During the following week Don Roberto was very ill. The doctor came
three times a day. Mrs. Yorba and Magdaléna sat up on alternate nights.
Mr. Polk was constantly at the bedside. When he retired to snatch an
hour's sleep, Don Roberto's temperature became alarming; of the presence
of his wife and daughter he took no notice whatever.
As the ego must enter into all things, Magdaléna, despite her alarm and
pity, was grateful for the diversion. The interview with her father had
roused her abruptly and finally; and during that night her misery had
raged in every part of her. It is true that in the long watches thought
fairly stamped in her brain, but it was rudely brushed aside every
little while by the imperious wants of the sick man, or the whispered
remarks of the professional nurse. At other times she slept heavily or
received the numerous friends who came to inquire for the eminent
citizen who had dined out too often during the gayest season in many
years.
Don Roberto recovered, and his convalescence was as memorable as his
previous social activity. No nurse would remain more than thirty-six
hours at any price; and even his wife, whose ideas of marital duty were
as rigid as her social code, lost her patience upon one occasion and
rated him soundly. Mr. Polk was the only person he treated with common
decency. As for Magdaléna, he might have been a sultan and she his
meanest slave. But Magdaléna was rather pleased than otherwise. Her
conscience had flagellated her as the immediate cause of his illness,
and she strove by every act of devotion to make amends.
As soon as he was sufficiently recovered, he was taken, in a special
car, to Fair Oaks, to absorb the sun on his spacious verandahs.
Magdaléna had asked the doctor to order Southern California, but the
order had been received with such a roar of fury that the subject was
not resumed. Magdaléna was forced to return to Menlo Park.
She spent the night walking the floor of her room, struggling for
endurance to face the places eloquent of Trennahan. There were so many
of them! Helena simply would not have returned; no power short of
physical force could have compelled her. More than once Magdaléna wished
that she was cast in her friend's anarchic mould. She felt that did her
grip upon herself relax she should scream aloud and grovel on the very
boards that had had their share in her brief love-life. But she was
Magdaléna Yorba, the proudest woman in California; in the very hour of
her discovery, when she had been possessed of a blind terror rather than
grief, she had remembered to be thankful that the world could not pity
her. Even the genuine sympathy of Tiny would have been gall in a raw
wound. She was looking thinner and plainer than ever, but her father's
illness would account for that. She must set her features in steel and
lock them, keep her emotions for the night.
The next day she visited every spot associated with Trennahan,--not
once, but many times. She had made up her mind with the right instinct
that the thing to do was to blunt her sensibilities. By the third day
she had ordered the earlier associations on duty, and managed to confuse
them somewhat with those which had held possession for so brief a time.
She was determined to succeed. She had no right to love the husband of
another woman, and suffering was something so much more terrible than
anything her imagination had ever hinted that she was frantic to get rid
of the load as quickly as possible. By and by she would go back to her
writing; and that, and her duties, should be every bit of her life
henceforth.
At the end of a week she discovered that she was still receptive to the
æsthetic delights. It was early spring. The soft air caressed the
senses, perfumed with violet and lilac, Castilian roses, new clover, and
the breath of mountain forests, brought on the long sighs of the wind.
Never was there such a _bouquet_ since Time began. Over a high bush on
the lawn opposite her window the long "bridal wreaths" tumbled. The
meadows were full of mustard, the bright green leaves hardly visible, so
thick were the yellow blossoms.
Once she rode to the foot-hills, escorted by Dick. They were covered
with yellow and purple lupins, miniature jungles which harboured nothing
more sanguinary than the gopher and the cotton-tail. The tawny poppies
had hills all to themselves, a blaze of colour as fiery as the sun to
which they lifted their curved drowsy lips. The Mariposa lilies grew by
the creeks, in the dark shade of meeting willows. The gold-green moss
was like plush on the trees. From the hills the great valley looked like
a dense forest out of which lifted the tower of an enchanted castle. Not
another signal of man was to be seen, nothing but the excrescence on the
big wedding-cake house of a Bonanza king. Beyond the hills rose the
slopes of the mountains, with their mighty redwoods, their dark
untrodden aisles, their vast primeval silences. Magdaléna was thankful
that Nature had not ceased to be beautiful, and pressed her hands
against her heart to stifle its demand; Nature commands union, and has
no sympathy for aching solitude.
Meanwhile Don Roberto was recovering rapidly. From the hour that he
could walk briskly about the garden his voluble irascibility left him,
and he reverted to something more than his old taciturnity; he rarely
opened his mouth except to put the plainest of food into it, even to
speak to Mr. Polk. His brows were lowered constantly over heavy brooding
eyes; his lips seemed set with a spring. When he finally addressed his
wife, it was to tell her that she must manage with one butler and one
housemaid. Coincidently he dismissed two of the gardeners and commanded
the one retained, and Dick, to plant in a part of the lawns that there
might be less water used. Himself came from town every evening and
worked in the garden for two hours, besides arising at five in the
morning and working until breakfast. He sold his finest carriage horses
to Mr. Geary; and when one of the two remaining was temporarily
disabled, he rode to and from the station in the spring wagon. The
monthly allowance of his wife and daughter was suspended for the summer.
Mrs. Yorba, tall, garbed in black, stalked about the house with the
expression of an outraged empress; Magdaléna, being the cause of the
outrage, was rarely addressed. She ostentatiously made over several of
her old frocks and coldly requested her daughter to make her own bed.
She kept all the windows in the house, with the exception of one in each
room, closed and shuttered, as she was deprived of both service and
water. The house seemed perpetually expectant of funeral guests, its
silence only broken by Mrs. Yorba's heavy sighs.
Magdaléna had certainly succeeded in making three people miserable; she
could only hope that she had been more fortunate with the other two. She
spent most of her time out of doors, riding or walking until her
strength was exhausted. She was profoundly grateful that she was to take
little part in the socialities of the summer. To dance and picnic and
tennis and ride to the hills, exactly as she had done when quite another
person! She infinitely preferred the disapproval of her parents and the
freedom they gave her.