Caro married her Englishman, and on a thriving grape-farm entertained
other Englishmen. Rose went East and triumphantly captured a Baltimorean
of distinguished lineage and depleted exchequer. Tiny went to Europe
again. Magdaléna was practically alone. Her father still lived in his
two rooms downstairs and never spoke to anyone but Ah Kee. Once he
forgot to close his study door, and Magdaléna, who happened to be
passing, paused and looked at him. His face had shrunken and was crossed
with a thousand fine and eccentric lines; like the palm of a man singled
out for a career of trouble. He had let his hair and beard grow, and he
looked uncouth and dirty.
Mrs. Yorba still read novels. She no longer paid calls, for her
allowance, now reduced to fifty dollars a year, was quite inadequate to
meet the requirements of a dignified member of society. She received her
few intimate and faithful friends in her bedroom; the first floor was
never dusted nor aired. The house smelt musty and deserted; the lower
rooms were as cold and damp as underground caverns; the spiders spun
unheeded; when the front door was opened, the festoons in the hall swung
like hammocks. Even the gloom of the house seemed to accentuate with the
years. Magdaléna wondered if the inside of the old Polk house looked any
more haunted than this; and even the Belmont house was acquiring an
expression of pathos, peculiar to desertion in old age. Magdaléna
fancied that the three houses must be pointed out to visitors as the
sarcophagi of the futile ambitions of three Californian millionaires.
In her own rooms she toiled on, absorbed in her work, loving it with the
beggared passion of her nature, experiencing two or three moments of
creative ecstasy and many hours of dull discouragement. She wrote her
stories and rewrote them; then again, and again. Her critical faculty
took long strides ahead of her creative power, and she rarely ceased to
be uneasy at the disparity between her work and her ideals. But
Trennahan had said that it would be ten years before she could attain
excellence, and she was willing to serve a harder apprenticeship than
this. Had it not been for her work and the books of those who had
climbed the heights and slept beneath the stars, she might have become
morbid and melancholy in her unnatural surroundings. But although the
monotony of her life was never broken by a day in the country, she had
always the beauty of bay and hill and sky beyond her window; and there
are certain months in the spring and autumn when San Francisco is as
lovely and brilliant as the southern shores of California. The trades
are hibernating in the caves of the Pacific, and the fogs exist only in
the spray of the ponderous waves. On such days and evenings Magdaléna
sat for hours on her little balcony, forgetting her work, dreaming idly.
It was inevitable, in her purely mental and imaginative life, that she
should apprehend in Trennahan the lover again. She wove her own romance
as ardently and consecutively as that of any of her heroines. In time he
would forget Helena; his love for her had been one of those sudden
insane passions of which she had read,--which she tried to depict in her
Southland tales,--and in time it would fall from him, and he would hear
the tinkle of the chain forged in long hours of perfect sympathy. They
would both be older and wiser and more sad: the better, perhaps.
Loneliness and the peculiar circumstances of her life inclined her to
borderland sympathies; she believed that if he died suddenly she should
become immediately aware of the fact.
Her love for Trennahan by no means interfered with her literary
ambitions. All others had failed her; she knew now that with the best of
opportunities she should never have cut a brilliant figure in society.
But she did not care; letters were a far more glorious goal. Helena
adored great military heroes, great imperialists like Clive and
Hastings, even great tyrants like Napoleon. Herself reverenced the great
names in literature, and could think of no destiny so exalted as to be
enrolled among them. And if she succeeded, what would have mattered
these long years of dull loneliness, of denial of all that is dear to
the heart of a girl? Sometimes she even thought the tarrying of
Trennahan mattered little; for there is no tyrant so jealous as Art.
Once she read her stories aloud to her mother; and Mrs. Yorba was
pleased to observe that they were much better than she could have
expected, but that on the whole she preferred "The Duchess." She had
grown quite fond of her daughter, and often sat in her room while she
wrote. The intimacy and isolation of the two women had made it easy and
natural for Magdaléna to confide in her mother, but she was forced to
confess that she had not inherited her critical faculty from her
maternal parent. Nevertheless, she was glad of the meagre encouragement
and plodded on.