The Californians Part 17

"There's the music," he said. "Suppose we go out in the hall by ourselves, and I will give you a little lesson. No?"

Magdalena was delighted, but she merely stood up in her unbending dignity and said that she was glad to take advantage of his kindness.

He was a man who danced so well that he compelled some measure of facility in his partner. Magdalena felt inspired at once, and carefully obeyed every instruction.

"We will have a great many other lessons, no?" he said as the music finished. "By the time that famous coming-out party of yours comes off, you will be in great form."

"Will you open it with me?"

"I shall be delighted, and to help you all I can." They were walking down the hall, and he was bending over her with an air of devotion which she thought very pleasant. His accomplished eyes appealed to the instinct of coquetry, buried deep in the seriousness of her nature, and she smiled upon him and found herself talking with some ease.

She danced with all the young men, but they bored her as much as she felt that she bored them. All the girls danced with her father, and he seemed amiable and pleased, especially when Tiny was smiling upon him.

Ila, despite her elegance and refinement, suggested the ladies of his leisure, Rose had too sharp a tongue, and Caro had an exaggerated innocence of manner and eye which experience had led him to distrust.

But Tiny, beautiful, cool, and remote, reminded him of the women of his youth, when he was a man of enthusiasms, ideals, and dreams.

Mr. Polk spent the evening wandering about alone or staring from the hearth-rug. One or two of the girls asked him to dance, but he refused brusquely. It was the first dance he had attended since the one given by Thomas Larkin to celebrate the Occupation of California by the United States.

The party broke up a little after twelve, and all a.s.sured Magdalena that the party had been a success with such emphasis that she was convinced that it had been; but when she was in bed and the light out, she cried bitterly.

XXVII

There were no engagements for the following morning, and Magdalena was sitting idly on the verandah when she saw Trennahan sauntering up the drive. The blood flew through her veins, lifting the weight from her brain. But she repressed the quick smile, and sat still and erect until he reached the carriage block, when she went to the head of the steps to meet him.

"Put on your hat," he said, "and let us hide in the woods before somebody comes to take us for a drive or to invite us to luncheon. I haven't forgotten our private plans, if you have."

"I had not forgotten, but Tiny and Ila manage everything. I don't like to refuse when they are so kind."

"You must develop a faculty--or no, leave it to me. I shall gradually but firmly insist upon having a day or two a week to myself; and Miss Geary informs me that such unprecedented energy can never last in this Vale of Sleep; that before a month is over we shall all have settled down to a chronic state of somnolence from which we shall awaken from Sat.u.r.day till Monday only. Then, indeed, will Menlo be the ideal spot of which I dreamed while you left me to myself on that long day of my visit."

Her hat was in the hall. She put it on hastily back foremost, and they walked toward the woods. Suddenly she turned into a side path.

"Let us walk through the orchard," she said. "Then we shall not meet anyone."

The cherries were gone; but the yellow apricots, the golden pears, the red peaches and nectarines, the purple plums, hung heavy among the abundant green, or rotted on the ground. Several poor children were stealing frankly, filling sacks almost as large as themselves. Don Roberto had never so far unbent as to give the village people permission to remove the superfluity of his orchard, but he winked at their depredations, as they saved him the expense of having it carted away; his economical graft had never been able to overcome his haughty aversion to selling the produce of his private estate. Magdalena often came to the orchard to talk to these children: the poor fascinated her, and she liked to feel that she was helping them with words and dimes; but they were not as the poor of whom she had read, nor yet of the fire.

They were tow-headed and soiled of face, but they wore stout boots and well-made calico frocks, and they were not without dimes of their own.

"Does California seem a little unreal to you?" she asked. "I mean, there are no great contrasts. The poverty of London must be frightful."

"You ungrateful person, for Heaven's sake reap the advantage of your birthright and forget the countries that are not California."

They pa.s.sed out of the back gate and entered the middle woods. Magdalena without hesitation led the way to the retreat hitherto sacred to Art.

Trennahan need not have apprehended that she would inflict him with her ma.n.u.script, nor with hopes and fears: she was much too shy to mention the subject unless he drew her deliberately; but she liked the idea of a.s.sociating him with this leafy and sacred temple.

He threw himself on his back at once, clasping his hands under his head and gazing up into the rustling storeys above. About his head was a low persistent hum, a vibration of a sound of many parts. Above were only the intense silences of a hot California morning.

Trennahan forgot Magdalena for the moment. He felt young again and very content. His restless temperament, fed with the infinite varieties of Europe, had seldom given way to the pleasures of indolence. Even satiety had not meant rest. But California--as distinct from San Francisco--with her traditions of luxurious idleness, the low languid murmur of her woods, her soft voluptuous air, her remoteness from the shrieking nerve centres of the United States, the sublime indifference of her people to the racing hours, drew so many quiet fingers across his tired brain, half obliterating deep and ugly impressions, giving him back something of the sense of youth and future. Perhaps he dimly appreciated that California is a h.e.l.l for the ambitious; he knew that it was the antechamber of a possible heaven to the man who had lived his life.

He turned suddenly and regarded Magdalena, wondering how much she had to do with his regeneration, if regeneration it were, and concluded that she was merely a part of California the whole. But she was a part as was no other woman he had met.

She had clasped her hands about her knees and was staring straight before her. Trennahan, in a rare flash of insight, saw the soul of the girl, its potentialities, its beauty, struggling through the deep mists of reserve.

"I could love her," he thought; "and more, and differently, than I have loved any other woman."

He determined in that moment to marry her. As soon as he had made his decision, he had a sense of buoyancy, almost of happiness, but no rejuvenation could destroy his epicureanism; he determined that the slow awakening of her nature, of revealing her to herself, should be a part of the happiness he promised himself. He was proud that he could love the soul of a woman, that he had found his way to that soul through an unbeautiful envelope, that so far there was not a flutter of sense. He was to love in a new way, which should, by exquisite stages, blend with the old. There could be no surprises, no enigmatic delights, but vicariously he could be young again. Then he wondered if he were a vampire feeding on the youth of another. For a moment he faced his soul in horrified wonder, then reasoned that he was little past his meridian in years; that a man's will, if favoured by Circ.u.mstance, can do much of razing and rebuilding with the inner life. No, he concluded with healthy disgust, he was not that most sickening tribute to lechery, an old vein yawning for transfusion. He was merely a man ready to begin life again before it was too late. This girl had not the beauty he had demanded as his prerogative in woman, but she had individuality, brains, and all womanliness. Her shyness and pride were her greatest charms to him: he would be the first and the last to get behind the barriers. Such women loved only once.

She turned her head suddenly and met his eyes.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked.

"I have been wondering what that huge pile is behind you."

"That is a wood-rat's nest."

"And you are not afraid of him? Extraordinary woman!"

"He is much more afraid of me. I am very afraid of house-rats."

"And you sit here often? You are not afraid of snakes?"

"There are none in these woods. They always retreat before people--civilisation. Everyone drives through here, but scarcely anyone goes through the back woods; the roads are so bad--"

"Hush!"

The sound of wheels, faint for a moment, grew more distinct; with it mingled the sound of voices. A heavy char-a-banc rolled by, and the words of Tiny and Ila came distinctly to the two in hiding.

"They will have a long and fruitless search," said Trennahan, contentedly. "We are going to stay here and become acquainted."

And they did not move for two hours. For a time Trennahan made her talk, learning almost all there was to know. He even drew forth the tattered shreds of the caballero, who had been little more than a matter of garments, and a confession of her long and pa.s.sionate desire to be beautiful. The story ended with the lonely and terrible surrender of her religion. He was profoundly interested. Once or twice he was appalled.

Did he take this woman, he must a.s.sume responsibility for every part of her. She was so wholly without egoism that she would give herself up without reservation and expect him to guide her. That would be all very well with the ordinary woman; but with a nature of high ideals, and possibly of transcendent pa.s.sions,--was he equal to the task? But in his present mood the prospect fascinated him. One of her slim hands, dark but pretty, lay near his own. He wanted to take it in his, but did not: he wished to keep her unself-conscious as long as possible.

He tried to talk to her about himself, but found it hard to avoid the claptrap with which a man of the world attempts to awaken interest in woman. He had always done it artistically: the weariness, the satiety, the mental grasp of nothingness,--these had been ever revealed in flashing glimpses, in unwilling allusiveness; the hope that he had finally stumbled upon the one woman sketched with a brush dipped in mist. But feeling himself sincere for the first time in incalculable years, he dismissed the tempered weapons of his victories with contempt, and, not knowing what others to subst.i.tute, talked of his boyhood and college days. As a result, he felt younger than ever, and closer to the girl who was part of the mystery that had taken him to her heart.

XXVIII

A woman's heart may be said to resemble a subterranean cavern to which communication is had by means of a trap-door. How the lover enters this guarded precinct depends upon the lover and the woman. Sometimes the trap-door is jerked open, and he is hurled down with no by your leave, gobbled up, willing or unwilling. Sometimes there is a desperate fight just over the trap-door, in which he does sometimes, but not always, come off victor. At other times he suddenly finds himself rambling through those labyrinthine pa.s.sages, to his surprise and that of the woman, who, however, perceives him instantly. There is no such fallacy as that a girl turns in terror or in any other sentiment from the knowledge of this dweller below the trap-door. A woman of experience may, after that first glimpse: she may, in fact, bolt the trap-door yet more tightly and sit herself upon it. But a girl uses it as a frame for her face and watches every movement of the occupant with neither fear nor foreboding until occasion comes,--hanging the halls with the tapestry of dreams, fitting the end of each rose-hued scented gallery with the magic mirror of the future.

Magdalena, at the end of that morning in the woods, was quite aware that she was in love. She wondered why she had not thought of it before, and concluded that in the prelude she had been merely fascinated by the first enthralling man she had known. The trap-door of her heart was not jealously guarded; nevertheless, it was not yawning for an occupant.

Just how and when Trennahan slipped in, she could not have told, but there he certainly was, and there he would stay so long as life was in her.

He went home with her to luncheon, and she longed to have him go, that she might be alone with the thought of him. He left early in the afternoon, and she locked herself in her room and sat for hours staring into the tree-tops swimming in their blue haze. She was not in the least terrified at the beginnings of tumult within her; she rather welcomed them as the birthright of her s.e.x. In this first stage, she hardly cared whether Trennahan were in love with her or not, having none of the instinct of the huntress and her imagination being a slow one. It was enough that she should see him for many hours alone during this dreamy exquisite summer, that she should look constantly into the cold eyes that had their own power to thrill. That he was not the orthodox lover in appearance, manner, nor age pleased her the better. She was not like other girls, therefore it was fitting that she should find her mate among the odd ones of earth. That there might be others like him in the great world whence he came, that he might have loved and been loved by women of the world, never occurred to her. She was content, having found her other part, and wove no histories of the past nor future.