Twenty-three years before the opening of this desultory tale its heroine
was born on the island of Santa Catalina, a fragment of Southern
California. Her father had begun life as a professor of classics in a
worthy Eastern college, but, his health breaking down, he betook himself
and his small patrimony to the State which electrifies the nerves in its
northern half and blunts them in its southern. Jonathan Shore wrote to
his cousin, Lyman T. Moulton:
“I haven’t a nerve left with a point on it; have recovered some
measure of health and lost what little ambition I ever possessed. I am
going to open an inn for sportsmen on the island of Santa Catalina, so
that I shall be reasonably sure of the society of gentlemen and make
enough money to replenish my library now and then—my books are on the
way. Here I remain for the rest of my natural life.”
But he crossed over to Los Angeles occasionally. At a soirée he met the
daughter—and only child—of one of the largest landholders in Southern
California, and danced with no one else that night. She married the
scholarly innkeeper with the blessing of her father, who was anxious to
pass his declining years in peace with a young wife. The bride, for
coincident if not similar reasons, was glad to move to Catalina. She was
the belle of her time, this Madelina Joyce, and her dark beauty came
down to her from Indian ancestors. Her New England great-grandfather had
come to California long before the discovery of gold, bought, for a
fraction, two hundred thousand acres from the Mexican government, and
married, despite the protests of his Spanish friends, an Indian girl of
great beauty, both of face and character.
The Pueblo bride had lived but two years to receive the snubs of the
haughty ladies of Santa Barbara, her ardent young husband had shot
himself over her grave, and the boy was brought up by the padres of the
mission. Fortunately, he came to man’s estate shortly before the United
States occupation, and managed to save a portion of his patrimony from
the most rapacious set of scoundrels that ever followed in the wake of a
victorious army. This in turn descended to his son, who, in spite of
Southern indolence and a hospitality as famous as his cellar, his
liberal appreciation of all the good things of life, and a half-dozen
lawsuits, still retained fifty thousand of the ancestral acres, and had
given his word to his daughter that they should go to her unencumbered.
This promise he kept, and when Catalina was ten years old he died, at
good-will with all the world. His widow moved to San Francisco with her
freedom and her liberal portion, and Mrs. Shore announced that she must
give the ranch her personal attention. The ten years had been happy, for
the husband and wife loved each other and were equally devoted to their
beautiful, unsmiling baby. But there were deep wells of laughter in Mrs.
Shore, and much energy. She wept for her father, but welcomed the change
in her life, not only because she had reached the age when love of
change is most insistent, but because she had begun to dread the hour of
confession that life on an island, even with the man of one’s choice,
was insufficient.
Mr. Shore himself was not averse to change so long as it did not take
him out of California, although he refused to sell the little property
on the island where he had spent so many happy years.
From the hour Mrs. Shore settled down in the splendid old adobe
ranch-house she watched no more days lag through her fingers. Attended
by Catalina she rode over some portion of the estate every day, and if a
horse had strayed or a cow had calved she knew it before her indolent
vaqueros. She personally attended, each year, to the sheep-shearing and
the cattle-branding, the crops and the stock sales. Once a year she gave
a great barbecue, to which all within a radius of a hundred miles were
invited, and once a week she indulged herself in the gossip, the shops,
and the dances of Santa Barbara.
In the vast solitude of the ranch Catalina grew up, carefully educated
by her father, petted and indulged by her mother, hiding from the
society that sought Mrs. Shore, but friendly with the large army of
Mexican and Indian retainers. When she was persuaded by her mother to
attend a party in Santa Barbara she rooted herself in a corner and
glowered in her misery, snubbing every adventurous youth that approached
her. She adored books, her out-door life, her parents, and asked for
nothing further afield.
When she was eighteen her father died. She rode to the extreme confines
of the ranch and mourned him, returning to her life at home with the
stolidity of her Indian ancestors. Mrs. Shore grieved also, but by this
time she was too busy a woman to consort with the past. Moreover, she
was now at liberty to take Catalina to San Francisco and give her the
proper tutors in languages and music. Incidentally, she made many new
friends and enjoyed with all her vivid nature the life of a city which
she had visited but twice before. She returned in the following winter
and extended her fame as a hostess. Catalina found San Francisco society
but little more interesting than that of the South, and enjoyed the
reputation of being as rude as she was beautiful. Here, however, her
Indian ancestress had her belated revenge. Her brief and tragic story
cast a radiant halo about the indifferent Catalina, whose strain of
aboriginal blood was extolled as the first cause in a piquant and
original beauty; all her quaint eccentricities—which were merely the
expression of a proud and reticent nature anxious to be let alone—were
traced to the same artless source, and when one day in the park she
sprang from her horse and shook the editor of a personal weekly until
his teeth rattled in his head, her unique reputation was secure.
The greater part of the year was spent on the ranch. Mrs. Shore loved
the world, but she was a woman of business above all things, and
determined that the ranch should be a splendid inheritance for her
child. Her time was closer than she knew. In all the vigor of her middle
years, with the dark radiance of her beauty little dimmed, and an almost
pagan love of mere existence, she was done to death by a bucking
mustang, unseated for the first time since she had mounted a horse, and
kicked beyond recognition.
Catalina resolutely put the horror of those days behind her, and for
several months was as energetic a woman of business as her mother had
been. She was mistress of a great tract of land, of herself, her time,
her future. When her stoical grief for her mother subsided she found
life interesting and stimulating. She rode about the ranch in the
morning, or conferred with her lawyer, who drove out once a week; the
afternoons she spent in the great court of the old house, with its stone
fountain built by the ancestors who had learned their craft from the
mission fathers, its palms and banana-trees, its old hollyhocks and
roses. Here she read or dreamed vaguely of the future. What she wanted
of life beyond this dreaming Southern land, where only an earthquake
broke the monotony, was as vague of outline as her mountains under their
blue mists, but its secrets were a constant and delightful well of
perplexity. For two years she was contented, and at times, when
galloping down to the sea in the early dawn, the old moon, bony and
yellow, sinking to its grave in the darkest canyon of the mountain, and
the red sun leaping from the sea, she was supremely happy.
Then, in a night, discontent settled upon her. She wanted change,
variety; she wanted to see the world—Europe above all things; and when
her Eastern relatives, with whom she corresponded, in obedience to a
last request of her father, again pressed her to visit them, and
mentioned that they were contemplating a trip abroad, she started on
three hours’ notice, leaving the ranch in charge of a trusted overseer
and the executors of her mother’s will.
She found her relatives living in a suburb of New York, their social
position very different from that her mother had given her in
California. Nothing saved them from the narrow routine of the suburban
middle class but the intellectual proclivities of Mr. Moulton, who was
reader for a publishing house and the literary adviser of the
pseudo-intellectual. Through the constant association of his name with
moral and non-sensational fiction, his well-balanced attitude of piety
tinctured by humor, the pleasant style with which he indited
irreproachable and elevated platitudes, his stern and invariable
denunciation of the unorthodox in religion, in ideas, and in style, and
his genially didactic habit of telling his readers what they wished to
hear, he had achieved the rank of a great critic. As he really was an
estimable man and virtuous husband, of agreeable manners, sufficiently
hospitable, and extremely careful in choosing his friends, his position
in the literary world was quite enviable. The great and the safe took
tea on his lawn, and if the great and unsafe laughed at both the tea and
the critic that was the final seal of their unregeneracy.
When Catalina arrived, after lingering for a fortnight in Boston with a
friend she had made on the train, she liked him at once, unjustly
despised Mrs. Moulton, who was the best of wives and copied her
husband’s manuscripts, hated Jane, and recognized in Lydia a human being
in whom one could find a reasonable amount of companionship, in spite of
the magnetism of the mirror—or even the polished surface of a panel—for
her complacent eyes. Lydia was innocently vain, and, being the beauty of
the family, believed herself to be very beautiful indeed. She always
made a smart appearance, and was frankly desirous of admiration. Like
many family beauties, she had a strong will and was reasonably clever.
When the first opportunity to go to Europe arrived she had reached what
she called a critical point in her life. She confided to Catalina that
she was becoming morbidly tired of mere existence and hated the sight of
every literary man she knew, particularly the young ones.
“Of course, they are more or less the respectable hangers-on that give
us the benefit of their society,” she said, gloomily. “Those that scurry
about writing little stories for the magazines and weekly papers—it
seems to me a real man might find something better to do. We know all
the big ones, but they are too busy to come out here often, and father
sees them at the Century and Authors’ clubs, anyhow. We hardly know a
man who isn’t a publisher, an editor, or a writer of something or
other—perhaps an occasional artist. For my part, I’d give my immortal
soul to be one of those lucky girls that go to Mrs. Astor’s parties;
that’s my idea of life. If a millionaire would only fall in love with
me—or any old romance, for that matter!”
“Have you never been in love?” asked Catalina, afraid of the sound of
her own voice but deeply interested.
“Not the least little bit, more is the pity. I wouldn’t mind even being
heart-broken for a while.”
It was this frankness that endeared her to Catalina. “Jane is third
rate, and tries to conceal the fact from herself and others by an
affectation of such of the literary galaxy as make the least appeal to
the popular taste, and cousin Lyman is no critic,” she informed herself
three days after her arrival. “Cousin Miranda is just one of those
American women who are invalids for no reason but because they want to
be, and I suppose even Lydia would get on my nerves in time. Thank
Heaven, when they do I can leave at a moment’s notice.”
After four months of the friction of travel, Catalina had half hoped her
relatives would reject her startling proposal and abandon her to a
future full of dangers and freedom.