I
When Thorpe left New Orleans his plan was to return on the next steamer
but one, then to go North to New York or Boston,--he had friends in both
cities,--and amuse himself in new fields until he was permitted to
return to California. He sought distraction, for although he was
reasonably sure of Nina's power to conquer herself, and intended to
marry her whether she did or not, separation and time deepened his
passion for her, and he only found peace of mind in filling his hours to
the brim. It is doubtful if he would have consented to remain the year
out were it not that he wished to admire her as much as she longed to
have him. Her pride and confidence in herself would invigorate the
happiness of both.
He left orders in New Orleans to have his mail held over until his
return. Harold was very ill on the voyage. Almost immediately upon
landing in Havana his health began to mend, and he declared himself
ready to kiss the soil, as he could not bestow a similar mark of favour
on the climate. He announced his intention of sending for his affianced
and spending the rest of his life in the West Indies. Thorpe did not
take him too seriously, but seeing that there was no prospect of getting
away for some time, and believing that Cuba would offer himself
entertainment for several months, he sent to New Orleans for his mail,
and wrote to Nina announcing his present plans. Whether the letters
never left the Havana post-office, or whether the mail sack was lost
overboard later, or ignored in the excitement at New Orleans, no one
will ever know. Nor does it matter; they were never received, and that
is all that concerns this tale. Thorpe and Harold started inland
immediately, and finally determined to go to Jamaica and San Domingo
before returning to Havana. He knew it was worse than folly to trust
letters to the wretched inland post-offices, and he had told Nina in his
letter of explanation not to expect another for some time. He should be
in New Orleans on the first of May, and, meanwhile, he kept a diary for
her future entertainment.
While exploring the mountain forests in the central part of Hayti, their
guide was murdered, and they were two months finding their way to San
Domingo. They were months of excitement, adventure, and more than one
hair-breadth escape. Thorpe would have been in his element had it been
possible to communicate with Nina, and could he have been sure of
getting out of the West Indies before the rainy season began. They came
unexpectedly upon San Domingo; and he learned that war had broken out in
the United States during April. They made what haste they could to
Havana, Harold as eager to return to civilisation as his brother; for
vermin and land-crabs had tempered his enthusiasm, and he had acquired a
violent dislike for the negro. At Havana, Thorpe found no letters
awaiting him. He also learned from an American resident that postal
communication had ceased between the North and South on May 31st. He
wondered blankly at his stupidity in not going North while there was
yet time, but like many others, he had heard so much talk of war that he
had ceased to believe in its certainty. He could only hope that his
letter had reached Nina, but knew that it was more than doubtful. The
Southern ports were in a state of blockade. He and his brother ran it in
a little boat rowed by themselves. In New Orleans he read the packet of
letters from Nina, that awaited him.
II
The great change in Nina Randolph's appearance and manner induced no
small amount of gossip in San Francisco. Women are quick to scent the
sin that society loves best to discuss, and there were many that
suspected the truth: her long retirement had prepared them for an
interesting sequel. Nina guessed that she was dividing with the war the
honours of attention in a small but law-making circle, but was quite
indifferent. She rarely went down to the parlour when people called, but
sat in her bedroom staring out at the bay; the Lester house was on the
summit of Clay Street hill.
Her father was deeply anxious, full of gloomy forebodings. He believed
Thorpe to be dead, and shook with horror when he thought of what the
consequences might be.
"Wouldn't you like a change?" he asked her one day. "How would you like
go to New York? Molly and Mrs. Lester could go with you."
Nina shook her head, colouring faintly.
"I see. You are afraid of missing Thorpe. I wish there were some way of
finding out--"
She turned to him with eager eyes. "Would you go, papa,--to New Orleans?
I haven't dared to ask it. Go and see what is the matter."
"My child, I could not get there. The ports are blockaded; if I
attempted the folly of getting to New Orleans by land, I should probably
be shot as a spy. It is for those reasons that he will have great
difficulty in getting here, as he did not have the forethought to leave
the South in time."
To this Nina made no reply, and as she would not talk to him, he left
her.
That evening Miss Shropshire came into Nina's room, and spoke twice
before she was answered. The room was dark.
"Look here, Nina!" she said peremptorily. "You've got to brace up.
People are talking. I know it!"
"Are they? What does it matter? I have no more use for them. I may as
well tell you I have come to the conclusion that Dudley Thorpe ceased to
care for me, and that is the reason of his silence. He has gone back to
England."
"I don't believe it. You're growing morbid. Women frequently do after
that sort of experience. I remember Beatrix sat in one position for
nearly a month, staring at the floor: wouldn't even brush her teeth. You
have too much brains for that sort of thing."
"I believe it. I have made up my mind. He is in England. He wrote me
once that if it were not that I had asked him not to leave the country,
he would run over, he was so tired of America. He went, and stayed."
"Well, then, go out in the world and flirt as you used to. Don't let any
man bowl you over like this; and, for Heaven's sake, don't mope any
more!"
"I hate the thought of every man in San Francisco. When I knew them, I
was an entirely different woman. I couldn't adapt myself to them if I
wanted to--which I don't."
"But there are always new ones--"
"Oh, don't! Haven't you imagination enough to guess what this last year
has made of me? If I got as far as a ball-room I'd stand up in the
middle of the floor and shriek out that since I was there last my heart
had lived and been broken, that I had lost a husband and buried a
baby--"
"Then, for Heaven's sake, stay at home! But I think," with deep meaning,
"that you had better try a change of some sort, Nina. If you don't want
to risk going East, why not visit some of the Spanish people in Southern
California?"
"I shall stay here."
It was during the next night that Nina left her bed suddenly, flung
herself into a chair, and pressed her elbows hard upon her knees. She
had barely slept for three nights. Her nerves were in a highly irritable
state. If any one had entered she would not have been able to control
her temper. Black depression possessed her; the irritability of her
nerves alternated with the sensation of dropping through space; and her
relaxed body cried for stimulant.
She twisted her hands together, her face convulsed. "Why should I
fight?" she argued aloud. "In that, at least, I should find temporary
oblivion. And what else have I left? Down deep, ever since I got his
last letter, I have known that I should never see him again. It is my
destiny: that is the beginning and the end of it. This is the second
time I have wanted it since the baby died. I _beat_ it out of me the
first time. I hoped--hoped--and if he were here I should win. If I could
be happy, and go away with him, it would not come again: I know--_I
know_. He could have got me some word by this. He is not dead. There is
only one other explanation. Men are all alike, they say. Why should I
struggle? For what? What have I to live for? I am the most wretched
woman on earth."
But she did struggle. The dawn found her sitting there still, her
muscles almost rigid. Her love for Thorpe had undergone no change; it
took the fight into its own hands. And it seemed to her that she could
hear her soul beg for its rights; its voice rose above the persistent
clamour of her body.
She went to bed and slept for a few hours; but when she awoke the desire
in her nerves was madder than ever. Every part of her cried out for
stimulant. She had no love for the taste of liquor; the demand came from
her nerve-centres. But still she fought on, materialising the monster,
fancying that she held it by the throat, that she cut its limbs off, its
heart out; but it shook itself together with magnificent vitality, and
laughed in her face.
Days passed. The clamour in her body strove to raise itself above the
despairing cry in her soul. But still, mechanically, without hope, she
lifted her ear to the higher cry, knowing that if she fell now she
should never rise again in her earthly life, nor speak with Dudley
Thorpe, should he, perhaps, return.
She invoked the image of her baby, the glory of the few days she had
known it. But a bitter tide of resentment overwhelmed the memory of that
brief exaltation. If she was to be saved, why had not the baby been
spared? Those who shared her secret had attempted to console her by
assuring her that its death was a mercy for all concerned. She had not
answered them; but her grief was cut with contempt for their lack of
vision. The baby might have cost her her social position, but it would
have stood between her soul and perdition. It had been taken--by One who
was supposed to know the needs of all His creatures. Therefore it was
only reasonable to assume that He wished her to be destroyed.
She thought of nothing else, but cunningly pretended to be absorbed in
her books.
There came a night when her nerves shrieked until her brain surged with
the din of them, and her hands clutched at the air, her eyes hardened
and expanded with greed, her lips were forced apart by her panting
breath. She jerked the stopper out of a bottle of cologne and swallowed
a quarter of the contents, then flung her wraps about her, stole
downstairs and out of the house, found a carriage, and was driven to
South Park.
III
Two weeks later she sat huddled over the fire in the library. Her face
was yellow; her eyes were sunken and dull; her hands trembled. She
looked thirty-five.
In her lap lay a letter from Dudley Thorpe. He and his brother, at the
risk of their lives, had got through the lines and reached New York. The
excitement, fatigue, and exposure had nearly killed Harold, who was in a
hospital in a precarious condition. Thorpe could not leave him. He
implored her to come on to New York at once; and he had never written a
more tender and passionate letter.
Cochrane opened the door, and announced that Dr. Clough had called.
"Tell him to come here," she said.
Dr. Clough wore his usual jaunty air, and he made no comment on her
appearance; he had come straight from Miss Shropshire.
"Sit down," said Nina, curtly, interrupting his demonstrations. "You
come at the right moment. I was about to send for you."
"My dear cousin Nina! I hope there is no--"
"Let me talk, please. Do you wish to marry me?"
Clough caught his breath. He flushed, despite his nerve. "Of course I
do," he stammered. "What a question! Certainly there never was a woman
so original. It is like you to settle matters in your own way."
"Don't delude yourself for a moment that I even like you. Of all the men
I have ever known, the sort of person I take you to be has my most
unmitigated contempt. It is for that reason I marry you. I must marry
some one at once to keep myself from ruining the life of Dudley Thorpe.
I choose you, because, in the first place, I am so vile a thing that no
punishment is severe enough for me; and, in the second, Fate has
acquitted herself so brilliantly in regard to my humble self that I feel
a certain satisfaction in giving her all she wants."
"My dear Nina, you are morbid." He spoke pleasantly, but he turned away
his eyes.
"Possibly; it would be somewhat remarkable if I were not. Do you still
wish to marry me?"
"Certainly. I do not take your rather uncomplimentary utterances
seriously. In your present frame of mind--"
"It is the only frame of mind I shall ever be in. You will have an
unpleasant domestic life; but you will have all the money you want.
Don't flatter yourself for a moment that you will either control or cure
me. You will be no more in my house than a well-paid butler--after my
father has been induced to accept you, which will not be in a hurry.
Meanwhile, you will probably beat me: you are quite capable of it; but
you may save yourself the exertion."
"I shall not beat you, Nina, dear." He spoke softly, with an assumption
of masculine indulgence; but his small pointed teeth moved suddenly
apart.
"You will understand, of course, that this engagement must not get to my
father's ears. He would lock me up before he would permit me to marry
you. He has all the contempt of the gentleman for the cad, of the real
man for the bundle of petty imitations: and you are his pet aversion. On
the tenth, he is obliged to go to San Jose to attend an important
law-suit. He will be detained not less than three days. We shall marry
on the eleventh--at Mrs. Lester's. I shall not tell my mother, for I
will not give her the pleasure of conspiring against my father. I
suppose that I shall break my father's heart; but I don't know that I
care. He might have saved me, if he had been stronger, and I am no
longer capable of loving any one--"
"Suppose Mr. Thorpe should come out here after you, anyhow, married or
not."
"He will do nothing of the sort. One reason you would be incapable of
understanding, should I attempt to explain; the other is, that he will
no longer want me after I have been the wife of a person of your sort."
"My word, Nina, you are rather rough on a fellow; but give me a kiss,
and I'll overlook it."
She lifted her face, and let him kiss her, then struck him so violent a
blow that the little man staggered.
"Now go," she said, "and don't let me see you again until the eleventh.
If you have anything to say, you can write it to Molly Shropshire."
When he had gone, she drew her hand across her lips, then looked closely
at it as if expecting to see a stain. Then she shuddered, and huddled
closer to the fire, and in a few moments threw Dudley Thorpe's letter on
the coals.
IV
"Well, some women _are_ remarkable!" exclaimed Miss Shropshire to her
sister, Mrs. Lester. "The idea of her having a wedding dress,--white
satin, train, and all. She even fussed over at least twenty pairs of
slippers, and I was almost afraid to bring home that bridal veil for
fear it wouldn't suit her."
"I suppose she thinks that weddings, white satin ones, at least, only
come once in a lifetime." Mrs. Lester was a tired little woman, quite
subservient to her strong-minded sister. The wedding was to take
place in her back parlour at an hour when Mr. Lester, occupied and
unsuspecting, would be away from home. She did not approve of the plot;
but her opinion, much less her consent, had not been asked.
"I'd like to thoroughly understand Nina Randolph, just for once," said
Miss Shropshire, meditatively. "It would be interesting, to say the
least."
The night before the wedding she went into Nina's room, and found her
standing before the mirror arrayed in her bridal finery,--veil, gloves,
slippers, all. She had regained her natural hues; but her eyes were
still sunken, her face pinched and hard. She was almost plain.
"Nina! Why on earth have you put on those things? Don't you know it's
bad luck?"
Nina laughed.
Miss Shropshire exclaimed, "_Umburufen!_" and rapped loudly three times
on the top of a chair. "There! I hope that will do some good. I know
what you are thinking--you are so unlucky, anyhow. But why tempt fate?"
She hesitated a moment. "It is not too late. Put it off for six months,
and then see how you feel about it. You are morbid now. You don't know
what changes time might--"
"No earthly power can prevent me from marrying Richard Clough
to-morrow."
"Very well, I shall stand by you, of course. That goes without saying.
But I believe you are making a terrible mistake. I would rather you
married almost any one else. There are several gentlemen that would be
ready and willing."
"I don't wish to marry a gentleman."
* * * * *
The next afternoon Nina, Mrs. Lester, and Miss Shropshire were in the
back parlour awaiting the arrival of Clough, his best man, and the
clergyman, when there was a sudden furious pull at the bell of the front
door. Nina sprang to her feet. For the first time in many weeks
animation sprang to her eyes.
"It is my father!" she said. "Close the folding-doors. Molly, I rely on
you! Do you understand? Send him away, and as quickly as possible. Tell
a servant to watch outside, and take the others round the back way."
Before she had finished speaking, Mr. Randolph's voice was heard in the
hall, demanding his daughter. The servants had been given orders to deny
the fact of Miss Randolph's presence in the house to any one but Dr.
Clough. Nevertheless, Mr. Randolph brushed past the woman that opened
the door, and entered the front parlour. Miss Shropshire joined him at
once. Every word of the duologue that followed could be heard on the
other side of the folding-doors.
"Why, Mr. Randolph!" exclaimed Miss Shropshire, easily. "Why this
unexpected honour? I thought you were in San Jose."
"Is my daughter here?" He was evidently much excited, and endeavouring
to control himself.
"Nina? No. Why? Is she not at Redwoods? She was to go down yesterday."
"She is not at Redwoods. I have received private and reliable
information that she is to marry Richard Clough this afternoon, and I
have reason to think that she is in this house."
"What? Nina going to marry that horrid little man? I don't believe it!"
Miss Shropshire was a woman of thorough and uncompromising methods.
"Is Nina in this house or not?"
"Mr. Randolph! Of course she is not. I would have nothing to do with
such an affair."
Mr. Randolph swallowed a curse, and strode up and down the room several
times. Then he paused and confronted her once more.
"Molly," he said, "I appeal to you as a woman. If you have any
friendship for Nina, give her up to me and save her from ruin, or tell
me where she is. It is not yet too late. I will risk everything and take
her abroad. She is ruining her own life and Thorpe's and mine by a
mistaken sense of duty to him, and contempt for herself: I know her so
well that I feel sure that is the reason for this act she contemplates
to-day. I will take her to Thorpe. He could reclaim her. Clough--you can
perhaps imagine how Clough will treat her! Picture the life she must
lead with that man, and give her up to me. And, if you have any heart,
keep my own from breaking. She is all that I have. You know what my home
is; I have lived in hell for twenty-four years for this girl's sake. I
have kept a monster in my house that Nina should have no family scandal
to reproach me with. And all to what purpose if she marries a cad and a
brute? I would have endured the torments of the past twenty-five years,
multiplied tenfold, to have secured her happiness. If she marries
Richard Clough, it will kill me."
"She is not here," replied Miss Shropshire.
Mr. Randolph trembled from head to foot. "My God!" he cried, "have you
women no heart? Are all women, I wonder, like those I have known? My
wife, a demon who nursed her baby on brandy! My daughter, repaying the
devotion of years with blackest ingratitude! And you--" He fell, rather
than dropped to his knees, and caught her dress in his hands.
"Molly," he prayed, "give her to me. Save her from becoming one of the
outcast of the earth. For that is what this marriage will mean to her."
Miss Shropshire set her teeth. "Nina is not here," she said.
Mr. Randolph stumbled to his feet, and rushed from the house. He walked
rapidly down the hill toward Old Trinity in Pine Street, the church Nina
attended, his dislocated mind endeavouring to suggest that he wait for
her there. His agitation was so marked that several people turned and
looked after him in surprise. He reached the church. A carriage
approached, passed. Its occupants were Richard Clough, a well-known
gambler named Bell, and a man who carried the unmistakable cut of a
parson.
Mr. Randolph rushed to the middle of the street, ordering the driver
to stop. The window of the carriage was open. He caught Clough by the
shoulder.
"Are you on your way to marry my daughter?" he demanded.
"My dear Uncle James," replied the young man, airily, "you are all
wrong. I am on my way to marry--it is true; but the unfortunate lady
is Miss McCullum."
Mr. Randolph turned to the gambler, and implored him, as a man of
honour, to tell him the truth.
Bell replied: "As a man of honour, I dare not."
Mr. Randolph appealed to the clergyman, but met only a solemn scowl, and
mechanically dropped back, with the sensation of having lost the
good-will of all men. A moment later the carriage was rattling up the
street at double speed, and he cursed his stupidity in not forcing an
entrance, or hanging on behind. There was no other carriage in sight.
V
The days were very long to Dudley Thorpe. The invalid recovered slowly,
and demanded much of his time. Before an answer to his letter could be
expected, Harold was sufficiently mended to be removed to the house
of a friend on Long Island. He declared his intention of sailing for
California as soon as he could obtain the doctor's permission to travel.
The lady to whom he was betrothed came over from England and married
him; and Thorpe had little to do but to think.
He bitterly reproached himself that he had asked Nina to come to New
York, instead of trusting to his brother's recuperative powers, and
starting at once for California. He dared not go now, lest he pass her.
But he was beset by doubts, and some of them were nightmares. She would
come if her child had lived, and she had weathered her year. If she had
not! He knew what she had suffered during that year, would have guessed
without the aid of the few letters she had written after letters from
him had ceased to reach California. Exposure and shame might have come
to her since. If he could have been sure that she believed in him, he
would have feared little; but it was not to be expected that she had
received a letter he had sent her from the West Indies. The telegraph
has averted many a tragedy, but there was none across the United States.
With all his will and health and wealth and love, he had been as
powerless to help her in the time of her great trouble, was as powerless
to help her now, as if he were in the bottom of a Haytian swamp. All
that was fine in him, and there was much, was thoroughly roused. He not
only longed for her and for his child, but he vowed to devote the rest
of his life to her happiness. It seemed to him incredible that he could
have committed such a series of mistakes; that no man who loved a woman
with the passion of his life had ever so consistently done the wrong
thing. But mistakes are not isolated acts, to be plucked out of life and
viewed as an art student views his first model, in which he finds
only a few bald lines; even when the pressure of many details is not
overwhelming it often clouds the mental vision. Years after, Thorpe
accepted the fact that the great links in that year's chain of events
were connected by hundreds of tiny links as true of form; but not then.
One day a budget of mail got through the lines, and in it was a letter
for him. It was from Nina, and was dated shortly after the last he had
found awaiting him when he arrived from Cuba.
I don't know where you are, if you will ever get this; but I must
write to you. The baby is dead. It was a little girl. It is buried
in the forest.
NINA.
The steamer by which he expected her arrived a few days later. It
brought him the following letter:
I was married yesterday. My name is Mrs. Richard Clough. My husband
is the son of a Haworth cobbler. I received your letter.
NINA RANDOLPH CLOUGH.
VI
Mr. and Mrs. Harold Thorpe sailed on the next steamer for California.
Dudley Thorpe worked his way South, offered his services to the
Confederacy, fought bitterly and brilliantly, when he was not in
hospital with a bullet in him, rose to the rank of colonel, and made
a name for himself which travelled to California and to England. At
the close of the war, he returned home and entered Parliament. He
became known as a hard worker, a member of almost bitter honesty,
and a forcible and magnetic speaker. Socially he was, first, a lion,
afterward, a steady favourite. Altogether he was regarded as a success
by his fellow-men.
It was some years before he heard from his brother. Harold was delighted
with the infinite variety of California; his health was remarkably good;
and he had settled for life. Only his first letter contained a reference
to Nina Randolph. She had lived in Napa for a time, then gone to
Redwoods. She never came to San Francisco; therefore he had been unable
to call, had never even seen her. All Thorpe's other friends had been
very kind to himself and his wife.
Thorpe long before this had understood. The rage and disgust of the
first months had worn themselves out, given place to his intimate
knowledge of her. Had he returned to California it would have been too
late to do her any good, and would have destroyed the dear memory of
her he now possessed. He still loved her. For many months the pain of
it had been unbearable. It was unbearable no longer, but he doubted if
he should ever love another woman. The very soul of him had gone out to
her, and if it had returned he was not conscious of it. As the years
passed, there were long stretches when she did not enter his thought,
when memory folded itself thickly about her and slept. Time deals kindly
with the wounds of men. And he was a man of active life, keenly
interested in the welfare of his country. But he married no other woman.
It was something under ten years since he had left California, when he
received a letter from his sister-in-law stating that his brother was
dead, and begging him to come out and settle her affairs, and take her
home. She had neither father nor brother; and he went at once, although
he had no desire to see California again.
There were rails between New York and San Francisco by this time, and he
found the latter a large flourishing and hideous city. The changes were
so great, the few acquaintances he met during the first days of his
visit looked so much older, that his experience of ten years before
became suddenly blurred of outline. He was not quite forty; but he felt
like an old man groping in his memory for an episode of early youth. The
eidolon of Nina Randolph haunted him, but with ever-evading lineaments.
He did not know whether to feel thankful or disappointed.
He devoted himself to his sister-in-law's affairs for a week, then,
finding a Sunday afternoon on his hands, started, almost reluctantly,
to call on Mrs. McLane.
South Park was unchanged.
He stood for a moment, catching his breath. The city had grown around
and away from it; streets had multiplied, bristling with the ugliest
varieties of modern architecture; but South Park, stately, dark, solemn,
had not changed by so much as a lighter coat of paint. His eyes moved
swiftly to the Randolph house. Its shutters were closed. The dust of
summer was thick upon them. He stood for fully five minutes staring at
it, regardless of curious eyes. Something awoke and hungered within him.
"My vanished youth, I suppose," he thought sadly. "I certainly have no
wish to see her, poor thing! But she was very sweet."
He walked slowly round the crescent on the left, and rang the bell at
Mrs. McLane's door. As the butler admitted him he noted with relief that
the house had been refurnished. A buzz of voices came from the parlour.
The man lifted a portiere, and Mrs. McLane, with an exclamation of
delight, came forward, with both hands outstretched. Her face was
unchanged, but she would powder her hair no more. It was white.
"Thorpe!" she exclaimed. "It is not possible? How long have you been
here? A week! Mon Dieu! And you come only now! But I suppose I am
fortunate to be remembered at all."
Thorpe assured her that she had been in his thoughts since the hour of
his arrival, but that he wished to be free of the ugly worries of
business before venturing into her distracting presence.
"I don't forgive you, although I give you a dinner on Thursday. Will
that suit you? Poor little Mrs. Harold! We have all been attention
itself to her for your sake. Come here and sit by me; but you may speak
to your other old friends."
Two of the "Macs" were there; the other was dead, he was told later.
Both were married, and one was dressed with the splendours of Paris.
Mrs. Earle was as little changed as Mrs. McLane, and her still flashing
eyes challenged him at once. Guadalupe Hathaway was unmarried and had
grown stout; but she was as handsome as of old.
They all received him with flattering warmth, "treated him much better
than he deserved," Mrs. McLane remarked, "considering he had never
written one of them a line;" and he felt the past growing sharp of
outline. There were several very smart young ladies present, two of whom
he remembered as awkward little girls. The very names of the others were
unknown to him. They knew of him, however, and one of them affected to
disapprove of him sharply because he had "fought against the flag." Mrs.
McLane took up the cudgels for her South, and party feeling ran high.
Nina Randolph's name was not mentioned. He wondered if she were dead.
Not so much as a glance was directed toward the most momentous episode
of his life. Doubtless they had forgotten that he had once been somewhat
attentive to her. But his memory was breaking in the middle and
marshalling its forces at the farther end; the events of the intervening
ten years were now a confused mass of shadows. Mrs. Earle sang a Mexican
love-song, and he turned the leaves for her. When he told Guadalupe
Hathaway that he was glad to find her unchanged, she replied:--
"I am fat, and you know it. And as I don't mind in the least, you need
not fib about it. You have a few grey hairs and lines; but you've worn
better than our men, who are burnt out with trade winds and money
grubbing."
He remained an hour. When he left the house, he walked rapidly out of
the Park, casting but one hasty glance to the right, crossed the city
and went straight to the house of Molly Shropshire's sister. It also was
unchanged, a square ugly brown house on a corner over-looking the blue
bay and the wild bright hills beyond. The houses that had sprung up
about it were cheap and fresh, and bulging with bow-windows.
"Yes," the maid told him, "Miss Shropshire still lived there, and was at
home." The room into which she showed him was dark, and had the musty
smell of the unpopular front parlour. A white marble slab on the centre
table gleamed with funereal significance. Thorpe drew up the blinds, and
let in the sun. He was unable to decide if the room had been refurnished
since the one occasion upon which he had entered it before; but it had
an old-fashioned and dingy appearance.
He heard a woman's gown rustle down the stair, and his nerves shook.
When Miss Shropshire entered, she did not detect his effort at
composure. She had accepted the flesh of time, and her hair was
beginning to turn; but she shook hands in her old hearty decided
fashion.
"I heard yesterday that you were here," she said. "Take that armchair. I
rather hoped you'd come. We used to quarrel; but, after all, you are an
Englishman, and I can never forget that I was born over there, although
I don't remember so much as the climate."
"Will you tell me the whole story? I did not intend to come to see you,
to mention her name. But it has come back, and I must know all that
there is to know--from the very date of my leaving up to now. Of course,
she wrote me that you were in her confidence."
She told the story of a year which had been as big with import for one
woman as for a nation. "Mr. Randolph died six months after the wedding,"
she concluded, wondering if some men were made of stone. "It killed
him. He did not see her again until he was on his death-bed. Then he
forgave her. Any one would, poor thing. He left his money in trust, so
that she has a large income, and is in no danger of losing it. She lives
with her mother at Redwoods. Clough died some years ago--of drink. It
was in his blood, I suppose, for almost from the day he set foot in
Redwoods he was a sot."
"And Nina?"
"Don't try to see her," said Miss Shropshire, bluntly. "You would only
be horrified,--you wouldn't recognise her if you met her on the street.
She is breaking, fortunately. I saw her the other day, for the first
time in two years, and she told me she was very ill."
"Have you deserted her?"
"Don't put it that way! I shall always love Nina Randolph, and I am
often sick with pity. But she never comes here, and one _cannot_ go to
Redwoods. It is said that the orgies there beggar description. Even the
Hathaways, who are their nearest neighbours, never enter the gates. It
is terrible! And if your letter had come six days earlier, it would all
have been different. But she was born to bad luck."
Thorpe rose. "Thank you," he said. "Are your sisters well? I shall be
here only a few days longer, but I shall try to call again."
She laid her hand on his arm. She had a sudden access of vision. "Don't
try to see Nina," she said, impressively.
"God forbid!" he said.
VII
He slept not at all that night. He had thought that his days of
poignant emotion were over, that he had worn out the last of it on the
blood-soaked fields of Virginia, on nights between days when Death rose
with the sun; but up from their long sleep misery and love rose with the
vigour of their youth, and claimed him. And the love was for a woman who
no longer existed, whose sodden brain doubtless held no memory of him,
or remembered only to curse him. He strove to imagine her as she must
be. She rose before him in successive images of what she had been: from
the night he had met her to the morning of their last interview on the
mountain,--a series of images sometimes painful, always beautiful. Then
his imagination created her as she must have been during the months of
her solitude in the midst of a wild and beautiful country, when in her
letters she had sent him so generous and so exquisite a measure of
herself; then the last months, when he would have been half mad with
love and pity if he had known. Nor was that all: it seemed to him in the
torments of that night that he realised for the first time what he had
lost, what poignant, enduring, and varied happiness might have been his
during the past ten years. Instead, he had had excitement, honours, and
mental activity; he had not been happy for an hour. And the possibility
of such happiness, of union with the one woman whom he was capable
of passionately loving with soul and mind and body, was as dead as
his youth, buried with the soul of a woman whose face he would not
recognise. She was above ground, this woman, and a different being! He
repeated the fact aloud; but it was the one fact his imagination would
not grasp and present to his mental vision. It realised her suffering,
her morbid despair, her attitude to herself, to the world, and to him,
when she had decided to marry Clough; but the hideous metamorphosis of
body and spirit was outside its limitations.
In the morning he asked his sister-in-law if she would leave California
at the end of the week. She was a methodical and slow-moving little
person, and demurred for a time, but finally consented to make ready.
Her business affairs--which consisted of several unsold ranches--could
be left in the hands of an agent; there was little more that her
brother-in-law could do.
Harold's remains had been temporarily placed in the receiving vault on
Lone Mountain. Thorpe went out to the cemetery in the afternoon to make
the final arrangements for removing them to England.
Lone Mountain can be seen from any part of San Francisco; scarcely a
house but has a window from which one may receive his daily hint that
even Californians are mortal. Here is none of the illusion of the
cemetery of the flat, with its thickly planted trees and shrubbery,
where the children are taken to walk when they are good, and to wonder
at the glimpses of pretty little white houses and big white slates with
black letters. The shining tombs and vaults and monuments, tier above
tier, towering at the end of the city, flaunt in one's face the
remorselessness and the greed of death. In winter, the paths are running
brooks; one imagines that the very dead are soaked. In summer, the dusty
trees and shrubs accentuate the marble pride of dead and living men.
Behind, higher still, rises a bare brown mountain with a cross on its
summit,--Calvary it is called; and on stormy nights, or on days when the
fog is writhing in from the ocean, blurring even that high sharp peak,
one fancies the trembling outlines of a figure on the cross.
To-day the tombs were scarcely visible within the fine white mist which
had been creeping in from the Pacific since morning and had made a
beautiful ghost-land of the entire city. The cross on Calvary looked
huge and misshapen, the marbles like the phantoms of those below. The
mist dripped heavily from the trees, the walks were wet. It is doubtful
if there is so gloomy, so disturbing, so fascinating a burying-ground on
earth as the Lone Mountain of San Francisco.
The sexton's house was near the gates. Thorpe completed his business,
and started for the carriage which had brought him. He paused for a
moment in the middle of the broad road and looked up. In the gently
moving mist the shafts seemed to leave their dead, and crawl through the
groves, as if to some ghoulish tryst. Thorpe thought that it would be a
good place for a man, if lost, to go mad in. But, like all the curious
phases of California, it interested him, and in a moment he sauntered
slowly upward. His own mood was not hilarious, and although he had no
wish to join the cold hearts about him, he liked their company for the
moment.
Some one approached him from above. It was a woman, and she picked her
way carefully down the steep hill-side. She loomed oddly through the
mist, her outlines shifting. As she passed Thorpe, he gave her the
cursory glance of man to unbeautiful woman. She was short and stout; her
face was dark and large, her hair grizzled about the temples, her
expression sullen and dejected, her attire rich. She lifted her eyes,
and stopped short.
"Dudley!" she said; and Thorpe recognised her voice.
He made no attempt to answer her. He was hardly conscious of anything
but the wish that he had left California that morning.
"You did not recognise me?" she said, with a laugh he did not remember.
"No."
He stared at her, trying to conjure up the woman who had haunted him
during the night. She had gone. There was a dim flash in the eyes, a
broken echo in the voice of this woman, which gave him the impression of
looking upon the faded daguerreotype of one long dead, or upon a bundle
of old letters.
Her face dropped under his gaze. "I had hoped never to see you again,"
she muttered. "But I don't know that I care much. It is long since I
have thought of you. I care for one thing only,--nothing else matters.
Still, I have a flicker of pride left: I would rather you should not
have seen me an ugly old sot. I believe I was very pretty once; but I
have forgotten."
Thorpe strove to speak, to say something to comfort the poor creature in
her mortification; but he could only stare dumbly at her, while
something strove to reach out of himself into that hideous tomb and
clasp the stupefied soul which was no less his than in the brief day
when they had been happy together. As long as that body lived on, it
carried his other part. And after? He wondered if he could feel more
alone then than now, did it take incalculable years for his soul to find
hers.
She looked up and regarded him sullenly. "You are unchanged," she said.
"Life has prospered with you, I suppose. I haven't read the papers nor
heard your name mentioned for years; but I read all I could find about
you during the war; and you look as if you had had few cares. Are you
married?"
"No."
"You have been true to me, I suppose." And again she laughed.
"Yes, I suppose that is the reason. At least I have cared to marry no
other woman."
"Hm!" she said. "Well, the best thing you can do is to forget me. I'm
sorry if I hurt your pride, but I don't feel even flattered by your
constancy. I have neither heart nor vanity left; I am nothing but an
appetite,--an appetite that means a long sight more to me than you ever
did. To-morrow, I shall have forgotten your existence again. Once or
twice a year, when I am sober,--comparatively,--I come here to visit my
father's tomb. Why, I can hardly say, unless it is that I find a certain
satisfaction in contemplating my own niche. I am an unconscionable time
dying."
"Are you dying?"
"I'm gone to pieces in every part of me. My mother threw me downstairs
the other day, and that didn't mend matters."
"Come," he said. "I have no desire to prolong this interview. There is a
private carriage at the gate. Is it yours? Then, if you will permit me,
I will see you to it."
She walked beside him without speaking again. He helped her into her
carriage, lifted his hat without raising his eyes, then dismissed his
carriage, and walked the miles between the burying-ground and his hotel.
VIII
Four days later he received a note from Miss Hathaway:--
"Nina Randolph is dying; I have just seen her doctor, who is also
ours. I do not know if this will interest you. She is at Redwoods."
An hour later Thorpe was in the train. He had not stopped to deliberate.
Nothing could alter the fact that Nina Randolph was his, and eternally.
He responded to the summons as instinctively as if she had been his
wife for the past ten years. Nor did he shrink from the death-bed scene;
hell itself could not be worse than the condition of his mind had been
during the past four days.
There was no trap for hire at the station; he walked the mile to the
house. It was a pale-blue blazing day. The May sun shone with the
intolerable Californian glare. The roads were already dusty. But when he
reached the avenue at Redwoods, the temperature changed at once. The
trees grew close together, and the creek, full to the top, cooled the
air; it was racing merrily along, several fine salmon on its surface. He
experienced a momentary desire to spear them. Suddenly he returned to
the gates; he had carried into the avenue a sense of something changed.
He looked down the road sharply,--the road up which he had come the last
time he had visited Redwoods, choking on a lumbering stage. Then he
looked up the wooded valley, and back again. It was some moments before
he realised wherein lay the change that had disturbed his introspective
vision; one of the great redwoods that had stood by the bridge where
the creek curved just beyond the entrance to the grounds, was gone. He
wondered what had happened to it, and retraced his steps.
The house, the pretty little toy castle with its yellow-plastered
brown-trimmed walls, looked the same; he had but an indistinct memory of
it. Involuntarily, his gaze travelled to the mountains; they were a mass
of blurred redwoods in a dark-blue mist. But they were serene and
beautiful; so was all nature about him.
He rang the bell. Cochrane opened the door. The man had aged; but his
face was as stolid as ever.
"Mr. Thorpe, sir?" he said.
"Yes; I wish to see Miss--Mrs. Clough."
"She won't live the day out, sir."
"Show me up to her room. I shall stay here. Is any one else with her?"
"No, sir; Mrs. Randolph has been no good these two days, and the maid
that has been looking out for Miss Nina is asleep. I've been giving her
her medicine. We don't like strange nurses here. Times are changed, and
everybody knows now; but we keep to ourselves as much as possible.
There've been times when we've had company--too much; but I made up my
mind they should die alone. You can go up, though."
"Thanks. You can go to sleep, if you wish."
Cochrane led him down the hall with its beautiful inlaid floor,
scratched and dull, up the wide stair with its faded velvet carpet, and
opened the door of a large front room.
"The drops on the table are to be given every hour, sir; the next at
twenty minutes to two." He closed the door and went away.
The curtains of the room were wide apart. The sun flaunted itself upon
the old carpet, the handsome old-fashioned furniture. Thorpe went
straight to the windows, and drew the curtains together, then walked
slowly to the bed.
Nina lay with her eyes open, watching him intently. Her face was pallid
and sunken; but she looked less unlike her old self. She took his hand
and pressed it feebly.
"I am sorry I spoke so roughly the other day," she said. "But I was not
quite myself. I have touched nothing since; I couldn't, after seeing
you. It is that that is killing me; but don't let it worry you. I am
very glad."
Thorpe sat down beside her and chafed her hands gently. They were cold.
"It was a beautiful little baby," she said, abruptly. "And it looked so
much like you that it was almost ridiculous."
"I was a brute to have left you, whether you wished it or not. It is no
excuse to say that the consequences never entered my head, I was half
mad that morning; and after what you had told me, I think I was glad to
get away for a time."
"We both did what we believed to be best, and ruined--well, my life, and
your best chance of happiness, perhaps. It is often so, I notice. Too
much happiness is not a good thing for the world, I suppose. It is only
the people of moderate desires and capacities that seem to get what
they want. But it was a great pity; we could have been very happy. Did
you care much?"
He showed her his own soul then, naked and tormented,--as it had been
from the hour he had received her letters upon his return from the West
Indies until Time had done its work upon him,--and as it was now and
must be for long months to come. Of the intervening years he gave no
account; he had forgotten them. She listened with her head eagerly
lifted, her vision piercing his. He made the story short. When he had
finished, her head fell back. She gave a long sigh. Was it of content?
She made no other comment. She was past conventions; her emotions were
already dead. And she was at last in that stage of development wherein
one accepts the facts of life with little or no personal application.
"It didn't surprise me when you came in," she said, after a moment. "I
felt that you would come--My life has been terrible, terrible! Do you
realise that! Have they told you? No woman has ever fallen lower than I
have done. I am sorry, for your sake; I can't repent in the ordinary
way. I have an account to square with God, if I ever meet Him and He
presumes to judge me. If you will forgive me, that is all that I care
about."
"I forgive you! Good God, I wonder you don't hate me!"
"I did for a time, not because I blamed you, but because I hated
everybody and everything. There were intervals of terrible retrospect
and regret; but I made them as infrequent as I could, and finally I
stifled them altogether. I grew out of touch with every memory of a life
when I was comparatively innocent and happy. I strove to make myself so
evil that I could not distinguish an echo if one tried to make itself
heard; and I succeeded. Now, all that has fallen from me,--in the last
few hours, since I have had relief from physical torments,--for I could
not drink after I saw you, and I had to pay the penalty. It is not odd,
I suppose, that I should suddenly revert: my impulses originally were
all toward good, my mental impulses; the appetite was always a purely
physical thing; and when Death approaches, he stretches out a long hand
and brushes aside the rubbish of life, letting the soul's flower see the
light again for a few moments. Give me the drops. Now that you are here,
I want to live as long as I can."
He lifted her head, and gave her the medicine. She lay back suddenly,
pinioning his arm.
"Let it stay there," she said.
"Are you sure, Nina, that your case is so bad?" he asked. "Couldn't you
make an effort, and let me take you to England?"
She shook her head with a cynical smile. "My machinery is like a
dilapidated old engine that has been eaten up with rust, and battered by
stones for twenty years. There isn't a bit of me that isn't in pieces."
She closed her eyes, and slept for a half hour. He put both arms about
her and his head beside hers.
"Dudley," she said, finally.
"Well?"
"I had not thought of the baby for God knows how many years. It was no
memory for me. But since the other day I have been haunted by that poor
little grave in the big forest--"
"Would you like to have it brought down to Lone Mountain?"
She hesitated a moment, then shook her head.
"No," she said. "In the vault with my mother and--and--_him_? Oh, no!
no!"
"If I build a little vault for you and her will you sign a paper giving
me--certain rights?"
Her face illuminated for the first time. "Oh, yes!" she said. "Oh, yes!
Then I think I could sleep in peace."
Thorpe rang for Cochrane and the gardener, wrote the paper, and had it
duly witnessed. It took but a few moments, and they were alone again.
"I wonder if I shall see _her_--and you again, or if my unlucky star
sets in this world to rise in the next? Well, I shall know soon.
"I am going, I think," she said a few moments later. "Would you mind
kissing me? Death has already taken the sin out of my body, and down
deep is something that never was wholly blackened. That is yours. Take
it."
It was an hour before she died, and during that hour he kissed her many
times.
A FRAGMENT
It was some twelve years later that Thorpe received a copy of a San
Francisco newspaper, in which the following article was heavily
marked:--
WHAT AM I BID?
AN AUCTION SALE OF FUNERAL AND WEDDING TRAPPINGS
"What am I offered?"
"Oh, don't sell that!" said one or two bidders.
The auctioneer held up a large walnut case. It contained a funeral
wreath of preserved flowers.
"Well, I've sold coffins at auction in my time, so I guess I can
stand this," replied the auctioneer. "What am I offered?"
He disposed of it, with three other funeral mementos, very cheap,
for the bidding was dispirited. It was at the sale yesterday, in a
Montgomery Street auction-room, of the personal effects, jewelry,
silverware, and household bric-a-brac of a once very wealthy San
Francisco family. The head of the family was a pioneer, a citizen
of wealth and high social and commercial standing. It was he who,
in early days, projected South Park. There was no family in the
city whose society was more sought after, or which entertained
better, than that of James Randolph.
"What am I offered for this lot?"
He referred to the lot catalogued as "No. 107," and described as
"Wedding-dress, shoes, etc."
"Don't sell _that_!" The very old-clo' man remonstrated this time.
It seemed worse than the sale of the funeral wreath. The dress was
heavy white satin--had been, that is; it was yellowed with time.
The tiny shoes had evidently been worn but once.
"What am I offered? Make a bid, gentlemen. I offer the lot. What am
I offered?"
"One dollar."
"One dollar I am offered for the lot--wedding-dress, shoes, etc.
One dollar for the lot. Come gentlemen, bid up."
Not an old-clo' man in the room bid, and the outsider who bid the
dollar had the happiness to see it knocked down to him.
"What am I bid for this photograph album? Bid up, gentlemen. Here's
a chance to get a fine collection of photographs of distinguished
citizens, their wives, and daughters."
A gentleman standing on the edge of the crowd quietly bid in the
album. When it was handed to him, he opened it, took out his own
and the photographs of several ladies, dressed in the fashion of
twenty years ago, and tossed the album, with the other photographs,
in the stove, remarking: "Well, _they_ won't go to the junk-shop."
"What am I offered, gentlemen, for this? There is just seventeen
dollars' worth of gold in it. Bid up."
The auctioneer held up an engraved gold medal. It was a Crimean war
medal which its owner was once proud to wear. There was a time in
his life when no money could have purchased it. He had risked his
life for the honour of wearing it; and after his death it was
offered for old gold.
"Twenty dollars."
"Twenty dollars; twenty, twenty, twenty! Mind your bid, gentlemen.
Seventeen dollars for the gold, and three for the honour. Twenty,
tw-en-ty, and going, going, gone! Seventeen dollars for the gold,
and three for the honour."
In this way an ebony writing-desk, with the dead citizen's private
letters, was sold to a hand-me-down shop-keeper. A tin box with
private papers went to a junk-dealer; and different lots of
classical music, some worn, some marked with the givers' names,
some with verses written on the pages, were sold to second-hand
dealers. "What am I bid?" The sale went rapidly on. Sometimes an
old family friend would bid in an article as a souvenir. But the
junk-dealers, second-hand men, and hand-me-down shop-keepers took
in most of the goods.
The above articles were the contents of a chest, and were the
personal effects of Mrs. Richard Clough, the late daughter of the
late James Randolph, of San Francisco. She had evidently carefully
packed them away at some time before her death; and the chest had
been mislaid or overlooked, until it made its way, intact, and
twelve years after, into the hands of the public.
And that was the last that Dudley Thorpe heard of Nina Randolph in this
world.
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise,
every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and
intent.