The Californians Part 36

This, then, was Spanish town. Magdalena had dreamed of it often, picturing it a blaze of colour, a moving picture-book, crowded with beautiful girls and handsome gaily attired men. There was not a young person to be seen. Nothing could be less picturesque, more sordid.

An old crone with a face like a withered apple followed her, whining for a nickel. The others stared at her with the stolid dignity of their race. She gave the woman the nickel and interrupted the invocation.

"Are there no girls here?"

"Girl come from other place sometimes, then have the baby and is old queeck. Si the senorita stay here, she have the baby and grow old too."

Magdalena hastened on. She neither knew nor cared where she went, but after a time struck down the slope again, judging that she was beyond the centre of social activity. Once, at the corner of two sharply converging streets, she pa.s.sed a house whose lighted windows were open, for the wind had gone and the night was hot. But she only stood for a moment. Fat Mexican women half dressed were lolling about, and the front door was open to many men. The women were not as evil appearing as the French dregs of Dupont Street, possibly because they wore flowers in their hair and looked more frankly sensual and less commercial. Again Magdalena felt an almost irresistible attraction, but hastened on. Once, in a dark street, she was flung against a wall and her pockets turned inside out, but she made no protest and was allowed to go without further indignity. It was a woman who had robbed her, and Magdalena, having come off with the mere loss of seventy cents, indulged in a pleasurable thrill of adventure.

After a time she found herself climbing a steep hill and felt a sudden desire to reach the top, and that the climb should be a long one. Here and there she pa.s.sed a tumble-down house, but the rest of the hill under the brilliant moon showed bare and brown. From the other side came the sound of lapping waves, and she knew herself to be on Telegraph Hill.

She reached the top and sat down on the ground. The clouds had flown with the wind, and the moon revealed the quiet bay and the black ma.s.ses of cliff and hill and mountain beyond. An occasional gust made a loud clatter in the rigging of the many crafts below, or an angry shout arose from the water-front; but otherwise the night from the summit of Telegraph Hill was peaceful and most beautiful.

Magdalena, who loved Nature and had yielded to its influence many times in her life, made a deliberate attempt to absorb the peace and beauty of the night into her own scarred and troubled soul. But she gave up the attempt in a few moments. The fierceness of her mood had pa.s.sed, and some of its blackness, but she was still bitter and hopeless. There was nothing to do but to face the problem of her life, and thinking was easier on these alt.i.tudes, where the air was fresh and salt, and the stars seemed close, than in the ill-ventilated prison which she called her home. She determined to remain until morning and to restore her brain to its normal condition, if possible.

She looked back upon the mental and moral inertia into which she had sunken during the past month, and its sequence of morbid and criminal instinct, with terror and horror. Before an hour had pa.s.sed, she had herself in hand once more, for she had deliberately forced herself to face her own soul, and she believed that she could put her character together again and accept the future without further luxation or debility of will. But she made no attempt to close her eyes to the ugly fact that in that future of interminable years there were only two small stars of hope; and it required an effort of imagination to drag them above the horizon,--her father's death and the return of Trennahan. Her father belonged to a long-lived race, and Trennahan during an absence of three years and some months had given no indication that he remembered her existence; moreover, he had gone into exile for love of another woman. But without the faint white twinkle of those stars the future would be not a blank, but an infernal abyss, which Magdalena, without the society of her kind, without talent, without occupation, without religion, refused to contemplate. And she had all a woman's capacity for fooling herself with the will-o'-the-wisps of the imagination.

Her eyes had been clear and her logic relentless so long as the man had been within sight and touch, but his absence, combined with his abrupt and final eviction from the toils of the other woman, had lifted him from practical life into the realms of the imagination; in other words, he was no longer so much a man as an ideal,--a soul whom her own soul was free to await or pursue in that inner world where realities are bodiless and forgotten.

She longed for the old comfortable irresponsible sensuous embrace of the Church of Rome. Its lightest touch was hypnotic, its very breath a balm.

Why, she wondered bitterly, could she not have been given less brains, or more? If her talents had been genuine, she would have had that magnificent independence of religion and worldly conditions which only art--and love--can create in the human mind. And if her logic had been a trifle less relentless, she would have had hours of ecstatic forgetfulness these last long years. Of course there was always the Almighty Power to whom one could pray, and who certainly could grant prayer if He chose. But it seemed to her an impertinence for ordinary insignificant beings to importune this remote and absolute G.o.d, so forbidding in His monotonous mystery. She had all the arrogance of intellect despite her remorseless limitations. Had she been granted the gift of creation,--in other words, a spark from the great creative force commanding the Universe,--she felt that she should have no hesitation in begging for further favours; a certain sense of kinship, of being in higher favour than the great congested ma.s.s, would have given her a.s.surance and faith. She sighed for a new religion, for that prophet who must one day arise and rid the world of the abomination of dogma and sect, giving to the groping millions a simple belief, in which the fussiness, sentimentality, and cruelty of present religions would have no place.

She sat there until the dawn came, grey and appalling at first, then touching the bay and the dark heights with delicate colour, as the sun struggled out of the embrace of the ocean. She was obliged to walk home, as she had no money, and the long toilsome tramp in the wake of the eventful night gave her appet.i.te and many hours of rest. When she awoke she felt that, whatever came, the most formidable crisis of her life had been safely pa.s.sed.

x.x.xI

In the autumn she found an occupation which gave her a temporary place in the scheme of things. Mrs. Yorba fell ill. The sudden and complete change from a personage to a n.o.body, the long confinement,--she rarely put her foot outside the house lest her shabby clothes be remarked upon,--and a four years' course of sensational novels induced a nervous distemper. Magdalena, hearing the sound of pacing footsteps in the hall one night, arose and opened her door. Mrs. Yorba, arrayed in a red flannel nightgown and a frilled nightcap, was walking rapidly up and down, talking to herself. Magdalena persuaded her to go to bed, and the next morning sent for the doctor. He prescribed an immediate change of scene,--travel, if possible; if not, the country. Magdalena undertook to carry the message to her father.

Knowing that a knock would evoke no response, she opened the door of the study and went in. Don Roberto, dirty, unshaven, looked like a wild man in a mountain cave; but his eyes were steady enough. His table and the floor about his chair were piled high with ledgers. On everything else the dust was inches thick, and the spiders had spun a shimmering web across one side of the room. It hung from the gas-rod like a piece of fairy tapestry, woven with red and gold here and there, where the sun's rays, scattering through the slats of the inside blinds, caressed it. On the mantel-piece, supported on its broken staff, was the big American flag which had floated above the house of Don Roberto Yorba for thirty years. It had been carefully washed, and although broken bits of spiders' weavings hung to its edges, there were none on its surface.

Magdalena felt no desire to kiss her parent, although it was the first time for several years that she had stood in his presence. She disliked and despised him, and thought no less of herself for her repudiation. If she, a young, inexperienced, and lonely woman, could fight and conquer morbid fancies, why not he, who had been counted one of the keenest financial brains of the country? She felt thoroughly ashamed of her progenitor as she stood looking down upon the little dirty shrunken shambling figure.

"Well?" growled Don Roberto, "what you want?"

"My mother is very ill. This life is killing her. The doctor says she must have a change."

"All go to die sometime. What difference now or bimeby?"

"Will you let us go to Santa Barbara to visit aunt?"

"Si she send you the moneys, I no care what you do with it. I no give you one cents."

"Very well; I shall ask my aunt."

But Mrs. Yorba declared that she would not go to Santa Barbara: she detested her sister-in-law, and would accept no favours from her, nor be forced into her society. There was nothing for Magdalena to do but to nurse her, and a most exasperating invalid she proved. Nevertheless, Magdalena, although a part of her duties was to read her mother's favourite literature aloud by the hour, was almost grateful for the change. She seldom found time for her daily walk, but at least she had little time to think.

When Mrs. Montgomery, Mrs. Geary, and Mrs. Brannan returned to town, they came frequently to sit with the invalid, and cheered her somewhat with talk of the coming summer, when they should take her down to their own houses in Menlo.

"And I shall go," said Mrs. Yorba to her daughter, "if I _haven't_ a decent rag to my back. They think nothing of that; I was a fool not to go before. And I'm going to get well--against the time when that old fiend dies. There! I never thought I'd say that, for I was brought up in the fear of the Lord, but saying it is little different from thinking it, after all. I've been thinking it for two solid years. California's not New England, anyhow. When I do get the money, won't I scatter it!

I've been economical all my life, for I had it in my blood, and it was my duty, as your father wished it; as long as he did his duty by me, I was more than willing to do mine by him: he can't deny it. But we all know what reaction means, and it has set in in me. When I am my own mistress, I'll give three b.a.l.l.s and two dinners a week. I'll have the finest carriages and horses ever seen in California. I'll have four trousseaux a year from Paris, and I'll go to New York myself and buy the most magnificent diamonds Tiffany's got. I'll refurnish this house and Fair Oaks. The walls shall be frescoed, and every stick in them will come from New York--"

She paused abruptly, springing to her elbow. The door was ajar. Through the aperture came a long low chuckle. Magdalena jumped to her feet, flung the door to, and locked it.

"Do you think he's gone mad at last?" gasped Mrs. Yorba.

"It sounded like it."

"For Heaven's sake, don't leave me for a minute. You must sleep here at night. There's a cot somewhere,--in the attic, I think, if the rats haven't eaten it. What a life to live!" She fell to weeping, as she frequently did in these days. Suddenly her face brightened. "If he should make a will disinheriting us, we could easily enough prove him insane after the way he's been acting these four years. Thank Heaven, this is California! General William could break any will that ever was made."

Mrs. Yorba took an opiate and fell asleep. Magdalena went out, locking the door behind her. She determined to ascertain at once if her father was insane. If he was, he should be confined in two of the upper rooms with a keeper. The world should know nothing of his misfortune; but it would be absurd for herself and her mother to live in a constant state of physical terror.

As she descended the stair, the door of her father's study opened abruptly and a man shot out as if violently propelled from behind. The door was slammed to immediately.

Magdalena ran downstairs and toward the stranger. He was a tall man greatly bowed, and as she approached him she saw that he was old and wore a long white beard. His head was large and suggested n.o.bility and intellect; but the eyes were bleared, the flesh of the face loose and discoloured, and he was shabby and dirty. He looked like a fallen king.

"Was--was--my father rude?" asked Magdalena. "He is not very well.

Perhaps I can do something." The man appealed to her strangely, and she had a dollar in her purse.

"We were great friends in our boyhood and youth," replied the stranger.

He spoke with an accent, but his English was unbroken. "And he has been my guest many times. There was a time when he thought it an honour to know me. When the Americans came, everything changed. My career closed, for I would have nothing to do with them. I had held the highest offices under the Mexican government. I could not stoop to hold office under the usurpers--many of whom I would not have employed as servants. Then they took my lands,--everything. But I am detaining you, senorita."

"Oh, no, no, indeed! How could they take your lands? Who are you? Tell me everything."

"They 'squatted,' many of them, almost up to my door. The only law we could appeal to was American law, and California was a h.e.l.l of sharpers at that time. It is bad enough now, but it was worse then. And then came the great drought of '64, in which we lost all our cattle. We never recovered from that, for we mortgaged our lands to the Americans to get money to live on with,--everything was three prices then; and when the time came they foreclosed, for we never had the money to pay. And we were great gamblers, senorita, and so were the Americans--and far better ones than we were. We were only made for pleasure and plenty, to live the life of grandees who had little use for money, and scorned it. When the time came for us to pit ourselves against sordid people, we crumbled like old bones. Your father has been very fortunate: he had a clever man to teach him to circ.u.mvent other clever men. Years ago, when I was prouder than I am now, I put my pride in my pocket and wrote, asking him for help. I wanted a small sum to pay off the mortgage on a ranchita, upon which I might have ended my days in peace, for it was very productive. He never answered. To-day I came to ask him for money to buy bread. He roared at me like a bull, and vowed he'd blow my brains out if I ever entered his house again. He looks like--" He paused abruptly.

There was much of the old-time courtliness in his manner.

"I--I--am so sorry. And I have little money to spend. If you will leave me your name and address, I will send you something on the first of each month; and if--if ever I have more I will take care of you--of all of you. I suppose there are many others."

"There are indeed, senorita."

"Some day I will ask you for all of their names. And yours?"

He gave it. It was a name famous in the brief history of old California,--a name which had stood for splendid hospitality, for state and magnificence, for power and glory. It was the name of one of her beloved heroes. She had written his youthful romance; she had described the picturesque fervour of his wooing, the pomp of his wedding; of all those heroes he had been the best beloved, the most splendid. And she met him,--a broken-down old drunkard, in the dusty gloom of an old maniac's wooden "palace," in the fashionable quarter of a city which had never heard his name.

"O G.o.d!" she said. "O G.o.d!" and she was glad that she had burned her ma.n.u.scripts. She took the dollar from her pocket and gave it to him.

He accepted it eagerly. "G.o.d bless you, senorita!" he said. "And you can always hear of me at the Yosemite Saloon, Castroville."

He pa.s.sed out, neglecting to shut the door behind him, but Magdalena did not notice the unaccustomed rift of light. She sank into a chair against the wall and wept heavily. They were the last tears she shed over her fallen idols. When the wave had broken, she reflected that she was glad to know of the distress of her people; it should be her lifework to help them. When she came to her own she would buy them each a little ranch and see that they pa.s.sed the rest of their lives in comfort.

She leaned forward and listened intently. Loud mutterings proceeded from her father's room. She wondered if there was a policeman in the street.

She and her mother were very unprotected. The only man in the house besides her father was the Chinaman, and Chinamen are as indifferent to the lives of others as to their own. Don Roberto had ordered the telephone and messenger call removed years ago. The sounds rose to a higher register. Magdalena, straining her ears, heard, delivered in rapid defiant tones, the familiar national cry, "Hip-hip-hooray!"

She went over softly, and put her ear to the thick door. The tones of the old man's voice were broken, as if by muscular exertion, and accompanied by a curious b.u.mping. Magdalena understood in a moment. He was striding up and down the room, waving the American flag, and shouting, "Hip-hip-hooray! Hip-hip-_hooray_! hoo_ray_! hoo_ray_!