One week from the day Viola had told her father of their contemplated
return to San Francisco, Colonel Reed had passed into a memory.
Death had come and gone so quickly--so terribly, bewilderingly quickly!
Viola had hardly realized what had happened to so check and change
the current of her life when the days had already sprung back to
their monotonous routine, and the other boarders had laid aside the
expressions of lugubrious solemnity which they had worn while death
had hushed the house. Now, while she sat still and stupid in her room
up-stairs, they told funny stories and "joshed" each other at dinner,
as they had "joshed" the old pioneer a few weeks before. Even Corinne
had returned to the doll and the kitten, though, out of consideration
for Viola, she played with them furtively on the corner of the balcony,
where, with the assistance of an old umbrella and a pair of towels, she
had built herself what she called a house. One morning, stepping out
upon the balcony, Viola came upon the child lying face downward and
whispering to herself while she played the solitaire the colonel had
taught her, with the pack of cards he had bought for her a few days
before his death.
The waters of oblivion had closed without a ripple over the old
pioneer. In the dingy boarding-house where he had spent the last
months of his life his name was unknown, and his fellow-lodgers had
come to regard the personal part of his reminiscences as figments of
his imagination. So obscure had been his situation, so little trusted
his own words, that his passing had not even been awarded the short
newspaper notice that is evoked by the death of the most commonplace
forty-niner. In the Sacramento boarding-house Colonel Reed was as a
stranger in a strange land. Only his daughter, Mrs. Seymour, and Bart
Nelson were the mourners at the funeral of the man who had once been
one of the most extravagant and picturesque figures of California's
brilliant youth.
At the end of the week Viola was to return to San Francisco. In her
heart-sickness and desolation she had turned to her home as a cat does.
After the first stunned bewilderment she woke to a sense of loneliness
that chilled her to the marrow. The world seemed terribly wide and
menacing as she stood thus hesitating on its verge. For the first time
in her life she realized what it meant to be alone, to be thrown into
that great maelstrom without a hand to hold or a shoulder to lean on.
She had no intimates--few acquaintances, even. The houses and streets
of San Francisco came to her mind with a more friendly aspect than the
people. Mrs. Seymour had asked her if she should write to any one.
She had answered that there was no one to write to. The good-natured
landlady had gazed at the girl--looking so slight and pale in her
somber draperies--with a frowning and fidgeted anxiety. She thought
it a very hazardous thing to let this delicate creature, still half
stupefied by a sudden blow, go away alone and unprotected into a city
of strangers. But Viola insisted. To herself she kept reiterating,
"I want to go home." It seemed to her as if the gaunt, gray city,
crowded on its wind-swept hills, would welcome her with the silent,
understanding love of a mother. It was the one friend she knew and
trusted.
After the expenses of the colonel's funeral were paid and her score
settled with Mrs. Seymour, she had still nearly one thousand dollars
left. This to her represented a little fortune. Even without work
she could live on it for several years. Economy had been the only
completed branch in Viola's education, and in this she was as
proficient as she was ignorant of all pertaining to business and the
investment or disposal of money. If she could find employment she would
put her money away--tie it up in an old glove, and hide it in the
bottom of her trunk. Mrs. Seymour had refused to allow her to leave
until she had positively arranged for a place of abode which would
be waiting and ready for her. Under the direction of that sensible
woman, Viola had written and engaged one of Mrs. Cassidy's upper back
rooms--it being the only place of its kind in the city where she knew
the people.
The evening before her departure the last leaf was added to this
momentous and miserable Sacramento chapter. Meeting her in the
sitting-room, Bart Nelson had detained her and made a halting and
bashful offer of marriage. Viola, too stunned by the terrible surprise
of the past week to have room for any more astonishment, had listened
to him indifferently, and then politely but coldly refused him.
The young man seemed to be astonished. He looked at her incredulously.
"But--but," he stammered, "what are you going to do?"
"I'm going to San Francisco to-morrow," she answered, rather wearily,
as she knew he was aware of her purpose.
"But what are you going to do when you get there?"
"I'm going to work at something."
"Work at something! What in the world can you work at? You look as if
you hadn't strength enough to grind an organ! You must be crazy."
"I can work at anything," she said, almost absently. "Besides, I have
money to live on, enough for a long time--several years."
He looked at her moodily, amazed by her indifference.
"It would be a hundred times better for you to stay here and marry me.
I'd take care of you and support you. Ain't that better for a woman
than scratching along by herself? Mrs. Seymour says you haven't got a
friend in San Francisco."
"No; but I don't mind that. I don't want to marry. I don't ever want
to."
"But isn't it better to have a man to work for you, and give you a
nice comfortable home, and--well--of course, be fond of you, and all
that--than to go off by yourself, trusting to luck to get work? You
don't know what you're in for."
"Perhaps I don't. But truly, there's no use talking about it any more.
I can't. I couldn't, no matter what happened. It was kind of you to
think of me. Thank you, and good-by."
When she had gained her own room she stood among her scattered
possessions, thinking. No one knew how terrifying her loneliness
seemed to her. As she looked out at it now, so close at hand, to begin
to-morrow, her heart sickened, and the bleakness of an encompassing
world, all strange, all cold, all uncaring, seemed to encircle her.
Were not protection, companionship, home, at any price, better than
this? She recalled the young man's coarse but good-natured face, his
passion shining through the businesslike phlegm of his manner, and
uttered a vehement exclamation, at the same time making a gesture as
though repulsing him. There were some things that even to a woman in
her position were impossible.
The next day she started, turning her back on her father's grave, and
her face toward the city where she had been born and yet had not a
friend.
Had Mrs. Cassidy heard this stricture upon her lonely condition, she
would have hotly denied it. Mrs. Cassidy told Viola that she would
be at once a mother and a father to her, and Micky Cassidy, her son,
would fill the various positions of male relations that, in Miss Reed's
case, were as yet untenanted. The impulsive widow did her best to make
the girl feel at home, and certainly offered Viola the consolation
of shedding many tears with her, and of lauding the colonel's good
qualities till even the girl's dulled emotions were roused, and she
wept as she had not done since her father's death.
But her home-coming was sharpened with pangs that she had not reckoned
on when her first longing to return to the city swept over her. Every
step of her surroundings was reminiscent of her father and of their
close companionship. All the byways held recollections of him, of small
happenings that, at the time, had been pregnant with joy or anxiety, of
little jokes they had had together. The shops they dealt at seemed as
if they might at any moment disgorge his tall, angular figure, with its
quick, decisive step, the old face alight with smiles as his eye fell
on her.
One afternoon, after she had been home a week, she was returning from
a walk, slowly traversing the familiar streets, absorbed in her own
thoughts. So engrossed was she that, for the moment, the Sacramento
interval, with all that it had held, was obliterated from her mind,
and, walking loiteringly, she turned the accustomed corner and
approached the house. Her suspension of memory lasted till she had her
hand on the gate. Then, with a sudden, dizzying rush, the consciousness
of the present returned. She felt faint and sick, and stood holding the
gate-post and looking up at the house with a frightened face. When she
had mastered herself she went home to her room at Mrs. Cassidy's and
locked herself in. Mrs. Cassidy knocked at her door three times that
evening, but Viola would not open it, even when the widow, through the
keyhole, extolled the merits of the tea she had waiting on the tray.
The next day Viola appeared to be herself, though she looked white
and listless, and Mrs. Cassidy resolved to impart to her a piece of
information that, with great effort of will, she had been hoarding up
to cheer a particularly dark hour. It was her habit to bring Viola her
tea at six, and during this meal to seat herself and discourse with her
lodger in a friendly and cheering spirit. The widow loved a gossip, and
it seemed to her that Miss Reed was a person more redolent of romance
than any one she had ever known before.
Rocking comfortably back and forth in the plush-covered, ribbon-decked
rocking-chair, she watched her lodger as she poured out her tea, and
delicately, after the manner of people who are without appetite, broke
small fragments off her roll and put them in her mouth. Then, in a
voice vibrating with secret exultation, she said:
"You won't always feel so bad as this, honey. Things cheer up sooner
'n we expect, and black clouds have silver linin's. Besides, there's
friends of yours that wouldn't let you want for nothin', if they knew
you was back."
She saw the piece of roll stop midway between Viola's mouth and the
plate, and her eyes fix themselves on the lid of the tea-pot in an
arrested stare.
"Who do you mean?" said the girl, the even modulations of her voice not
hiding its undertone of apprehension.
"Who do you suppose?" retorted Mrs. Cassidy, teasingly.
"I can't imagine," replied Viola. "I haven't the slightest idea to whom
you're referring."
"Oh, yes, you have, now," said Mrs. Cassidy, wagging her head
knowingly, and flushing over her broad, buxom face with the pleasure of
her secret. "Try and guess."
"Who do you mean, Mrs. Cassidy?" said Viola. Her pretension of
indifference had suddenly disappeared. She tried to make her voice
commanding, but it was full of a frightened distress.
"Mr. John Gault," announced the other, her narrow eyes, alight with
curiosity, fastened on her lodger's face. The change in its expression,
quick, inexplicable in its sudden tightening of the muscles and veiling
of the eyes, told the watcher, not what the romance was that she so
keenly scented, but confirmed her suspicions that there was a romance
of some sort or other.
Viola turned back to the tea-things. As she moved them about, the eager
eyes of the watcher saw that her hands were trembling.
"He's the finest gentleman I ever set eyes on since I came to
California," continued the widow, immensely interested and hardly able
to wait for further developments. "I said to Micky, after he'd been
here, 'There, Mick Cassidy, is the way they grow real gentlemen. No
imitation about him!'"
"Was he _here_?" came the question, in a hardly comprehending voice.
"He was that--and to find out about you. He was that crazy to know
where you'd gone that he was at Coggles's, and had the Robsons turned
'most inside out with his questions. When he couldn't get nothing out
of them, he got detectives to track out Mick,--'cause, you remember,
he'd left that package,--and he was here to find out what I knew. Oh,
he's got it bad."
Viola, conscious of the scrutiny fastened upon her, bent her face over
the tray. She began to make another cup of tea.
"I couldn't give him no information," continued Mrs. Cassidy--"more's
the pity, for I ain't never seen a gentleman that took my fancy more;
and just as pleasant and agreeable as if he was no better off than me
or Mick. Policeman O'Hara, when I asked him, says to me: 'Rich? Why,
Mrs. Cassidy, he's more money in a minute than you'll ever see in your
life. He's a capitalist, and not mean, like the rest of 'em, neither.'"
Though the widow's tongue had been busy, her eyes had followed the
tea-making closely. It was not a success. Viola had abandoned it, and
her hands were now clasped under the edge of the table. But she made no
comment, sitting motionless, with her face averted. Nothing daunted,
Mrs. Cassidy returned to the charge.
"He was just dead set upon finding you. He says to me as he left, says
he, 'If you hear anything of her, Mrs. Cassidy, let me know. Send over
Mick the first thing in the morning.'"
It must be confessed that Mrs. Cassidy's imagination had added this
last touch; but to Viola, in her fluttered alarm, it carried no
suggestion of fiction.
"Mrs. Cassidy," she said, turning on the woman, "you haven't let him
know? You haven't sent Mick?"
"Lord love you, no, dear," returned the widow, good-humoredly. "I was
waiting till you pulled yourself together a little more. But don't you
think, now,"--she leaned forward and spoke in a wheedling tone, but
with her eyes full of an avid interest,--"don't you think you might
write a little letter, and Mick'll take it over to his office this
evening?"
Viola pushed back from the table, her face suddenly suffused with an
angry red.
"No--no!" she cried violently. "Don't think of such a thing--don't
suggest it! I don't want to see that gentleman again, ever. This is my
affair, Mrs. Cassidy; leave it to me."
She rose from the table and walked to the window.
"There's no use gettin' mad about it," retorted the other, somewhat
tartly, rising from the rocker and setting the tea-things on the tray.
"I'm only tryin' to do the best I can for you. And it don't seem to
me just right for a girl like you, young and not over-strong, to be
knockin' round this way, when she's got friends ready to black her
boots for her. Still, it's your funeral, not mine."
There was no reply, and as she lifted the tray she said in an aggrieved
tone:
"I don't want to hurt no one's feelin's, but I want to do my dooty
in this world. Well, good night, deary. Don't get down on your luck.
You're not so friendless as you think."
After she had left the room, Viola stood motionless, looking out of the
window on the gray and soot-grimed back yard. Night was falling, and
the washing, still pendulating on its lines after the slovenly fashion
of the neighborhood, gleamed white and ghostly through the dusk. A
high brick wall shut off the end of the lot, and over this, dark,
mournful-looking trails of ivy hung downward, rubbing back and forth in
the passing breaths of wind. It was a prospect and an hour conducive
to melancholy. But Viola felt none. For the moment a sense of hunted
terror had shut out all other feelings.
He had searched for her, employed detectives to try and find a clue to
her hiding-place! And now, led by some horrible caprice of destiny, she
had walked into the very house where he would soonest find her. She
must go to-morrow. Mrs. Cassidy could not be trusted. The expression of
her face, with its ugly, half-concealed triumph and its coarsely prying
interest, warned the girl that the secret of her whereabouts would not
long remain with the widow. In a fever of anxiety she paced up and down
the room. Her nerves, broken by the shock and strain of the past two
weeks, exaggerated the importance of the situation, till she felt as if
Mrs. Cassidy and Gault had spread a net around her, from which, in her
weakness, she would never be able to break away.
She fell asleep, only to wake in the dead of the night, shaken into
throbbing consciousness by the thought that the widow had already
communicated with Gault, and that the conversation of that evening was
for the purpose of preparing her for the appearance of her lover.
Curled up and trembling under the clothes, she lay staring into the
blackness about her. It seemed a reflex, in its impenetrable gloom, of
her own surroundings. With the goblin terrors of night weighing upon
her overwrought spirit, she felt too helpless and feeble to battle
with a life that was so beset with pitfalls. The dreariness of her
isolation, the hopelessness of her misplaced love, that should have
been the crown of her life, and was instead its direst dread and peril,
seemed combining to crush her, and in her despair she pressed her face
into the pillow and whispered wild supplications for death.
The next morning life did not look so formidable. Things fell into
their proper perspective, and Viola's fears of Mrs. Cassidy as an agent
of destruction appeared phantasmagoric. Nevertheless, sunlight and its
restoring influences did not allay all her doubts of the woman. She
had seen her thoughts and intentions written on her face, and she knew
that it would only be a question of time when she would be tempted to
communicate with Gault.
She determined to leave Mrs. Cassidy with no clue as to her new place
of residence. She had no idea as to where she would go, except that she
would try to find a lodging as far from where she was now as possible.
This would be an easy matter. The town seemed to be placarded from end
to end with the signs of "Furnished Rooms." Viola was brave, now the
morning had come, and with it sunlight. Moreover, the thought of moving
from the locality every corner of which seemed alive with memories of
her father was a sustaining relief.
After breakfast she acquainted Mrs. Cassidy with her intention of
leaving, giving as her reason the fact that that portion of the
city was too full of painful memories for her to remain in it. The
widow received the news with loud lamentations, which ended almost
in tears. As soon as she had overcome her surprise and commanded her
feelings, she besieged Viola with questions as to where she intended
going. The girl, who was not skilful at this sort of duel, found it
difficult to evade her hostess's vigilant determination to maintain
her surveillance. Viola was soon red and stammering under the widow's
persistent and unescapable queries, and her discomfort was not lessened
by the realization that Mrs. Cassidy had guessed her real reason for
leaving and had resented it.
It was a clear, soft morning, the air still and golden. In its brief
Indian summer the city seemed to stretch itself, and lie warm,
apathetic, and relaxed, basking in the mellowness of its autumnal
quiet. That part of it toward which Viola directed her course was
almost as old as the locality where she had passed her uneventful
girlhood. Boarding an electric car, she crossed the low basin of the
town, where originally the village of Yerba Buena skirted the cove
in straggling huts and tents. Here the business life of a metropolis
is compressed into an area covered by a few blocks. Women do their
shopping one street away from where men are making the money which
renders the shopping possible. The car swept Viola through the gay
panorama that Kearney Street presents on a sunny morning, out past
Portsmouth Square, with a glimpse of Chinese back balconies, where
lines of flowering plants, the dip of swaying lanterns, and here and
there the brilliant spot of color made by a woman or a child, bring to
the scene a whiff of the Orient.
Beyond, where the broken flank of Telegraph Hill rises gaunt and red
amid its clinging tenements, she alighted and continued her way on
foot. She made a detour round the forbidding steeps of the hill, past
narrow alleys where shawled figures slunk along lengths of sun-touched
wall, by old verandahed houses brooding under rusty cypress-trees, by
straight-fronted, plastered dwellings, the stucco streaked with dark
rain-stains like the traces of tears on a face too dejected to care
how it looked. Finally the street rose over a spur of the hill, then
dipped, sloping down to the hollow of North Beach.
There was a sudden widening of the horizon on every side. Marine
views broke on the eye through the spaces between high, cramped, flat
buildings, over the tops of decrepit cottages, in the breaks between
peeling, vine-draped walls. Vivid bits of sea were set in mosaic-like
clearness between the trunks of dark old trees in gardens that were
planted when the region was yet suburban. The end of the street's vista
was filled with its blue expanse, with the distant hills beyond--all
clear lights and shadows on this sun-steeped autumn morning.
Here was spaciousness and room. The torn hill, battered and
weather-beaten with the stress and turmoil of the elements, stood
up from the lower portions of the city in an eternal wash of air
fresh from the ocean. Houses clung to it like barnacles. On its
sharper steeps they seemed to be hanging precariously, clutching to
irregularities in the soil, cowering down in hollows, or gripping rocky
projections. But on its seaboard face the slope was more gradual, and
here, in the old days, prosperous families had once built charming
villas, where, from rose-shaded balconies, the inmates could look on
the bay, sometimes a weltering waste, sometimes a vast sapphire level
tracked with the trails of sailing-vessels bending to the trades.
Viola knew that North Beach, like her old home, was a quarter upon
which fashion had turned its back. Rents were low there, and, judging
by the number of signs of "Furnished Rooms," the inhabitants must be
poor. She began her search at the foot of the hill, working up through
the streets that struck her as at once clean and respectable-looking.
But even her humble requirements were hard to fill.
By noontime, passing back and forth from street to street, she had
gained the top of the hill. She had seen nothing at once tolerable
to her taste and suitable to her purse. Now, spent with fatigue and
disappointment, she climbed a last breathless ascent, and came out
upon the slope below the summit. This space of open ground, devoid of
streets, and with here and there a hovel squalidly sprawling amid its
own debris, slants up the crest of the incline upon which perches the
deserted observatory, worn and weather-stained into an appearance of
mellow antiquity.
Even at this warm noonday hour the air was pure and balmily clear.
Viola sank down, panting, on a broken sod, and several dogs, attracted
by the unusual presence of a stranger, rushed upon her from one of the
neighboring shanties, barking frenziedly. Some hens joined them, and
for a moment they stood in an excited group, evidently meditating a
sortie. Presently a tousled woman in a wrapper emerged from the house
and threw an old boot at them, at which they scattered--the hens
running off in staggering terror, the dogs scuttling away to safer
regions, their tails tucked in.
The silence that settled was crystalline. It seemed to place the city
at a curiously remote distance. Far below her, Viola could see the
wharves and the masts of ships that lay idle by the quays. Men were
running about down there with the smooth, sure movements of mechanical
toys. Drays passed along the water-front, and little light wagons that
sped by in a sudden wake of dust. From there, and from regions unseen,
sounds came up to her with clear distinctness. A bell rang, a dog
barked, a child cried piercingly--each sound seeming to rise separate
and finely accentuated from the muffled roar which broods over the
hives of men.
She leaned back against the broken ground behind her and looked
sleepily about. The parched sward was lined by little paths that seemed
to cross and recross each other in purposeless wanderings. Some led
to the edge of a quarry that had torn away a huge chunk of the hill
as though a giant lion had struck down and ripped off a piece of its
flank. Below her were the roofs and chimneys of houses on the face
of the slope. Smoke came from the chimneys and went up straight,
and here and there the ragged foliage of eucalyptus-trees that had
grown sere and scant in the turmoil of wintry gales hung motionless,
resting on this day of grace. It must be near midday, Viola thought,
and, even as the thought formed in her mind, all the whistles of the
city below seemed to suddenly open their throats and blow together--a
long, mellifluous, fluent sound. Then there was a pause, and odd ones,
late but determined, took up the cry and poured out their hollow,
reverberant roar. From the water-front louder ones came, hoarse,
harsh, dominant, riding the tumult like strident talkers, and others,
shrill-toned, broke in, high and protesting, and the note of distant
whistles, away in the Mission and the Potrero, answered again, faint,
thin, and far. It was twelve o'clock.
Viola gathered herself up from her relaxed attitude. She had been
hunting now for two hours, and felt tired and discouraged. She wished
she could live here, since one must live somewhere--just here, she
thought, as she rose stiffly to her feet and dusted her dress. No one
would ever find her, and there was something at once inspiring and
soothing in all this vast panorama of sea and mountain and this wash
of living air. She looked back at the house the woman with the shoe
had come from, and wondered if even there they would take her in. The
woman had come to a doorway now, and stood there, eying her, it seemed
to Viola, with suspicious disfavor; and even as she looked, the dogs,
grown brave again, made a spirited rally round the corner, and came
yapping about her heels. She turned and, selecting the first path that
she saw, walked down over the forward face of the hill.
The fall of the land was so abrupt here that the few householders had
had to build steps from the street below to their gates. Some had even
gone to the extravagance of a handrail. Viola, making a chary descent,
was attracted to glance about her by a sweet, pungent fragrance, and
looking to locate its source, found herself at the gate of a house,
low, long, and narrow, with a garden on the outward side, terraced
to keep the soil from sliding bodily down into the back yard of the
house below. From this garden rose the scent that had attracted her.
It was the soft, illusive perfume of mignonette, of which the little
inclosure, sheltered from the winds by a lattice-work fence, held a
goodly store.
The love of flowers was strong in Viola, and pressing her breast
against the top of the fence, she stood peering in at the garden with
its roughly bordered terraces and pebbled paths. The mignonette
was growing in a border that skirted the side of the house. In the
parterres below it were many varieties of blossoming annuals and
rose-bushes still densely in flower. The cypress-trees from the yard
below showed their dark, funereal tops over the outer fence, and a
gaunt eucalyptus made a pattern on the pale noonday sky with its
drooping foliage. From the garden Viola's gaze turned to the house. It
presented its side to the view, its narrow front to the street. Its
seaward face was flanked by a balcony, and windows, commanding the
enormous sweep of water and distant hills, were set closely along the
wall. In one of these windows Viola saw the sign her eyes had grown so
accustomed to that morning--"Furnished Rooms."
Half an hour later she made her exit from the house, having completed
her arrangement to become a tenant that same day. Its sole occupant at
the time was the landlady, Miss Defoe, a spinster of advanced years,
who dwelt there with her brother. She was glad of the chance of a
lodger, especially one who seemed so gently tractable. The almost
inaccessible position of the house made it difficult to rent the rooms,
even at the lowest prices. Viola found that the terms offered her were
more desirable than those made by Mrs. Cassidy.
In the afternoon, having made her escape from the widow's with guilty
stealth, she took up her residence on the high hilltop, in a room
from one window of which she could look out through the Golden Gate
on the broad bosom of the Pacific, while from the other she could see
the dappled sweep of the Alameda hills, with Berkeley and Oakland
clustering about their bases.
A life uneventful and monotonous now began for the solitary girl. The
days in the house on the hill passed with the even, colorless rapidity
of days full of uninteresting duties and bereft of the stimulus of
hope. Viola plodded on doggedly, with her head down and her eyes on the
furrow before her. Work had cropped up quickly, and she turned to it
with dull resolution. In the back of the house some former tenant had
built a small greenhouse, which, during the Defoes' occupancy, had been
left in dusty desuetude. Being granted the use of it, she cleaned and
repaired it, and here once more plied her old graceful trade of raising
plants.
Her friend the Kearney Street florist, to whom the colonel in his grand
days had given many profitable orders, was glad to help the daughter
of his old patron. Once again Viola found herself supplying his shops
with the delicate ferns which grew so luxuriantly under her intelligent
care. Besides this, he now and then engaged her to assist in making
up floral pieces used in decoration and at weddings and funerals. In
this branch of the work she displayed so much taste and skill that her
services were employed more and more constantly.
She earned enough to supply her small wants, and the remains of the
thousand dollars lay untouched in the bottom of her trunk.
As the winter began, with its early darkening of the days, its long
gray spells of lowering weather, and its first warm, hesitating rains,
Viola spent hours in the small room behind the store in Kearney Street,
surrounded by flowers mounted on wire stalks, which she stuck into the
mossy mold that filled in the skeleton frames. When the work was heavy
she was assisted by the girl who waited in the shop--a self-confident,
talkative young woman, whom every one called "Miss Gladys," and who
had the most improbably golden hair and the most astonishingly high
collars Viola had ever seen. Nevertheless, the confidential chatter of
Miss Gladys, which ranged over a variety of topics, not the least of
which was Miss Gladys's own conquering charm and its fatal power, had a
salutary effect in diverting Viola from her brooding melancholy.
Her hours in the shop and greenhouse acted as preservatives of
her physical health and mental freshness. Here she felt safe from
observation, and worked on, with mind engrossed and fingers busy,
through the long gray afternoons till the dark fell and the early night
was spangled with garlands of lamps.
In the off hours, when her plants did not need her attention and
there was no work for her at the store, she took long walks. That
portion of the city where she had hidden herself grew as familiar to
her as the old one on the other side of town. Its charm of a ruinous
picturesqueness, of a careless intermingling of alien races, of a
sprawling, slovenly serenity through days drenched by sun and swept
by rain, was slowly revealed to her. Aspects of it grew to have
expressions of almost human attraction or repulsion. This little blue
glimpse of sea invited her, with its suggestion of freedom and space.
That lowering alley, dark and furtive, with reluctant rays of sunshine
slanting down its walls, and the gleam of eyes watching from behind its
stealthy shutters, inspired her imagination to strange, soaring flights.
From the summit of the hill she looked down on the crowding,
dun-colored city, cut cleanly with streets and decked with feathers of
smoke, and tried to reconstruct the village of '49. Here, far back,
was the curve of the shore; there, up the California Street incline,
tents and shanties were dotted through the chaparral; and below, an
open sand-space marked the plaza. The adobe of the Señora Briones lay
farther round in the hollow of North Beach; her father had often shown
her where it stood. Now the myriad roofs of a metropolis stretched far
away, filling the valley and cresting the adjacent hills. Domes and the
crosses on church steeples caught the light, and from this great height
the girdle of silver water encircled it like a restraining bond.
The Italian and Spanish quarter was even more interesting. It was
farther round, on one of the steepest faces of the hill. The streets
seemed to share the characteristics of their occupants. They all
started out bravely from the level ground, ascended for a few energetic
blocks, then gave up the effort and appeared to lazily collapse in
a debris of unkempt houses and squalid yards. But no one seemed to
care. A tranquil indifference pervaded the quarter. Only the old
houses--grave, stucco-fronted dwellings, with long windows under
floriated cornices, and iron balconies skirting the upper stories--had
the air of looking out on this degradation of the once prosperous
region with the sad, patient dignity of a broken old age. Here and
there, too, stood those dwellings, relics of Spanish taste, which
maintain a secret and arresting suggestion of mystery. They are
ramparted from vulgar eyes by a high plaster wall, which, through a
curved archway, gives egress up a flight of steps. All is dark, mossy,
and quiet. Over the top of the wall great strands of ivy hang, and
only an angle of windowed roof rises above the sheltering cypress- and
pepper-trees.
But through decay, poverty, and dirt the love of beauty still spoke. It
met Viola's eye and gave her its message in the touch of green, in the
brilliant blossom that rejoiced in its existence on balcony-rail and
window-ledge. Flowers were the one ornament that was cheap. They hung
from windows, and stretched out frail blossoms from shadowed angles.
They grew bushily in glad luxuriance on sunny roofs, and put forth buds
of perfect beauty behind broken, grimy panes. When the sun touched them
they bloomed, bravely, splendidly, prodigally, giving forth their best.
Old verandas, sagging under their weight of decrepitude and household
overflow, held their gardens. In the most menacing of the alleys there
was the gleam of flower and leaf from starch- and soap-boxes on the
ledges below unwashed, unshuttered casements. Viola had seen children
leaning over the sills as they searched with pouting, busy gravity
for a bud to pluck; and sometimes she caught a glimpse of the coarse,
painted face of some humble Aspasia of the quarter bending over her
window-garden, where the flowers bloomed as luxuriantly for her as
they did for the children on the floors above.
With the advance of winter and its multiplying gaieties, Viola's
engagements at the florist's grew more and more frequent, her hours
longer. Her employer realized that she was a more than ordinarily
valuable acquisition, and constantly demanded the assistance of her
skill and taste. She was often detained till long after dark, when she
made a weary way up the hill to the cold dinner that had been awaiting
her since six o'clock. On one of these nights, at the beginning of the
rainy season, she walked past her destiny unseeing and unsuspecting.
It had been a lowering day. The clouds lying low and gray over the city
bulged with rain which did not fall. The wind was moist and sweet,
smelling as if it had blown over miles of rich earth, quick with
germinating seed. People were out with umbrellas, and the children as
they came home from school were protected by mackintoshes and rubbers.
* * * * *
Gault, walking up Kearney Street in the gray of the late afternoon,
observed his sister-in-law's coupé standing at the curb before a
popular confectioner's. As he approached, Letitia emerged from the
shop, her hands full of small boxes, and crossed the sidewalk to the
carriage. He encountered her half-way, and paused with her by the
carriage door for a moment's greeting. Gault did not see as much
of his brother's household as formerly. They knew of Viola Reed's
disappearance; and Letitia from delicacy and Maud from a sense of
guilty embarrassment refrained from urging him to reëstablish himself
on the old footing of careless intimacy.
He said now, in response to Letitia's query why he absented himself so
much, that he was getting old and had to go to bed early. "For beauty
sleep, you know," he added, looking at her with his eyes smiling behind
his glasses. "You don't need that, do you, Tishy? Hullo, there's the
rain!"
The first drops, swollen, slow, and reluctant, spotted the pavement.
The air felt curiously damp, and had a languid softness in its touch.
Letitia looked up at the low-hanging clouds, and a drop fell on her
cheek.
"Yes, there it is," she said. "Get in the carriage and come home to
dinner, John. No one will be there--just ourselves."
He said he had an engagement for dinner.
"Well, then, get in the carriage and drive with me down to South Park,
where I have a message to give a scrub-woman. I've got something I want
to say to you."
He obediently entered, and the coachman turned the horses' heads in the
direction of South Park.
The afternoon had suddenly darkened as if a pall had been unfurled
across the sky. The streets without had burst into a forest of
umbrellas, already shining, and agitated with curiously unsteady
movements as the bearers hurried this way and that. The rain was still
falling slowly, but the drops were large. A little flurry of wind
lashed the window with them as the coupé made its way through the mêlée
of vehicles and over the car-tracks at Lotta's Fountain. An eery,
yellowish light seemed to be diffusing itself from the horizon, and to
have crept along under the dark cope of the storm.
Letitia leaned forward, looking out at the figures of the passers-by,
butting against the wind with lowered umbrellas, and then jerking them
aside and giving a scared look up and down for a threatening car.
Gault, leaning back, could see her profile clearly defined against the
pale square of the window. On the little seat in front of them she had
dropped all her parcels, and a bunch of violets that she had thrust
into a convenience for that purpose filled the carriage with its soft
and subtle fragrance. Outside, the bells of the cars clanged furiously,
and at moments the rain was dashed against the window and then diverted.
"Well, Tishy," he said, "what's the communication you're going to
make? As far as I know, when a lady speaks solemnly of having an
important matter to impart, it only means one thing."
"What's that?" asked Letitia, without responding to the raillery of his
tone.
"That she is going to be married."
"Well, that's just it," she answered, and continued to look out of the
window.
"What?"
Gault leaned forward and tried to see what her face revealed. It was
handsome as ever, calm and imperturbable.
"That's just it," she repeated, turning toward him and letting her eyes
dwell gravely on his. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about."
"Tishy!" he ejaculated. "Why, you amaze me!"
"Why should I?" she queried. "Everybody gets married sometime or other."
"I know, but--who is it?"
"Tod McCormick."
"Oh, Letitia!" he exclaimed in quite a different tone--a man's tone of
sudden revolt and protest. "Tod McCormick?"
"Yes, of course, Tod McCormick. I should think you would have guessed
him in a minute."
"He's the last person I ever should have thought of."
"Well, isn't that odd! Everybody knows Tod's been fond of me. It's been
going on for years--five or six, I should think."
"A woman doesn't marry a man because he happens to be fond of her. She
marries a man because she happens to be fond of him."
"She sometimes does--if she's very lucky, and things turn out exactly
right. But things don't often turn out exactly right. Besides, I like
Tod."
"Yes--like him, of course. Everybody likes him. Maud likes him, and
Mortimer, and, I've no doubt, hundreds of other people. But liking's a
poor sort of thing to marry on. It's a bad substitute for love. A woman
ought to love the man she marries."
"Yes, I suppose she ought; and in novels she always does--unless she
hates him terribly. But in real life girls don't love or hate so
desperately as all that. We just go along easily, taking things as they
come."
"Why are you going to marry him, if you don't love him?" he asked in a
tone of irritation.
"I think it's better to marry. You see, there isn't really anything
else for a girl like me to do. Besides,--don't misunderstand me,--I
tell you I like him very much."
He ignored the remark and said:
"I don't see what you want to marry for at all. Wait till the right man
comes along."
"Oh, the right man!" she answered, with a little laugh which was the
nearest approach to a bitter laugh he had ever heard from her. "That's
what they keep telling us. But we may have met the right man, and he's
never found out that he was the right man, or perhaps hasn't felt that
we were the right woman."
"A man must be a fool if he can't see when a woman cares for him," he
answered.
For a moment Letitia looked silently out of the window; then she
continued, but without turning her head: "Men seem to think that women
can marry any one they want. We have to wait till we're asked. And the
men that ask us are not always the men that we would like the best.
Novelists would make you think a girl has nothing to do but make her
choice from dozens of suitors who are all crazy about her. But that's
not true--not in California, anyway. I've only had three real offers in
my life, and I've got money, and"--she made a little pause, and then
added bravely--"and I'm handsome."
Gault leaned forward, and, in a sudden élan of admiration for the
honest, simple, strong-hearted creature, took her hand.
"Dearest Tishy," he said, "don't do this. Don't make a hasty marriage
with a man who is--who is--not worthy of you."
Her hand remained motionless for a moment, and then she drew it away.
"Don't say that. Tod's quite worthy of me," she answered. "He's
a first-rate fellow, but you never liked him, and so you never
appreciated his good points. He's not good-looking, and that's made
people misunderstand him."
Gault smothered a groan, and she went on:
"You asked me why I wanted to marry at all. There's nothing else for a
woman in my position to do. I'm not bright. I can't do anything like
writing, or painting, or making statues. All I do now is to help Maud
when she has dinners, and talk to the dull people. And you know"--her
voice dropping to a key of naïve confidence--"I sometimes feel that I'd
like to have a home of my own--a house where I could do just what I
liked, and have the sort of people I liked to dinner. Maud doesn't care
for the kind of people I do."
"Why don't you have it, then? You're of age; you're financially
independent. You can do exactly what you like. You seem to forget that
this is the United States at the end of the nineteenth century."
"No, I don't forget; but that doesn't make it any easier for me. I
can't go off and live all by myself. And think what a fuss Mortimer
and Maud would make! It would drive Maud crazy if I did that. People
would say I'd quarreled with her, and she can't stand people saying
things like that. I don't like it, either. And it would hurt Mortimer's
feelings dreadfully. He'd think I wasn't happy with them. You couldn't
make him understand. Besides, I don't want to live in a house of my own
all alone. I'd die of the blues. Think how dismal I'd be with nobody
but servants and Chinamen!"
Gault looked out of the window near him and made no immediate response.
The appearance of squalor which marked the street was intensified by
the rain, which was now falling heavily. Already the pavements shone
with the greasiness of well-tramped mud. Miserable pedestrians, without
umbrellas and in scanty clothes, stood under the dripping projections
before show-windows, looking out with yellow, dejected faces. Others
plodded drearily onward, their heads lowered against the descending
flood. Women passed, with bare, red hands gripping at their sodden
skirts. In the depths of the dark interiors Gault had seen so often,
lights were being kindled that shone like small red sparks in the
thick, smothering gloom. Without turning from the window, he said:
"But why marry Tod? If you want liberty, a larger and more independent
life, why not choose some one else?"
Letitia was silent for a moment. Then she said in rather an offended
tone:
"There's nothing so dreadful about Tod. I don't like the way you speak
about him. It sounds as if he was idiotic or deformed. I like him more
than I do almost any one. I respect him, too. And then," she added, in
one of her uncontrollable bursts of candor, "there's nobody else wants
to marry me."
Gault gave an annoyed ejaculation. The carriage turned from the main
thoroughfare and began jolting over the cobbles of a paved street.
"Then wait till somebody better does," he said. "Heavens, Letitia! to
think of you, that I've always looked upon as a model of reason and
sense and intelligence, throwing yourself away like this, when five-ten
years from now will be time enough for you to marry."
"I'll be twenty-seven next month," replied Letitia, with her ruthless
regard for veracity.
The carriage here stopped at a high-stooped porch, and the coachman,
alighting, delivered Letitia's message. While they waited, silence
rested between its occupants, and continued when they were once more
rattling over the uneven cobbles toward the wider street they had
recently left.
Darkness had settled by this time, and the lamps were breaking out
in every direction, the long lines of the rain looking like threads
of glass against their light. The force of the storm was augmenting.
The drops beat on the top of the carriage with a drumming, pugnacious
violence, and now and then dashed across the window. There were already
pools in the hollows of the pavement, and from bent gutter-pipes long
ribbons of water, torn by the gusts, sprang down on unwary passers-by.
Letitia took her handkerchief and rubbed away the moisture on the
pane. She was looking out on the spectacle of the swimming streets
with apparent interest. The conversation had not been resumed. She
had nothing more to say, and Gault sat back in his corner immersed in
silent thought. Once he had asked her if her engagement to Tod was a
fully accomplished and recognized fact. To this she had replied that
it was not, exactly, as Tod was to receive her final answer on the
following Sunday, but that as far as she was concerned it was a settled
thing.
Leaning back in the darkened corner, Gault bitterly inveighed against
the social system which allows such a mismating; against the narrowing
laws of conventionality which had fettered so strong a spirit as
Letitia; above all, against that weakness of the woman which makes
life alone so impossible to her unsufficing and dependent spirit.
What a fate for this creature, so rich and tender in her splendid
womanhood! Letitia to make such a marriage--Letitia, whom nature had
designed to be some strong man's guide and solace, to be the queen of a
gracious home, the mother of tall sons and blooming daughters! It was a
sacrilege.
The carriage rolled out upon Market Street, amid a din of car-bells
and the roar of intersecting streams of traffic. The outlines of the
high newspaper buildings were hazy in the blur of the rain, but their
illuminated windows seemed dotting the sky far up toward the zenith,
where they burst into a splutter of lights. From every point cars
seemed to be advancing, with their lanterns shooting rays through the
wet, and stretches of pavement and pools of water gave forth sudden
gleams. The whole scene, lights magnified and outlines erased by the
rain, had a chaotic, broken effect of glaring radiance and softly dark,
looming vagueness.
Letitia again rubbed the window and leaned forward. Her companion
could see the outline of her head against the light, as if it were a
silhouette backgrounded with gold-leaf. Why should he not marry her?
Would he not be a better mate for her than the witless and sickly boy
to whom she intended binding her blooming youth, for whom she would
pour out the treasures of her heart and reveal the sacred places of a
nature that he could never understand or appreciate?
She did not care for Tod. Her very assertions of a liking for him
seemed to the man of the world proof of her indifference. He could make
her care for him. He was certain of it. He was certain that even now
she had more real affection for him--far removed from love though it
was--than she had for the brainless lad who next Sunday would be her
acknowledged fiancé.
What was the use of wasting a life in regrets for what was past, for
what was irrevocably gone? Alone, he would go drearily on, forever
dreaming of his lost paradise. He was so wretched in the isolation of
his own accusing loneliness! Life was slipping by him unlived. The
future loomed dark and terrible, bereft of hope and promise. He cowered
before its vast, cold emptiness. There was nothing that offered him a
refuge from its enveloping despair but an affection in which he could
forget the might-have-beens that now were unforgettable. The dreariness
of that long road would only be beguiled by a loved presence at his
side, a soft hand in his. And he would make Letitia happy--a thousand
times happier than she would be with Tod.
His thoughts reached an abrupt decision. He leaned forward.
"Letitia," he said, in a tone the low pitch of which did not conceal a
peremptory note.
"Yes," she answered rather listlessly, without turning from the window.
"I have something to say to you."
"Is it that you're going to be married, too?" she asked, smiling.
"No--at least, I don't know. Listen to me. I want--"
She checked him with a sudden cry, and leaned forward, staring out of
the window.
"Oh, John--wait! That girl! Did you see her? I'm almost sure it was
Viola Reed."
In an instant every thought of Letitia had vanished from his mind.
"Where?" he said. "What girl? Which way did she go?"
"Look out of the back window," said Letitia, greatly excited. "Do you
see her? A woman in black, walking quickly. I just caught a glimpse of
her side face as she moved her umbrella, and it looked very like."
Through the small back window Gault saw the woman--a slender figure in
black, the head bent forward under the fronting shield of her umbrella.
As she passed a lamp he saw the gleam of blond hair. She was walking so
rapidly that already she was some distance away. He pulled the strap,
and the carriage came to a jolting halt.
"Letitia," he said, turning toward her and trying to speak quietly,
"you'll excuse me, won't you? I'm going to get out. Yes, I'm going to
follow her--I must. I don't know whether it's she or not, but it may
be. Good night."
He was out and the door shut before Letitia could answer. As the
carriage rolled on she turned and through the window followed his
pursuing figure with eagerly interested eyes.
It was Viola. At the end of the block she turned into the florist's,
where she had agreed to come and spend the evening helping Miss Gladys
on some extra orders. She passed through the store into the room
beyond, and, donning her black apron, was soon busy. The two girls were
working and talking together when Gault stopped at the street door
and swept the flower-scented interior with a searching gaze. He had
done this at every shop on the block. Yet, though he went up and down,
hunting in every corner, in every darkened doorway where she might
possibly have sought shelter, she had disappeared as completely as if
the passing glimpse of her had been a vision.
Letitia had evidently made a mistake. Slowly through the rain Gault
walked home to his rooms.
It was two hours later when Viola started to leave the florist's. The
storm was raging with all the malignant intensity of driving rain and a
wind that lay in wait at corners and sprang upon the wayfarer. She made
part of her journey on the electric car, but the long climb up the hill
had to be accomplished on foot. About this high point the wind met few
obstacles, and swept by, shouting hoarsely in the joy of its freedom.
It played with Viola like a cat with a mouse--at one moment swept her
forward in a sail-like spread of skirt, at the next turned upon her,
buffeting her furiously back against the streaming walls, tearing at
her hat, driving the rain into her face, down her neck, up her sleeves.
It seized her umbrella and whisked it this way and that, while she held
its handle and helplessly followed its eccentric course. When half-way
up the hill she was forced to shut it, and then, angry with her for
thus terminating its sport, the wind concentrated its spiteful anger
upon her.
It blew steadily in her face, except at the moments when she crossed
an intersecting street. Then it seemed to blow from all points at
once, seizing her and shaking her, whirling her about, throwing her
against a gate or into the drenched, yielding leafage of a hedge, and
then creeping up behind her and beating against her with a force that
almost sent her on her face. Her clothes clung to her, saturated and
heavy, confining her limbs with their clammy hold. The water streamed
off her hat and oozed out of her shoes. Once she was forced to take
shelter on a door-step, under the jutting roof of a balcony. From this
she crept onward, clinging close to the walls, down which water ran in
wide rills, and where long strands of creepers struck her with their
wet leaves. Once in the cottage, she threw her clothes out of the
window on the balcony, and crept shivering to bed.
The storm wore itself away in the course of the week, to be followed
by an interval of bright weather, and then by other storms. There
were short ones, when the rain came and went with a sudden rolling
up of clouds and breaks of blue, and the sun burst out hopefully and
licked up the moisture. There were long ones, when the rain fell in
warm, rustling floods, copious but gentle, that assuaged the earth's
thirst and poured down in silvery lances from a low, swollen sky.
There were blustering ones, that lashed the windows and threshed
against the pavements, flooded the sewers, and tried to force an
entrance through opened casements and doors left ajar. And then the
great, conscientious, businesslike ones, which went on day after day,
oblivious of anything but their duty to thoroughly saturate the dry
ground far down through its parched crust to where the seeds lay
waiting for the moisture that was to give them life.
So the time wore on till Christmas began to loom close at hand, and all
the town was agog with its holiday shopping.
Maud Gault and Letitia splashed about the dripping streets in a hired
coupé, which returned from every trip full of packages. Mortimer
went alone to Shreve's and bought his wife and sister-in-law costly
surprises. John ordered his presents,--there were a good many of
them,--all but the beautiful turquoise clasp for Letitia, which he
selected himself. Tod gave his mother money to buy his sisters suitable
gifts, but took with him a friend of acknowledged taste when he went to
choose the necklet of small diamonds and emeralds that was to carry his
greetings to the fortunate Miss Mason.
On Christmas eve Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Gault gave a large dinner for
their sister, whose engagement to Mr. Theodore McCormick had been
announced a short time before. Society had often predicted this finale
to the attachment which it was known Mr. Theodore McCormick had long
cherished for Miss Mason. Society did not concern itself about Miss
Mason's sentiments on the subject. That Mr. Theodore McCormick was
the only son of Jerry McCormick, one of the richest of the bonanza
men, was supposed to be sufficient ground for Miss Mason to have been
pleased and flattered by his choice of herself. Society regarded her as
a very lucky girl.
John Gault had gone to this dinner reluctantly. The thought of
Letitia's marriage with Tod was as repulsive to him after a month
had familiarized his mind with it, as it had been on the day Letitia
told him of it. That the large-hearted girl, whose simple honesty of
nature he had learned long ago to respect and rely on, was to give the
freshness and beauty of her life to the feeble and half-bred son of a
day-laborer, seemed to him a sacrilege worthy of the days of Molech. He
had seen little of Letitia lately. When he had been at his brother's
she had generally been absent, staying at the McCormicks', or dining
elsewhere with Tod. Whatever her feelings for her fiancé were, Gault
saw that, with her unswerving obedience to convention and duty, she was
evidently doing her best to understand and grow fond of him.
To-night, however, at the dinner, he saw that a change had taken place
in her. It was so subtle, so illusive, so hard to define, that for a
space he watched her surreptitiously, wondering what it was. Yet even
as he shook hands with her in the moment of greeting, he saw it in
her face, he felt it radiating from her, like the warm individual
atmosphere that is said to encompass us and contain the color of our
personality.
Her eyes dwelt on his with a bright, soft inner look of happiness, but
happiness aloof and far away from him. The impersonal, cold sweetness
of her glance seemed to put him at a great distance, to herd him
together with all the hundred other casual people that she knew and
spoke to, and liked and forgot. Some mysterious influence had suddenly
withered their friendship. Its richness and reality were gone, and as
he met that sparkling, conscious, and yet distant glance, he realized
that Letitia was no longer his friend, nor yet his enemy, but from
henceforth would be the same Letitia to him that she was to his
brother, that she had once been to Tod.
She was in love with Tod McCormick. It was incredible, inconceivable,
but true. He saw it in the abashed and yet proud consciousness of her
manner to him, in her averted eye, in the indefinable softening of her
whole presence when the meager-visaged lad addressed her. Inside she
glowed with the consciousness of the developing of her life; but her
eyes only let a little of the inner light out in their shy shining.
That was why they had lost their look of a dear, comfortable intimacy
when they met his. Now they said that all that was over, a remnant
of freedom that must die with girlhood and its other relinquished
liberties. Everything belonged to some one else now--not love alone,
but interest, loyalty, confidence, duty. The rest of the world was
only to get that cool interest, that gentle, remote kindness, which is
the husk of the woman's heart. The kernel was for her mate. With her
maidenhood would end for Letitia all life but such as bore on the life
of her husband.
Gault had lost her, even as he had lost Viola. He had thought of
marriage removing her from the close, interested friendliness of the
old days, but he had never realized that it would wean her from him
with this cold completeness. She wore the semblance of the Letitia
of the past, with strange, bright, alien eyes, and a soft hand that
held his with the slack, indifferent clasp of polite acquaintance.
Women--would he ever understand them? Would any man? What mystery was
behind their white foreheads and under their white breasts?
A rush of unutterable sadness, of dreary, sick depression, overwhelmed
him. He was hardly able to respond intelligently to the conversational
inanities of Pearl, who sat beside him. A numbing consciousness of
the futility and hopelessness of life invaded him, and with it, in
the midst of the noise and glitter of the brilliant scene, a sense of
isolation and a yearning for the woman who, in this gay throng, would
have felt lonely as he, and have turned to him as her one soul-mate.
Suppose to-night she had been waiting for him in the bare parlor down
near South Park!
A sudden resolve seized upon him. As soon as dinner was over he excused
himself to Mrs. Gault and Letitia, hurried on his overcoat, and slipped
away.
It had been raining all day--the warm, abundant rain of late December.
The breath of the night was softly damp, and fragrant with scents from
the saturated gardens. The avenue was deserted and noiseless, save for
the even rustle of the falling flood, which made the asphalt shine
like ice, into which the lamps' reflections stabbed in long, broken
poniards. Nobody was abroad. It was Christmas eve. There were wreaths
in the lighted windows, and sounds of singing now and then fell upon
Gault's ear.
He boarded the car which crossed the avenue farther down, and sat
in the glare of its lamps, his face fallen into lines of spiritless
apathy. When it reached its terminus he alighted.
There were life and movement enough here. People were jostling on the
sloppy sidewalks; umbrellas struck against umbrellas, sometimes, in
an elbow-brushing contact, caught together, and were dragged apart
with a spattering of moisture over laughing faces. The rain dripped
monotonously down on them, between them, across the glare of windows,
over the rheumy halo of lamps, off the cope of cornices and the angles
of gutters. The even roar of Market Street was broken into by the deep
voices of hilarious men and the shrill notes of women. Raucous laughter
was interrupted by the sudden petulant wail of tired children. Over all
the light of show-windows poured in a steady glare, unsoftened by the
veil of rain. It was reflected from innumerable wet surfaces, uncovered
faces that were moist, draperies beaded with drops, bits of sidewalk,
pools in little hollows, and the black and gleaming bosses of hundreds
of umbrellas.
Gault, unheeded and unheeding, hurried through the press, crossed
Market Street, and plunged into the region beyond. There were crowds
here too, and lights and laughter, brilliant windows that sent gushes
of raw radiance across the sidewalks, and Christmas shoppers as busy as
those on the other side of the city's great dividing artery. Even in
the old street, among the brooding palaces, there was a faint show of
life. In one there were lights in the second-story windows. Against the
ground-glass panels in the massive front door of another the circular
forms of two wreaths were outlined. The iron gate of its bulky neighbor
grated grudgingly to give egress to an expressman carrying parcels.
In the smaller streets down which he had so often passed, the windows
were alight and, according to the gracious custom of the time, the
blinds were undrawn. Sometimes he had a glimpse of darkling interiors,
where, alone and glittering frostily in its fairy trimmings, the tree
stood, not to be revealed until the morrow. But in many homes they
were keeping Christmas eve. The rifled branches, sparkling even in
their despoilment, were a-wink with candles. The children clustered
about, some flushed and excited, others sitting solemnly among their
presents, examining them with grave and pouting intentness. There were
mothers with sleeping babies in their arms, and fathers explaining
the mechanism of wondrous, uncomprehended toys. They were the city's
humblest and least prosperous homes; yet, hidden by the veil of night,
a man, rich in all they lacked, stood staring in at them, wistful,
heart-hungry, and envious.
He turned the last corner, and the small shape of the colonel's old
house defined itself among the surrounding buildings. In the kindly
dark it looked as it used to, and he approached slowly, letting his
gaze wander over its façade and dwell on the homely bulge of the
bay-window, whence, as of old, light broke in cracks and splinters
on the small panes of glass on either side of the front door, on the
steps, and the porch that used to sag down to one side, and the gate
between its squat brick posts.
There was no one on the street, but a block away he could hear the
measured tread of Policeman O'Hara on his customary beat from the
saloon at the corner to the saloon in the middle of the block. Beyond
this there was nothing but the whispering fall of the rain and its
warm breath. Then, as he drew nearer, he passed into an atmosphere of
delicate, illusive sweetness that told him the jasmine-tree by the gate
was in flower. It recalled vividly other times when he had come--but
not to stand outside this way, a stranger in the rain.
He advanced slowly. The street was deserted; no one was there to spy
upon him. What would he have felt if to-night he had known she was
there, and he was coming to see her--coming like a lover to see her,
when the door opened to feel her little hand cold in his, and her
lips softly respond to his welcoming kiss--the kiss that had never
been given, that was never now to be returned! He would not pass by,
but would stop at the gate just for a moment, and dream that she was
waiting. He paused, and then started with a suppressed exclamation.
Some one was standing close in front of him in the shadow of the
jasmine-tree, and almost concealed by its foliage. He could not see
whether the figure was that of a man or woman, could only trace the
outline of a form through the darkness and rain. Whoever it was, he
had not been heard,--the fall of the rain muffling other sounds,--and
he was now close at hand. As he stood, undecided whether to pass on or
turn back, the figure made a stealthy movement with its arm--appeared
to part the flexible jasmine branches and through the aperture look at
the house. The head was thus presented to Gault in partial profile,
spotted over with the moving lights that filtered between the leaves.
He saw it was a woman's, crowned with some sort of small, close hat.
She seemed to be watching the house. The light caught the curve of her
cheek; it was gleaming with moisture.
"She must be soaking," he thought, "with no umbrella," and made a step
forward.
She heard and started, and, still mechanically holding the branches
back, turned and looked at him. For one moment, like a memory from
another life, he saw her face in the light.
"Viola!" he cried, as a man might cry to whom the beloved dead stood
suddenly revealed.
She gave a gasping ejaculation and let go the branches. In the
sudden blotting out of the light he lost her, and, in his terror and
superstitious dread, he thought he had seen a vision.
"Viola," he cried again, "stay with me! love me! forgive me! I've
prayed for you--I've longed for you--I've died for you! Don't leave me
now! There is no life for me without you!"
She came forward beyond the dark shadow of the tree, and the light
shone full on her. He might still have thought her a vision, for her
face was transfigured with a look that seemed hardly of this earth. But
the woman that he held in his arms was warm with life, the lips against
his gave back his kiss.
A few moments later Policeman O'Hara, having extended his beat beyond
the saloons, saw what he supposed to be a single figure standing
opposite Robson's house under a dripping umbrella. As he approached,
it suddenly resolved itself into two figures, and walked away from him
under the umbrella.
"Well, I'll be jiggered!" murmured the bewildered policeman. "Have I
got it that bad so early in the evenin'?"
And judging that his case was gone too far for help, he dropped into
another saloon.
The two figures under the one umbrella walked down the street, out and
away through the rain, seeing nothing but the vistas of glory which
open before those who for one moment stand upon the pinnacle of life.
Transcriber's Note:
Minor changes have been made to regularize hyphenation and correct
obvious typesetter errors. Variant spellings have been retained.