor said; but he did n't seem to think it was anything serious. You frightened me."
Mrs. Seymour walked down the hall to the gas-jet by the stair-head.
"You don't want to get frightened," she said over her shoulder; "but I don't think you know much about sickness, and, if I was you, I 'd get the doctor to-morrow."
"I 'll do that anyway," said Viola, as she opened the door of the colonel's room.
The picture that she entered upon was reassuring. The lamp was lighted under its opaque yellow shade, and cast its chastened light over the center of the room. Here Corinne lay on the floor, the pack of cards spread out before her. In the intensity of her absorption she kicked gently on the floor with her toes, making a soft but regular tattoo. Near by sat the kitten, its tail curled neatly round its front feet, ink-black save for the transparent yellow-green of its large watching eyes. The colonel leaned over the arm of his chair, following the game as intently as the child. He was laughing when Viola came in, and pointing with a long forefinger at a possible move that Corinne had not seen. Both were so interested in their play that they did not heed the opening of the door. Viola stood in the aperture, regarding them with pleasure and relief. A slight smell of brandy in the air was the only indication that there had been sickness here a short time before.
At the sound of the closing of the door they both looked up. Over the colonel's visage the same childishly embarrassed expression flitted that Viola had noticed a few days before. Corinne, on the contrary, merely gave the newcomer the short side look of begrudged attention, and returned to the cards, murmuring, "It 's only Viola."
The girl went across to her father, and taking his hand, curled her soft fingers around it in a warm, infolding clasp.
"Mrs. Seymour says you have n't been well," she said.
The unexpected caress made the old man forget the game, and his face flushed with pleasure. He leaned toward her with the content of a forgiven child.
"It was nothing—just a little turn like I had the other day. First a pain, and then something comes fluttering up near your throat. The heat knocked me out. But it scared Corinne."
"He got the color of the pitcher," said Corinne, not moving her eyes from the cards, but sparing enough time to give a jerk of her head in the direction of a white china water-pitcher on the table.
"You ought to have seen Corinne. She went out in the passage and made a noise as if there was a fire."
"I was scairt," said Corinne, "and hollered for mommer. I don't want you to scare me that way again, colonel."
The colonel and Viola laughed.
"I 'll try and not have it happen again," said the old man. "You know, I always do what you tell me."
"Mostly always," Corinne absently agreed. "I 'm going to put this ten-spot here. Look, colonel, is n't that the best move?"
The old man leaned forward, studying the contemplated move. Viola drew back, watching him. She had noticed his pallor when she came in. Now his face, settled into lines of gravity, appeared to have suddenly collapsed and withered into the gray hollows of decrepitude. Her heart contracted at the sight. She turned away, under the pretense of pulling off her gloves, and said:
"I made a plan when I was out this afternoon. I think you 'll like it."
"Let 's hear it," he said, turning back from the cards and watching her with a fond half-smile.
"Something I think you 'll like—oh, ever so much!" She patted and pinched the limp gloves into shape, not looking at him.
"Hit me with it," he said. "Mrs. Seymour's just given me that glass half full of brandy; you can't expect me to guess after that."
"That we should go back to San Francisco."
Her news had more effect than even she had expected. The colonel sat up as if he had been struck, his lips quivering into a smile that he feared to indulge.
"Do you mean that, Viola? Do you really mean it?" he asked.
"Of course I do. I thought you 'd like it."
"But do you like it? Do you want to go? Is n't there—would n't you rather stay here?"
"Oh, no." She struck lightly on the edge of the table with the gloves, avoiding his eyes. "I 'd rather be there. We 've had our little change, and we can go back. It 's our home, anyway; and we 've enough money to last for a long time yet."
"Of course we have, and it does n't matter if we have n't." The old man's face burned with excitement and joy. "But the house is sold! Where shall we go? Oh, that does n't matter, either. We can get rooms near there. You'd like to be back near the old place, would n't you? We could go to Mrs. Cassidy's; you know she rents her two back rooms on the second floor. Oh, Viola—to be back again!"
He sank back in his chair, his eyes half shut in the ecstasy of this sudden restoration to happiness.
"Just think of it!" he said. "To see the bay again, and Lotta's Fountain, and Montgomery Street! and to smell the sea outside the Golden Gate when the wind 's that way! and to feel the fog! Viola, you don't know what I 've suffered. I never meant to tell you."
"I know—I know now. But I did n't guess at first—truly, father, I did n't know at first."
"Why, of course not, honey—how should you? And it does n't matter now. It 's all over, and we 're going to have the time of our lives. But it was awful, was n't it? Everything was so lonesome and strange. And those dreadful people! But we won't have any more bother with them. When 'll we start? Let's not waste any time."
Viola had turned away to the tall glass behind him, under the pretense of taking off her hat. She could not control her tears. As she stood, seeing her blurred image dark against the lamplight, she could hear the colonel babbling on, apparently too preoccupied to notice that she was not answering:
"It 'll be warm when we get back—not this diabolical heat, but just soft and sunny. The hills will be all brown. Presently there 'll be a smell of eucalyptus in the air, but that won't be till later, when the evenings are short. Oh, I 'm so glad we 're going back! It 's like getting out of prison."
He was suddenly silent, and Viola heard him making a slight rustling movement in his chair. Then the room was very quiet, for Corinne had stopped beating with her toes. For a space Viola struggled with herself, biting her lips, and surreptitiously taking out her handkerchief and pressing it against her face. She was more afraid of the piercing eyes of Corinne than of her father, and when she had controlled herself sufficiently to be presentable, she looked in the mirror to see if Corinne had been observing her. Instead, she saw the child standing up some few steps away from the colonel, regarding him with an expression of keen, suspended intentness that was at once curious and fearful.
As Viola's eyes encountered the reflection, and read in it terror and alarm, Corinne spoke in a quick, frightened voice:
"Look at the colonel, Viola. He looks so queer. I don't like him."
Viola was at his side before the child had ceased speaking.
The colonel's head had dropped forward on his breast. A yellowish, waxen hue had spread over his face, and his eyes, cold and brooding, were staring straight before him.
"Father!" she said, touching his hand with a strange fearfulness she had never felt before.
The word sounded portentously loud in the deep, mysterious stillness that had settled on the room. Awe of something majestic and terrible clutched Viola's heart. As she stood staring, she heard the child screaming down the hall:
"Mommer! Mommer! the colonel 's sick again, and his eyes are open. Oh, come quick—come quick!"
A moment later Mrs. Seymour's heavy footfall sounded at the doorway, and she entered panting. As her glance fell on the colonel, she gave a sharp sound.
"What is it?" whispered Viola, her tongue suddenly dry and stiff as a piece of leather. "He won't speak."
Mrs. Seymour stepped forward, and laying her hand on the colonel's eyes, softly closed the lids.
"He won't never speak no more, my dear," she said gently.
Viola looked at her with a wild and terrified face.
"Oh, no, Mrs. Seymour!" she cried. "Oh, no—oh, not that! We were just going away—we were going home! Oh, it could n't be that; it's too cruel, it's too unnecessary. He wanted so to go! There was no harm in it. Why could n't they have waited till we 'd got home?"
She raised her hands to her head in a gesture of dazed despair, and fell senseless into Mrs. Seymour's arms.