TRANSPLANTED
BY MRS. ATHERTON
Historical
The Conqueror
A few of Hamilton’s Letters
California: _An Intimate History_
War Book
The Living Present
Fiction
_California_
Rezánov
The Doomswoman
The Splendid Idle Forties (_1800-46_)
A Daughter of the Vine (_The Sixties_)
Transplanted (_The Eighties_)
The Californians (_Companion Volume to Transplanted_)
A Whirl Asunder (_The Nineties_)
Ancestors (_Present_)
The Valiant Runaways; A Book for Boys (_1840_)
_In Other Parts of the World_
The Avalanche
The White Morning
Mrs. Balfame
Perch of the Devil (_Montana_)
Tower of Ivory (_Munich and England_)
Julia France and Her Times (_B. W. I. and England_)
Rulers of Kings (_Austria, Hungary and the Adirondacks_)
The Travelling Thirds (_Spain_)
The Gorgeous Isle (_Nevis, B. W. I._)
Senator North (_Washington_)
Patience Sparhawk and Her Times (_California and New York_)
The Aristocrats (_The Adirondacks_)
The Bell in the Fog (_Short Stories of various Climes and Places_)
TRANSPLANTED
A NOVEL
_By_ GERTRUDE ATHERTON
_Author of “The Conqueror,”
“Tower of Ivory,” etc._
[Illustration]
NEW YORK: DODD, MEAD
AND COMPANY 1919
COPYRIGHTED, 1898
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
As “American Wives and English Husbands”
New and revised edition
Copyrighted, 1919
By Gertrude Atherton
_TO
THE LADIES OF RUE GIROT
BOIS GUILLAUME_
TRANSPLANTED
TRANSPLANTED
[Illustration]
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
Mrs. Hayne’s boarding-house stood on the corner of Market Street and
one of those cross streets which seem to leap down from the heights of
San Francisco and empty themselves into the great central thoroughfare
that roars from the sandy desert at the base of Twin Peaks to the
teeming wharves on the edge of the bay. On the right of Market Street,
both on the hills and in the erratic branchings of the central plain,
as far as the eye can reach, climbs and swarms modern prosperous San
Francisco; of what lies beyond, the less said the better. On the left,
at the far southeast, the halo of ancient glory still hovers about
Rincon Hill,[A] growing dimmer with the years: few of the many who made
the social laws of the Fifties cling to the old houses in the battered
gardens; and their children marry and build on the gay hills across the
plain. In the plain itself is a thick-set, low-browed, dust-coloured
city; “South of Market Street” is a generic term for hundreds of
streets in which dwell thousands of insignificant beings, some of whom
promenade the democratic boundary line by gaslight, but rarely venture
up the aristocratic slopes. By day or by night Market Street rarely
has a moment of rest, of peace; it is a blaze of colour, a medley of
sound, shrill, raucous, hollow, furious, a net-work of busy people and
vehicles until midnight is over. Every phase of the city’s manifold
life is suggested there, every aspect of its cosmopolitanism.
To a little girl of eleven, who dwelt on the third floor of Mrs.
Hayne’s boarding-house, Market Street was a panorama of serious study
and unvarying interest. She knew every shop window, in all the mutable
details of the seasons, she had mingled with the throng unnumbered
times, studying that strange patch-work of faces, and wondering if
they had any life apart from the scene in which they seemed eternally
moving. In those days Market Street typified the world to her; although
her school was some eight blocks up the hill it scarcely counted. All
the world, she felt convinced, came sooner or later to Market Street,
and sauntered or hurried with restless eyes, up and down, up and down.
The sun rose at one end and set at the other; it climbed straight
across the sky and went to bed behind the Twin Peaks. And the trade
winds roared through Market Street as through a mighty cañon, and the
sand hills beyond the city seemed to rise bodily and whirl down the
great way, making men curse and women jerk their knuckles to their
eyes. On summer nights the fog came and banked there, and the lights
shone through it like fallen stars, and the people looked like wraiths,
lost souls condemned to wander unceasingly.
When Mrs. Tarleton was too ill to be left alone, Lee amused herself
watching from above the crush and tangle of street cars, hacks,
trucks, and drays for which the wide road should have been as wide
again, holding her breath as the impatient or timid foot-passengers
darted into the transient rifts with bird-like leaps of vision and
wild deflections. Occasionally she assumed the part of chorus for her
mother, who regarded the prospect beneath her windows with horror.
“Now! She’s started--_at last_! Oh! _what_ a silly! Any one could have
seen that truck with half an eye. She turned back--_of course_! Now!
Now! she’s got to the middle and there’s a funeral just turned the
corner! She can’t get back! She’s got to go on. Oh, she’s got behind
a man. I wonder if she’ll catch hold of his coat-tails? There--she’s
safe! I wonder if she’s afraid of people like she is of Market Street?”
“If I ever thought you crossed that street at the busy time of the
day, honey, I should certainly faint or have hysterics,” Mrs. Tarleton
was in the habit of remarking at the finish of these thrilling
interpretations.
To which Lee invariably replied: “I could go right across without
stopping, or getting a crick in my neck either; but I don’t, because I
wouldn’t make you nervous for the world. I go way up when I want to
cross and then turn back. It’s nothing like as bad.”
“It is shocking to think that you go out at all unattended; but what
cannot be cannot, and you must have air and exercise, poor child!”
Lee, who retained a blurred, albeit rosy impression of her former
grandeur, was well pleased with her liberty; and Mrs. Tarleton was not
only satisfied that any one who could take such good care of her mother
was quite able to take care of herself, but, so dependent was she on
the capable child, that she was frequently oblivious to the generation
they rounded. Mrs. Tarleton was an invalid, and, although patient,
she met her acuter sufferings unresistingly. Lee was so accustomed
to be roused in the middle of the night that she had learned to make
a poultice or heat a kettle of water while the receding dreams were
still lapping at her brain. She dressed her mother in the morning and
undressed her at night. She frequently chafed her hands and feet by
the hour; and cooked many a dainty Southern dish on the stove in the
corner. Miss Hayne, who had a sharp red nose and the anxious air of
protracted maidenhood, but whose heart was normal, made it her duty to
fetch books for the invalid from the Mercantile Library, and to look in
upon her while Lee was at school.
Lee brushed and mended her own clothes, “blacked” her boots with a
vigorous arm, and studied her lessons when other little girls were
in bed. Fortunately she raked them in with extreme rapidity, or Mrs.
Tarleton would have made an effort and remonstrated; but Lee declared
that she must have her afternoons out-of-doors when her mother was well
and companioned by a novel; and Mrs. Tarleton scrupulously refrained
from thwarting the girl whose narrow childhood was so unlike what her
own had been, so unlike what the fairies had promised when Hayward
Tarleton had been the proudest and most indulgent of fathers.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] This was written before the earthquake and fire of 1906.