Ancestors Part 41

Her trained features did not betray her, but Isabel saw the figure under the loose gown grow rigid and brace itself against the back of the chair. And as Isabel stared at her, with the desperate courage born of the sudden plunge, it seemed to her that she felt a vibration from the nausea, the disgust, the hatred of life, the death-rattle of great pa.s.sions dying hard. She wondered again, if, given the same conditions, she would have differed much from the woman she had brought to bay. Her early trials and provincial upbringing had developed her Puritan inheritance, but she had had flashing and startling glimpses of her depths now and again. For a moment she felt the waters of an immemorial ennui rise high in her own soul, then drop to the grinning skulls and sparkless ashes of old pleasures. She shuddered back, and raised her eyes once more to the haughty mask opposite.

"I think I understand," she said, gently. "But you must go. I kept him from seeing you to-night. But he would find out in time. As you know how he believes in you, you can imagine the consequences. I suppose you have not done anything so public before, or I should have heard of it. I vaguely recall that women can look on at prize-fights from private boxes. Last night, it isn't likely that any one noticed. Or if they did they would question the evidence of their senses in the morning, the best of them. So please go."

She paused. Lady Victoria stared at her without the slightest change of expression. Isabel continued imperturbably. "London is so vast--if you must have that sort of liberty, for heaven's sake go where it is most likely to be overlooked--and where libel laws are operative. For all its license, San Francisco is one of the most censorious and unrelenting societies in the world, and has more old-fashioned people than New York.

If you become the talk of the town, and those awful weekly papers find you out, Elton will be a long while living it down. It will make ridiculous all his efforts at reform. Perhaps he would no longer care. I fancy it would affect him that way."

She rose, and Lady Victoria rose also and walked to the door. As she opened it she smiled grimly. "You have courage," she said. "I am more than ever convinced that you are the wife for Jack. I will go."

PART III

1906

I

On the same afternoon Lady Victoria developed appendicitis and went to bed for two months. She was only in danger for a short time, but the doctor announced his intention of giving her a rest cure, and his patient, who was profoundly indifferent, made no protest. And if invalidism is a career, an illness is an adventure; moreover, no doubt, it was a relief to Victoria Gwynne to have her thinking done by some one else for a time. Isabel had thoughtfully rung up the handsomest doctor in San Francisco the moment the disease declared itself, and it was to be expected that he would find his patient interesting enough to spend an hour by her bedside daily. It was manifestly impossible to transfer a woman of Lady Victoria's heroic proportions down that rickety and almost perpendicular flight of steps to an ambulance, but the best of nurses were engaged, Anne Montgomery agreed to come every morning and attend to the housekeeping, Gwynne established a long-distance telephone beside the bed, and Mrs. Trennahan, whom Lady Victoria liked--she could not stand Mrs. Hofer--promised a daily visit; and an automobile trip to the south as soon as the doctor would permit.

It was nearly a week before Isabel, who had sat up with Gwynne during the first two nights, and been on the rush ever since, was able to return to her ranch. She had offered to remain in town altogether, but Lady Victoria replied with some show of irritation that if either she or her son sacrificed their time and interests on her account it would oppress her mind with a sense of guilt, and hinder her recovery. She would telephone to them at a certain hour every day, and if they came down once a week as usual she should enjoy seeing them, instead of being worried by a sense of obligation. In truth she was glad to be rid of them for more reasons than one.

It was late in the afternoon when Isabel arrived in Rosewater, and business detained her there for several hours. She dined with the Tom Coltons, and the conversation was a quaint mixture of babies, politics, servants, and the Hofer ball. Colton drove her home, and talked the steady monotonous stream with which he tricked the world into believing that his own ideas were still in the germ. Upon this occasion he might as well have betrayed his secrets or quoted the poets, for Isabel paid no attention whatever to his monologue. She was consumed with her desire to be alone once more. She was tired of the very sound of the human voice, and remembered with satisfaction the silence of her Chuma and the taciturnity of her men.

When she finally reached her home she illuminated it from top to bottom and wandered about in a pa.s.sion of delight. Her sensation of grat.i.tude and novelty in her solitude and freedom could not have been keener if she had been absent for six months. Although it was too cold to sit out-of-doors, she walked up and down the piazza for an hour, watching the crawling tide and the brown tumbled hills. The boat was late, and every other light was out when it appeared, a mere string of magic lanterns with a red globe suspended aloft. Isabel struck a match and answered the captain's familiar greeting from his high perch in the pilot-house; then went within, for the fog was rolling over Tamalpais, dropping down the mountains in great sea waves. But even then she would not go to bed, and lose her knowledge of recovered treasure. After a time, however, she fell asleep in her chair before the fire. She awoke suddenly, but drowsily surprised and disappointed not to find Gwynne in the chair opposite. Then she became aware of the cause of her interrupted slumbers. There was the sound of fire-arms and of barking dogs on the hills sacred to the Leghorn. In three minutes she had her skirts off, her high boots on, and was running, pistol in hand, to the colony, announcing her coming by a preliminary discharge. Then for the next hour she and her men fought one of those hordes of migratory rats that suddenly steal upon chicken-ranches and leave ruin behind them.

Isabel had a genuine horror of rats. She would far rather have faced an army of snakes; but with her rubber boots, the well-trained dogs, and her accuracy of aim, she had nothing to fear. Those that were not slaughtered were finally driven off, and Isabel, content even in this phase of her strictly personal life, went to bed and slept the sleep of youth and health and an easy conscience.

The next day began the torrential rains that lasted for three weeks, almost without an hour's intermission; that wiped out the marsh, and threatened floods for all the valleys of the north. The boats no longer looked as if cutting their way through the lands, but adrift on a great lake. Tamalpais and the mountains below it had disappeared, as if hibernating, and the winds raged up and down the long valley, shaking old houses like Isabel's to their foundations, and leaving not a leaf on the trees. Nothing could be wilder or more desolate than the scene from Isabel's piazza, where, encased in rubber, she took her exercise, often battling every inch of one way against a driving wall of rain.

Rosewater, or any sort of house except her own, she did not see for days at a time, nothing but that gray foaming muttering expanse of water, its flood and fall no longer distinguishable. At first she was more than content to be so isolated. Her practical life occupied little of her time; only a daily, and always unexpected, dash up the slopes to see that her men were not shirking their duties, and a weekly trip to Rosewater with her produce: she used her own incubators in bad weather.

A visit to San Francisco she did not attempt, and she was quite sure that the daily conversation over the telephone--when it had not blown down--was as sufficing for Lady Victoria as for herself. She read and studied and dreamed, became indifferent to what she chose to call her failure as a society ornament, and planned a larger future; to be realized when she had come to care less for dreams and more for realities. No doubt that state of mind would develop before long, and meanwhile she might as well enjoy herself according to her present mood.

Nothing could alter her belief that all unhappiness came from contacts, and certainly she had proved her theories so far, and took a pagan joy in mere living. She loved the wild battle of the elements, the waste below her garden, with as keen a sensuousness as the spring and the flowers, and often sat late in her red room by the fire to enjoy its contrast with the desolation without.

But Gwynne was not a man to be dismissed from the thoughts of any one that knew him as well as his cousin, He had taken his part in her life as a matter of course, and of late they had been very intimate. During the first days and nights of his mother's illness, they had talked, or sat in companionable silence, by the hour. She had been a.s.sailed by regrets more than once that she was to have no part in his life, that he had already won some of his hardest battles with no help of hers, and deliberately had matched their spirits and driven her off the field where she had subtly sought to manage him. She liked him the better for this, but while her vanity retired with philosophy, she regretted her inability to help him. That she had it in her to a.s.sist and encourage him in many ways, she needed to be told neither by himself nor his mother, but she was unwilling to pay the price. That she felt his charm, took an even deeper interest in him since he had announced his intention to marry her, she did not pretend to deny, and sometimes caught herself looking out upon a future in which he had as inevitable a part as if it had been decreed from the beginning of time. She also dreamed of the satisfaction and pleasure it would give her to make him really love her, become quite mad about her. But again she was unwilling to pay the price. She argued that this was merely due to the persistence of the solitary ideal; and refused to face the cowardice that lurked in the bottom of her soul. Heroic in every other development of her highly bred character, she had all the secret fear and antagonism of her s.e.x for the other, a profound resentment of the male instinct for possession, and the deeper terror that what Gwynne might find would eventually make her wholly his. Life had given her a deep surface; the depths below it sent up rare vibrations; and her mind was seldom unoccupied. She could add layer upon layer of evasions and subtleties with no prospect of a rude disturbance; and when the wind ceased for a time she tramped over the hills. But she missed Gwynne increasingly, wondered that he did not brave the elements and come out to her; finally felt herself shamefully neglected, and would not answer his occasional telephone queries as to her well-being.

II

Three days of floundering through the mud between Lumalitas and Rosewater exhausted Gwynne's patience, and he engaged a furnished suite of rooms on Main Street, moved in his law library, Imura Kisaburo Hinomoto, and several easy-chairs, invested in a red wall-paper for his sitting-room, and was immediately so comfortable, and so relieved to be rid of his dripping sighing trees and flooded valley, that he was almost happy. As he looked down from his window upon the slope of the street crowded with muddy wagons and men in oil-skins and high rubber boots, he recalled the ironical picture Isabel had drawn, that memorable night at Capheaton, of his own future appearance; and as he could not ride out to Old Inn in any other garb, an excess of vanity deterred him from going at all. To be sure he could drive out in a closed surrey, but he would have felt equally ridiculous, and Isabel, beyond doubt, would scorn him.

Better let her think him indifferent for a while; it might do her good.

He could save himself from discourtesy by telephoning occasionally, and, for the matter of that, the less he thought of her at present the better.

For the first time he came intimately in contact with the men of Rosewater: "leading citizens" too busy to call upon him at Lumalitas, or to sit down in their places of business for a chat during the day, and too well trained to ask strangers home for dinner, were any hospitable instincts left in them. But they soon discovered that his rooms were very comfortable and inviting, his whiskey and tobacco "above par." The homeless citizens of Rosewater, while their wives wrangled at bridge or five-hundred, fell into the habit of "dropping in at Gwynne's," instead of going to the Lodge or the dingy back room of some saloon or lawyer's office. They were at liberty to take off their coats and put their feet on the railing surrounding the large iron stove that sat well out into the room. There were even spittoons for such as clung to the old tradition; and in a short time the large newly built, almost luxurious room took on somewhat of the character of that forum of an older time, the corner grocery. Judge Leslie seldom honored these a.s.semblies, as he was tired at night and rejoiced in a comfortable home; nor did Tom Colton, whose domestic virtues were p.r.o.nounced; but Mr. Wheaton came, and Mr. Haight, Mr. Boutts, and other solid business men old enough to be Gwynne's father; and they were all deeply interested in Rosewater first, State politics second, and national affairs once in four years; or oftener if there was any pyrotechnical departure from routine.

European politics interested them not at all, and if they had any suspicion of Gwynne's real status, they were too accustomed to minding their own business to take any liberties with his reserve.

But they were fully alive to the importance of his addition to the community. He was a large landholder, selling many small farms to acceptable persons; he spent money freely, buying everything he needed for his household and farm in Rosewater, instead of sending to the city; he was studying law with a view to practising in their midst; and now that Judge Leslie--who proclaimed him a marvel--was threatening to retire, his keen and cautious fellow-citizens needed nothing more than a man of first-cla.s.s legal ability to take care of their great and varied interests and defend them against the corporation bogie. They found themselves hinting that he should engage in politics as well, when his probationary years were over.

When Gwynne shrugged his shoulders one night and remarked bluntly that he had no desire to work with either of the California machines, and would unquestionably come a howling cropper if he worked against either, Mr. Wheaton answered with the nimbleness of a mind already made up, that he could be sent to Sacramento on an independent ticket--manipulated by the honest men of Rosewater--to fight such of the frauds and tyrannies as the State was suffering acutely from at the moment. During reform spasms the machines were practically powerless, and with the brilliant abilities he would be able to display as soon as he entered public life, and backed by a powerful influence, he could win his way to higher things before the wave subsided. They wanted a senator in Washington who was for his State first and himself next, even more than they wanted a lawyer; and for that matter he could serve their anti-corporation interests better there than here. Meanwhile he would have many opportunities to speak and show the stuff that was in him, draw converts to himself with his fiery eloquence and hard practicality, inculcate the desire for better things, and the necessity for reducing the influence of the army of petty professional politicians to a minimum, make of himself so central and inspiriting a figure that when his time came the best element of both parties throughout the State would form an independent body under his leadership.

This was an alluring picture, but if Mr. Wheaton, who had had as little to do with politics as possible, was a bit of a dreamer, there was no question that his dreams were shared by more practical men at the present moment than for many years past; and that his theories were sound, however formidable the alert, resourceful, enormously capitalized army which stood between them and execution. His idol was Abraham Lincoln, and in consequence he "banked" on the good in human nature as a factor, which, in sudden recrudescences of indignant energy, accomplished revolutions of far greater moment than the overthrowing of political machines.

Mr. Wheaton had launched forth upon one particularly stormy night when he happened to be Gwynne's only guest. The host, not to be outdone, was sitting with his feet on the railing of the stove, but as far from the spittoon as possible. He had listened to the long monologue, which involved a sketch of Lincoln's varied career, with more attention than might have been inferred from his half-closed eyes, and his pipe had gone out. It was only recently that any of his neighbors, barring Judge Leslie and Tom Colton, who shared his secret, had definitely proposed a political career to him, in other words divined his abilities and ambitions. But Mr. Wheaton had once been young and adventurous himself, and much if not all of his success in life was due to his shrewd divination of human nature. No man could drive a harder bargain than "Wash" Wheaton (he was named for the father of his country), but he had never been wanting in a vein of humorous sympathy, nor in a fair capacity for friendship as well as enmity.

He raised his eyes from the coals and looked directly at Gwynne, who was relighting his pipe.

"I don't like Tom Colton," he said, abruptly. "And it's not so much because he is the son of that old skinflint, neither. He is a little too much the product of the times--a sort of polished up descendant of that hoodlum element that terrorized San Francisco in the Seventies. He started out as a mere or'nary politician, but the Democratic Boss took him up and his ambitions are growing. What with the money he has and will inherit, and the devilish gall of him, he can play a deep game, and his chances of winning look a little too fair to suit a good many of us.

He's nothing better than an anarchist, and without the excuse of the common anarchist--who, at the worst--or his own best--risks his life.

Tom Colton and men of his stamp wouldn't risk the skin of their little fingers. All they do is to build a red-hot fire under the political caldron, stir it up with a big stick until it doesn't know where it is at or what it is made of, and then float into power on the steam. This has been one of the rottenest States in the Union for a good many years, and no wonder such men as Tom think they can about do as they please; but a good many are getting pretty d.a.m.ned tired of it, and there's a sort of reform mutter going on here and there that will gather and swell if skilfully manipulated. We've been talking you over, and have concluded to back you up for all we are worth as soon as you are ready--that is to say we would but for one drawback--your friendship with Colton."

"If you choose to call it that. I have told him in as plain English as he will ever hear what I think of his politics, and that if I ever enter public life myself I shall devote my energies to running him and his like out of it. He is too good-natured and too sure of himself--and his State!--to mind. Moreover, he has four years the start of me. It is possible that I shall go to Sacramento with, and even speak for, him; but he understands perfectly that I am only after experience, will advocate nothing I disapprove of--he actually has certain reforms in his political basket, and whatever may be his intention to compromise when he reaches Sacramento, I, at least, can advocate them in all sincerity; and further open the eyes of all these people to what they ought to want and to have. All this is perfectly understood between us. I, and the honest public clamoring for its rights, do not weigh a feather in the scale, in his opinion, against the might of organization."

"Very good. I suspicioned something of the sort. He can't corrupt you, and you couldn't get a better insight into corruption than through him; so fire away. What's your program, anyhow?"

"It's too soon to make one--be sure that I am willing to return your confidence with my own"--as the sharp china-blue eyes opposite contracted; "but I can do little now except win the confidence of the farmers in this district and of men like yourself. But if a reform party does achieve power, if only for a term, the first thing for it to do is to overhaul the ballot system. Before we reformed ours we were as deep in the mire as yourselves. When the American voter is under the supervision of an honest judiciary, a general system of local reforms will follow as a matter of course."

Mr. Wheaton sighed. "You would have to begin with the judiciary. If you reformed them, and had any strength left, and then reformed the ballot in the manner of your own country, I guess you'd get about anything you wanted. But you'll need a tidal reform wave, I'm afraid. However, you never can tell what one year will bring forth in this country. On the other hand, the results of certain reforms, fought and died for, have done as much to make us pessimists as any of the immovable abuses. Take the question of Civil Service Reform, for instance. In the old days when you wanted to induce a man to give you the benefit of his abilities and influence during an election, you held out hopes of preferment, and he took your word if he knew your word was good, and worked with a decent sort of ambition--all things being relative. What happens now? Few find anything promising or attractive in the compet.i.tive examination. You ask a man--the professional politician he is now, sure enough--to help you get your candidate, or yourself, in, and what happens? The gentleman coolly demands, 'How much?' and holds out his hand. You fill it or he turns his back and walks off. There is just that much less of good left to appeal to in this particular brand of human nature. Ours is a much more complicated civilization than yours, Mr. Gwynne. You were dealing with Britishers only, in 1832. We are trying to digest the riffraff of the world, and can't do it, in spite of such incorrigible optimists as Judge Leslie. Immigrants in the first generation have just about as much feeling for the American flag as a chicken has for Rosewater. They look upon vote-selling as a legitimate way of improving their fortunes, and they are the easy prey of such agitators as Colton, because they had nothing in their own countries, and want the earth in this. Of course their children go to the public schools, and become Americans, but we always have the problem of fresh hordes to deal with. And new and old--it is easy to plant the weevil in their brains that the rich have corralled all the money, and the laborer--even in California, where he gets the highest wages paid on this earth--is a miserable victim, and ent.i.tled to all he doesn't make. They never remember that nearly every capitalist in the country has risen from their own ranks, and that their dreams are mainly occupied with doing the same. But you might as well talk to the trade-winds, especially with such men as Tom Colton stirring the caldron. 'Get rich quick; and selling votes is as good a starter as any.' There you have the moral sickness of the country in a nutsh.e.l.l.

And few professions pay better than that of the politician. The pettiest division leader, who does the Boss's dirtiest work, and has fewer redeeming virtues than the midnight burglar, makes such a good thing out of it that the prettiest Salvation Army la.s.s couldn't convince him of the error of his ways. And he enjoys himself. To hang around saloons, prize-fights, help out shyster lawyers with their tricks, and play the game hard during election times--that satisfies him until he sees a chance of stepping into a bigger pair of boots of the same make. But, thank G.o.d, there are more honest men out of politics than in. That is the trouble, but there they are, and it will be a part of your business to round them up. Well, I guess I've held forth long enough. I'll send you round a few volumes from my Lincoln library to-morrow. I always go to it when I lose my faith in human nature. Good-night."

And he gathered up his long legs and went out.

In his many talks with his friends in San Francisco, Gwynne had received practically the same suggestions. The lawyer who advised this group in its necessarily intermittent campaign against the San Francisco politicians was one of the ablest in the United States. He had offered Gwynne a place in his office, a 'courtesy partnership,' when he was ready to move to the city. But Gwynne deliberately remained undecided for the present, although half inclined to practise in the country for some years. If he could not have the inestimable education of the old days, when lawyers jogged about the country with the circuit judges for months at a time, he could at least get into close contact with the plain people in a manner that in a city would be practically impossible.

Until the rains began, and after his definite understanding with Colton, he had, during his hours of exercise, formed the habit of "dropping in"

upon the small farmers of his political district, under pretence of asking their advice; gauging and sowing. Upon the men that had bought land of him he was able to bestow many small favors, and his old experience with the tenantry of Capheaton gave him an instinctive knowledge of their wants that added to the sum of his popularity. To his inferiors he had never shown the arrogance of his nature, and he welcomed these small toilers as a subst.i.tute for his old tenants; for he had missed the poor that kept the sympathies quick--and, perhaps, gave richer shadows to life.

His long lank American figure and slight resemblance to Hiram Otis, who had been an inst.i.tution if not a favorite, his readiness to stand drinks to his farmer acquaintances, and others, whom he happened to meet in Main Street, the approachableness he had cultivated with some effort, combined with the subtle suggestion that he would not permit a liberty; a characteristic that every true man respects; his reputation for being "dead straight," and his insistence upon receiving his just dues--"all that was coming to him"--in spite of the easy terms he made with several to whom he sold land; all this, in addition to the dignity of being the largest rancher in the county, and a law partner of Judge Leslie, had quickly made him a marked as well as a popular figure. Even his accent was unnoted in that State of many accents.

He had thought out for himself all that Mr. Wheaton had suggested, and if he still had his moments of depression and disgust, and even of revolt, much of his old confidence was returning; although he sometimes reflected, with a sort of whimsical bitterness, upon the difficulty of sustaining an impression of innate greatness unaided by an occasional demonstration. But he had, at least, learned to see people merely as human beings without taking their sh.e.l.ls into account; and he also realized that in those storms of spirit, which, at the time, he had deprecated as ebullitions from a too mercurial nature, he had developed more rapidly and precisely than many a man does by the exterior catastrophe. And impersonally his admiration for the land of one set of forefathers grew, although personally he remained cold. But he cultivated all sorts and conditions of men, and hopefully trained himself for the enthusiastic moment.

There were even times when, surrounded by his Rosewater friends, with their lapses into quaint American speech and their intense localism, the old Otis blood stirred in him very strongly; he caught himself using phrases and figures that no doubt were an inheritance with his brain cells. When the walls and furnishings of his room were obscured by smoke, and there were half a dozen pairs of boots against his stove, it was not difficult to fancy himself back in the old corner grocery on a winter's night: his companions drinking apple cider, instead of rye whiskey, and the orator of the moment sitting, by preference, on a barrel, and munching crackers.

In San Francisco, which he visited twice a week on his return from Berkeley, when alone in the long sloping streets swept with the wind-driven rain, when the gutters roared and the houses looked as deserted as their huddled beaten gardens, stories Isabel had told him of the days of the Argonauts rose like ghosts in his brain, and he would suddenly experience an overwhelming sensation of being at home. His mother promptly dispelled these visions.

On the whole his time was too fully occupied to leave him more than stray moments for the subtler mood; but as day after day, finally week after week pa.s.sed, with no prospect of fair weather, the monotony and confinement affected his nerves, he tired of the unrelieved companionship of men, and wished that Isabel would move in to Rosewater for the winter months. He rang her up, when this brilliant idea occurred to him, but was informed by Chuma that she was not in the house. On the following day he telephoned again, and learned that she slept, on the third that she was engaged in the delicate operation of extracting some deleterious substance from the crop of a valuable hen. Whereupon he swore vigorously, and vowed that he would forget her until the skies cleared. But "the skies they were ashen and sober," and he caught himself dreaming over his "Torts," or during one of Mr. Boutts's ecstatic visions of Rosewater with a great hotel in the style of the old Missions, and an electric railway. (Mr. Boutts, by-the-way, never elevated his feet to the railing of the stove, but always sat on the edge of his chair, a hand on either knee.) He took the train impulsively to San Francisco, one afternoon, and talked of reinforced concrete with his contractor, and San Francisco politics with Hofer. He even called upon several young ladies, who interested him less than ever, and returned to Rosewater at the end of four days with a sense of duties neglected and a slip in his self-mastery. This put him in such a bad humor that he directed his Asiatic to refuse him to the members of his informal Club, and wished he were back in San Francisco doing the town with Stone.

III

He was glowering into the open door of the stove and wondering why on earth he had not remained in town over Sunday at least, when he became aware that his noiseless j.a.p was standing at his elbow.