Ancestors Part 20

"All men are children," said Isabel, indulgently. "Tie up the boat and we'll go after widgeon."

They landed and stole softly over the larger reach of marsh-land, Isabel in the lead as she knew every hole. It was ten minutes before she raised her hand and pointed to a wilted but still effective screen. Under cover of this they crawled towards a large pond on which ducks were resting but by no means asleep. Before the guns were shouldered they had taken flight; so few were brought down on the wing that Gwynne's interest revived, and he followed Isabel eagerly towards another pond with a better blind. Here they were more wary and more fortunate, and Isabel took a curious pleasure in watching the manifest bliss of her companion.

She had never seen him look really happy before. Upon his return to Capheaton from his triumphant battle on the hustings he had been as impa.s.sive as his traditions demanded. On the morning of his engagement he had looked rather silly to her detached eye; and immediately after, tragedy and trouble and infinite vexation had claimed him. But this evening, with his cap pushed back, his nostrils distended, his eyes sparkling, he looked like any other young fellow to whom the present was all. Isabel reflected somewhat cynically that it was the opportunity to kill something that had effected this momentary reconciliation with life. But she was too good a sportswoman not to understand his mood, and when he had waded into the lake and returned flushed and triumphant with his bag, she complimented him so warmly that he laughed aloud in sheer delight.

"We have enough for once," she began, but he would not hear of returning to the boat even for the refreshment of tea, and they went on and on until their feet were as weary as their shoulders under the burden that was Isabel's part to string while her partner enjoyed himself.

"But we must really go," she announced, finally. "We have a long stretch out in the open creek after we leave the slough, and it is not so easy to keep the channel after dark. I have lost track of things and don't remember what time the moon rises. You can come every day if you like; and four in the morning is the best time if you are energetic enough--"

"I would get up at midnight--stay up all night. But I am quite willing to return now--and not for tea. I should like several of these ducks for supper, if your j.a.p is less haughty than mine."

Their way lay through the middle of the marsh-land. It was not until they reached the slough that she uttered a loud sharp cry. The boat was at least three feet below them and there was nothing at either end but mud.

Isabel stamped both feet in succession and flung her burden to the ground. "Why, _why_ did I take Mac's word?" she exclaimed, furiously.

"He always makes mistakes about the tide--he hasn't an inch of memory left. Why didn't I look at the calendar? Or think? This comes of going off for three weeks instead of staying at home and attending to business. I had a confused idea that this was the 'good week.' Great heavens!"

Gwynne had watched her with considerable interest and curiosity. But he answered, soothingly: "Well, what of it? The tide turns, doesn't it." It happened that he had had no experience of marsh-lands.

"Yes--in six hours."

"Six hours! Well, what of it? It is all in the day's work. Look at it as a jolly adventure." It was his first opportunity to console and he hastened to take advantage of it. "We have tea and sandwiches, warm enough clothing, and the weather is perfection. If we get stiff and chilly we can walk--"

"Walk? In these rubber boots? I am nearly dead already." She had a wild impulse to drop her head on his shoulder and weep; but her pride flew to the front and she shrugged her shoulders and remarked, airily: "I don't really mind anything much except being an idiot. However, I'll make it up to you. I can cook ducks better than Chuma. You make the tea."

Gwynne made a fire out of decayed tule weed and driftwood, then climbed down into the boat and brought up the provisions and utensils intended for an earlier interlude. The tea warmed and stimulated both, and they knelt by the fire and toasted the ducks at the end of the boat-hook, scowling with a preternatural earnestness both were too hungry to observe. Then they fell to, and it is doubtful if either had ever eaten with a keener relish. They were obliged to use their fingers, and, as they had no salt, to shred the ham and wrap it about the morsels of duck, but to such minor matters they gave not a thought, and consumed four teals and every sc.r.a.p they had brought from home, as well as another pot of tea. Isabel, recalling the injured air of her father, uncle, and brother-in-law when their comfort was rudely disturbed, warmed to Gwynne, who was good-humored and amused. Even the reflection that he had roughed it in far worse straits than this, or that had he the legal right to grumble he might possibly use it, did not alter the pleasant impression he made as he tramped out the fire, washed his hands in the marsh gra.s.s, and then stretched himself full length with his pipe. She lit a cigarette, but had not smoked half its length when she sprang to her feet.

"Look!" she said. "We must get into the boat. It is getting damper every moment, and the fog will make us feel as if we were in our graves if we don't sit on something dry."

She had pointed northward, and Gwynne saw a phantom mountain moving along the level surface of the marsh with the quiet plodding motion of a ship under full sail in a light breeze. The curious combination of images fascinated him, and he watched the stealthy silent progress of this night visitor from the tule lands of the north, that looked as if it might have obliterated the world. As he jumped down into the boat he saw before him, on three sides of him, the sparkling night. Then as Isabel laid her hands on his shoulders and he lifted her down, the fog swept over them, and there was nothing to do but sit and watch the glow of pipe and cigarette; even their own outlines were barely visible.

"I fancy it will go home when the moon rises," said Isabel, with a little shiver. "Are you cold?" she asked, solicitously.

"No," replied a tart voice. "Why didn't you let me ask that? You are not my mother. We can make tea at intervals. How long do you suppose the tide has been out?"

"About two hours."

"I am quite comfortable and have never resented any adventure. And this is the appropriate time and place for a certain story. As I remarked before I shall not know you until I have heard it. Pasts are dead walls."

"It is not necessary that you should know me."

"I think otherwise. You are my one friend among eighty millions of aliens, or ought to be. I shall continue to feel a superior sort of acquaintance until you have taken me into your confidence."

There was a movement of the fog that he inferred was a shrug. "Very well," she replied, without a break in her cool even voice. "I suppose I shall enjoy talking about myself. It is not often I have had the opportunity to indulge in a monologue in my family, and you certainly are at my mercy. If you attempt to flee you will be mired like the boat, and I could not pull you out."

He had never felt the least curiosity about the past history or the inner life of a mortal before, and in normal circ.u.mstances Isabel's would not have appealed to him. But her instrumentality in changing the whole current of his life had alarmed his masculinity into a resolve to demonstrate his superiority if it came to a contest of wills; given birth to a subtle a.s.sumption of proprietorship, indifferent in material things, but pressing towards the guarded chambers of the spirit. Isabel, vaguely uneasy earlier in the day, began to appreciate the advance of an outer and powerful force upon her precious freedom, and resented it. And while she made up her mind that if it came to a silent contest of wills, hers at least should not be conquered, she reflected that the deeper intimacy, certain to ensue if she gave him her confidence, would insure her a firmer and subtler hold upon his destinies.

X

"Of course I lived two lives before my father's death. My days were sufficiently filled with him, to say nothing of making both ends meet; for even after my uncle's death, I had only a small income until the day of my complete liberty came. I slept soundly enough when I was not following my father about the house with a candle, or about the hills with a lantern. But such a life preyed upon my spirits. I imagined myself both melancholy and bitter and grew unhealthily romantic. But from the conditions of my life I had two escapes--in books and in dreams. My father hated company more and more and I rarely left him for a dance or one of those church festivities where all the young people of my set were sure to meet. I knew that I was regarded as rather a tragic figure, and this enhanced my morbid egoism. I wonder if I shall ever be as really happy again!

"During the year following my father's death I lived out here alone, but with my hands tied by the executors of my uncle's will. I felt myself quite the enchanted princess and put in most of my time dreaming about the prince. I suppose no girl ever had such wild and impossible notions of love. That is to say most girls have, but I had peculiar opportunities for indulgence and elaboration. At the same time I despised or disliked every man I knew or ever had known--with the possible exception of Judge Leslie. Not only had I found all the men of my little personal world weak, or selfish, or tyrannical, but those I knew almost as well were narrow, or commonplace, or uninterested in anything but local politics or making money, or both combined. Not but that Rosewater is the world in little. You never read of any old Italian duchy where there was more jealousy and intrigue; more silent and tense, or open and gnashing struggle for supremacy than is centered in these three banks. They have prevented the town from increasing in size and importance, in spite of its prosperity, through their machinations against one another. If a stranger comes to the town intending to invest his money in some one of the flourishing industries, or to introduce another, the banker to whom he brings a letter, or whom he happens to meet first, terrifies him with tales of the rapacity and dishonorable methods of his rivals; and the other two, who fear that the first will get the stranger's business, warn him that Mr. Colton, for instance, never gave an hour's mercy. The three have made slow, sure, dogged fortunes, but each has prevented the others from becoming millionaires, and Rosewater from taking its proper place as county seat. And they are all afraid of new-comers, new capital, of authority pa.s.sing out of their hands. They are careful not to charge exorbitant rates of interest, and every farmer and merchant in the county borrows from them; partly from habit, partly because the banks are uncommonly sound. They foreclose without mercy, but that does not frighten their old patrons, who have the perennial optimism of the country. The only capital they have not succeeded in frightening off is that controlled by the great corporations. One or two have wedged their way in and others will follow in time. Doubtless when the younger men get the reins in their hands they will trim with the times, but the older seem to be Biblical if not Christian, and the consequence is that most of the younger have left for a wider field.

"Finally the day came when I could turn my back on California, and I felt sure that I should remain away for ten years at least. I thought that the liberty I had longed for all my life was mine at last. In a conducted tour, I soon discovered, there was little liberty, to say nothing of privacy. Before I had been two days in the train I was made to feel that there was something wrong with a person that showed a disposition to retire into herself. She was either aristocratic, or had something to hide, unless she responded to the confidences natural to people of that cla.s.s. As there were just eighteen in the party, of course I always had a room partner, and there was not a woman in the entire company that I would have known from choice. However, it was excellent discipline, not unenlightening, and the end came in six weeks.

They sailed from Naples and I wandered about by myself. In a way the liberty was intoxicating, but of course the sum of it was lessened by the daily irritations of travel in Europe: the rapacity of the Italians and French, the wretched trains, the hordes of vulgar tourists, mostly of my own nation, the absurd primness, quite foreign to my nature, I was forced to a.s.sume when alone with a man who was neither English nor American, the awful fatigues, the ennuis of long rainy days in the second-rate hotels and pensions I had to frequent. Still, I was too young for any unpleasant impression to take root and discourage me, and there was much that was wholly delightful. I spent weeks in a city or even village that took my fancy. But even so it was not long before I realized that my liberty was as far off as ever, because my soul at least was possessed by the image of the prince, the more tormenting and insistent as his outlines were so remarkably vague. In the intervals when novelty ceased to appeal, when my very eyes refused to look at things, I pictured inexpressibly thrilling and romantic futures. Then I would fall into a panic at the pa.s.sing of youth, for a woman never feels so old again as between eighteen and twenty-five--her first quarter-century.

"And I did not lack opportunities. I met many people, some of them quite charming. But they left me cold.

"Then I lived the student life in Paris, studying art just enough to give me the raison d'etre. It was very gay, very irresponsible, very educating to a provincial miss. The restaurants with their sanded floors, and the cosmopolitan mixture of students, generally eccentric to look at, brandishing temperament until the poor thing must have been worn out before its harness of technique was ready--all was a perpetual source of delight to me, and I used to let my mind dwell on Rosewater for the sake of enjoying myself with the more wonder and grat.i.tude.

"But of course in such a life I had to have a companion, I could not long go to students' restaurants alone. I had taken a tiny flat in the Latin Quarter at the top of a house, and overlooking a convent where the nuns were always walking in the garden. A _femme de menage_ cooked my breakfast and kept my rooms in order; but although I was quite comfortable and never lonely, I had not been established a fortnight before certain experiences at the restaurants and on the street, which you can imagine for yourself, convinced me that I could not live alone.

So I looked hurriedly over the field, and decided that an American girl in my cla.s.s suggested fewest complications. Moreover, she interested me.

She had a pale tense face, rarely spoke to anybody, and worked as if her life depended upon every stroke, although her talent was not conspicuous. It was not easy to approach her, but one day, after I had dined alone in my flat five times in succession, I noticed that she was paler than usual, and that her hands were trembling. Then I felt certain she was in trouble, and it would have been my instinct to help her in any case. I joined her as we left the atelier, and asked her to walk a bit. It was not long before she admitted that her money was practically gone, and that her family would not send her any more; they had never approved of her coming to Paris to study art. They were not at all well off, and as she had a facility in tr.i.m.m.i.n.g hats they had thought it her duty to contribute more immediately to the support of the family. She had not advanced as rapidly as she had hoped to do, and it would be insupportable humiliation to return.

"Here was my opportunity. I exultingly invited her to share my apartment, told her that my income was quite enough for two, that I was merely studying life, and that her protection would more than compensate me for the little extra outlay. She declined at first, hesitated for a week; but in the end she came. I grew very fond of her, and she interested me more and more. Her real bitterness taught me what a purely youthful symptom mine had been, and she was rather a clever girl, often entertaining. She was about twenty-six, I fancy, and had received a good education at the academy of the Western town in which she had been born.

Her grandparents were Italian emigrants, and she had fine black eyes and a beautiful mouth.

"Well, before many months had pa.s.sed I knew that she was in desperate straits, and she offered to go away, reiterating that she had only intended to take advantage of the temporary haven while she fed her courage and painted something that might sell. I knew that if she left me she would throw herself into the Seine, and I persuaded her to stay.

It is not difficult to persuade a stricken woman to remain under a friendly roof. I was full of sympathy for the poor little thing, but I don't deny that I was immensely interested, and fairly palpitated with the thought that I was actually seeing life at first hand. Who the hero of her romance was I never discovered, except that he was of her own race, and married, a fact he had concealed until ready to leave Paris.

She told me enough to make me hate all men so violently that the prince took himself off and left me in peace. But I had trouble enough in my household. As time went on Veronica's alternate attacks of melancholy and hysteria were terrible. I sat up night after night to keep her from throwing herself out of the window; at times she seemed to be quite off her head. And then she still loved the wretch, and would maunder by the hour. But it ended, as everything does; and the poor girl died. I have no desire to linger over the climax. If anything was needed to set the final seal upon my disgust with life at first hand it was the mean and sordid details that attend death and burial in Paris. The landlord behaved like the mercenary fiends they all are; I was obliged to call in the a.s.sistance of the American consul before I could get the body out of the house, and between all the trouble and fuss poor Veronica's story was published from the house-tops.

"As soon as it was over I left Paris and started to travel slowly through Germany, feeling now a real sense of liberty, inasmuch as I was sure I could be all intellect henceforth, dependent upon nothing so unsatisfactory as human happiness. I never wanted another real contact with life. I would travel, and study, and develop my mind, possibly some latent talent. Many talents are manufactured anyhow, and the world is always hailing them as genius.

"But, of course, in time, and with constant change of scene, to say nothing of youth, the impression faded; the painful experience hovered faintly in the background of the past; the romantic imp in my brain, a little pale and emaciated from its long sojourn in the cellar, resumed the throne. Once more I began to realize that I was human, and to cast about for the mate that must surely be roaming in search of me. It was then that I arrived in Munich.

"I saw him first in the Englischergarten. You remember it, that wonderful imitation of a great stretch of open country, with fields where they make hay, and bits of wild woods, and crooked pathways, and bridges over a branch of the Isar, greenest and loveliest of rivers. And then the little beer-gardens, where the people are always sitting and listening to the band--and beyond the tree-tops, the spires and domes of the beautiful city.

"I was standing by the lake watching the swans when he rode by, and I am bound to say that he made no great impression. I hardly should have noticed him had it not been for his excessively English appearance, and a certain piercing quality in the glance with which he favored me. I should never have given him another thought, but a week later I met him formally. It came about oddly enough.

"That evening in looking through my trunk for a business paper I came upon a letter of introduction given me by a friend I had made in Italy.

It was to a Baroness L., of Munich. I had quite forgotten it, and the sight of it inspired me with no desire for the social curiosities. I was infatuated with Munich, and its exteriors satisfied me. It has a large courteous grandly-hospitable air, as if it were the private property of a king, to which, however, all strangers are royally welcome. It is the ideal king's city: life but no bustle; neither business, as we understand the word, nor poverty; a city of infinite leisure and infinite interest, a superb living picture-book, where one is ever amused, interested, both stimulated and soothed. I had been in it three weeks and had almost made up my mind to live there, and dream away the rest of my life. Knote and Morena, Feinhals and Bender were singing at the Hof Theatre. Mottl was conducting. Lili Marberg's Salome was something to be seen again and again. You forgot the play itself. And Bardou-Muller's Mrs. Alving! I did not sleep for two nights.

"Well, I left the letter on my table, instead of returning it to the portfolio of my trunk, and it exercised a certain insistence. What are letters of introduction for? And should I not see the social life of Europe when the opportunity offered? So I left a card on the baroness.

She returned it in the course of a day or two, then wrote, asking me to drink tea with her. I went. There were perhaps fifty people there. I have not the faintest idea who they were or what they looked like.

Prestage--that was only one of his names, but it will do--asked immediately to be introduced to me, and we talked in a corner for an hour. Before we had talked for ten minutes I knew that the great gates were swinging open. It is not possible for a woman to define one man's fascination to another, and I hardly know myself why this man so completely turned my head. He was not exactly good-looking, but he had remarkable eyes and a singular tensity of manner, which made me almost breathless at times. He was, moreover, brilliantly educated and accomplished, and the most finished specimen of the man of the world I had met. He was an American of inherited fortune who had spent the greater part of his life in Europe, alternating between Paris and London, although he knew the society of other cities well enough. His contempt for the vulgarity of the huge modern fortunes, and his admiration for Munich, were the first subjects to discover to us the similarity of our tastes.

"We soon discovered others. I think he fell as deeply in love with me as he was capable of doing. He was forty-one and had fairly exhausted his capacity, for he had lived the life of pleasure only; but no doubt I was something new in his experience, and penetrated the ashes like a strong western breeze. I have seen him turn quite white when I suddenly appeared at one of our trysts.

"Of course I lived in a pension. I had no private sitting-room, and he positively refused to sit in the salon a second time. So we used to take interminable walks about Munich, lingering in all the quaint old Gothic corners, along the magnificent stretches of Renaissance; lunching on the terraces of the restaurants under the shade of the green trees, or in quaint little back gardens set in the angle of buildings as mediaeval as Rothenburg; the people looking down at us from the narrow windows or the little balconies. We spent hours in the Englischergarten, sitting on the banks of the Isar; often took the train to the beautiful Isarthal and spent the day in the woods; or sailed on one of the lakes with the tumbled glittering peaks of the Alps always in sight. We visited Ludwig's castles together, attended peasants' festivals in the mountains, lunching in some dilapidated old garden of a Gasthaus. And of course we went constantly to the opera. It was positive heaven for a time, and as romantic as the heart of any romantic idiot could wish. I was so happy I could not even think, even when I was alone. I simply sat like one in a trance and gazed into s.p.a.ce, vague rose-colored dreams turning the slow wheel of my brain. No one paid any attention to us.

Everybody in the pension was studying something; we avoided the American church and consulate and even the Baroness L. We were determined to have our blissful dream unvulgarized by gossip.

"There is no doubt that for a time my young enthusiasm gave him back a flicker of the romance of his own youth, but of course it couldn't last.

I hardly know when it was I began to realize that the whole base of his nature was honeycombed with ennui, and that any structure reared upon it might topple at a moment's notice. I had been steeped to the eyes in the present. I had no wish to marry. Marriage was prosaic. Life was a fairy tale, why materialize it? I soon discovered that man's capacity for living on air is limited, and I had almost yielded to his entreaties to cross to England where we could marry without tiresome formalities, when one day--this was perhaps a month after we had met--he was late at a tryst. I lived a lifetime in five minutes. When he arrived he was so apologetic and so charming that if I had been an older woman I should have known that something was wrong. The next day, as it happened, I had to go to bed with influenza, and wrote him that I might not get out for a week. He wrote twice a day and sent me flowers. On the fourth morning I felt so much better that I sent him a note by a _dinstmann_ telling him that I should lunch on the terrace of the Neue Burse restaurant. He was not awaiting me; nor did he come at all. Later I saw him driving with an astonishingly handsome woman; who looked as if she had been born without crudities or illusions.

"There are no words to express the tortures of jealousy and disgust that I endured that afternoon. But at five came a note stating that he had been out of town on a lonely voyage of discovery, and begging me to come for a cup of chocolate at the Cafe Luitpold--where we had gone so often to watch the motley crowd. I went, wrath and horror struggling in my heart with the sanguineness of woman. He had never been so charming and so plausible. I let him go on, exulting in the discovery that he was a liar, for I knew that it pushed me a step towards recovery. When he had finished I told him that I had seen him in the Hofgarten. I never shall forget how white he turned. But if he had been an adventurer his mind could not have been more nimble. He recovered himself instantly, admitted the impeachment, insisted that he had just returned when I saw him, had accepted a seat in the lady's carriage as he was entering his hotel--before he had time to go to his room and find my note. I knew that he was lying, but when he changed the subject to impa.s.sioned pleading that I would cross to England at once, I was forced to believe that he loved me.