Produced by Al Haines
[Illustration: Cover art]
[Frontispiece: Looking up at her I felt she had won.]
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR
BY
LUCIA CHAMBERLAIN
Author of
THE COAST OF CHANCE
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HERMAN PFEIFER
New York
GROSSET & DUNLAP
Publishers
COPYRIGHT 1909
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
MAY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
PROLOGUE--THE CITY
I THE BASKET OF MUSHROOMS
II THE EVIDENCE
III THE RUMORS
IV THE FIRST DAY IN COURT
V THE SECOND DAY IN COURT
VI THE SPANISH WOMAN'S HOUSE
VII THE REFUGE
VIII THE LAST DAY OF THE TRIAL
IX THE CONCEALMENT
X A LIGHT IN THE DARK
XI THE LUGGER
EPILOGUE--TWO YEARS
ILLUSTRATIONS
Looking up at her I felt she had won. . . . . . _Frontispiece_
"What's the matter, child?" father said.
I tried to make myself look as pretty as possible.
[Transcriber's note: A fourth illustration was missing from the book.]
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR
PROLOGUE
THE CITY
The city is always gray. Even in March, the greenest month of all,
when the Presidio, and the Mission Hills, and the islands in the bay
are beautiful with spring, there's only such a little bit of green gets
into the city! It lies in the lap of five hills, climbing upward
toward their crests where the trees are all doubled and bent by the
trade-wind. It seems to give its own color to the growing things in
it. The cypress hedges are dusty black; the eucalyptus trees are gray
as the house fronts they knock against, and even the plaza grass looks
dark and old, as if it had been the same grass always, and never came
up new in the spring.
But for the most part there are no trees, and only the finest places
have gardens. There are only rows and rows of houses painted gray,
with here and there a white one, or a glass conservatory front. But
the fog and dust all summer gray these, too, and when the trade-winds
blow hard it takes the smoke out over the east bay, and makes that as
gray as the city.
And yet the city doesn't look sad. The sky is too blue, and the bay is
too blue around it; and the flying fog, and the wind, and the strong
tide flowing in and out of the bay are like restless, eager creatures
that never sleep or grow tired. When I was a very little child the
fierceness of it frightened me. All the noises of the city made one
harsh, threatening voice to my ears; and the perilous water
encompassing far as eye could reach; and the high hills running up into
the sky now blinded by dust, now buried in fog, now drenched in rain,
were overpowering and terrifying to me. Beyond that general seeming of
terror there is little I remember of the early city, except the glimmer
of white tent tops against gray fog or blue water, the loud voices in
the streets, and a vague, general impression of rapid and violent
changes of place and circumstance. Through their confusion three
figures only, move with any clearness,--my tall, teasing, father, my
grim nurse Abby, and my pale-haired mother. Indeed, the first distinct
incident that stands forth from that dim background is the death of my
mother.
It was a puzzle for a child. One day she was there, ill in bed, but
visible, palpable, able to speak, to smile, to kiss,--the next, she had
disappeared. They said she had gone away, but I knew that was
nonsense; for when people went away it was in the daytime with bags and
umbrellas, and every one knew they were going, and where they went, but
with my mother it was different. One day she was there,--the next she
was not, nor in any of the rooms of the house could she be found. It
was long before I ceased to expect her back; long before I ceased, by
some process of child's reasoning, to blame her departure on the gray
unaccountable city. For as early as I can recall a coherent sequence
of impressions the city appeared to me strange and unaccountable.
There was a secret shut away from me behind every closed house front;
the eucalyptus trees seemed to whisper "mystery" above my head; and at
night, when the fog came heaping in, thicker than feather-beds, across
the Mission, and streaming down the long hills on the heels of the
wind, it brought an army of ghosts to inhabit the dark places beyond
the safety of the lighted window-pane. Though I had lived among the
seven hills almost all my life; and though in ways it had grown
familiar, and even dear to me, yet I never seemed to grow quite used to
the city. It had strange tricks of deception that were enough to
unsettle the finest faith. For when I looked at it from the windows of
my room under the roof it was as flat as a plate, visible in its
entirety from end to end, and it was as easy to find Telegraph Hill or
the Plaza upon it as it was to pick up a block from the carpet. But,
when I went abroad in it, it hid away from me. It would never show me
more than one street at a time, and never by any chance would it reveal
to me, through the tall houses, in what part of it I was walking.
But by the time I was old enough to play in the garden by myself, and
make friends through the hedge with Hallie Ferguson, who lived a block
below us, I had come to accept this trick of the city as somewhat less
extraordinary. It was developing other characteristics not so fearful
to my mind and of far greater fascination; and I spent hours, when I
could not be out of doors, watching it from the windows of my room.
Father had built what was at the time one of the finest houses in San
Francisco. It had a glass conservatory at the side, and a garden with
a lawn and palm in the corner; and on rainy nights when the wind was
high, and the house was shaking, I could hear the long palm-fingers
tap-tapping on my window glass. The house stood half-way up Washington
Street Hill, on what was then the western skirts of the city, and from
my window under the roof I could look down over the whole city to the
east water front, with Rincon Hill misty on the south, and Telegraph
bold on the north of it. By leaning far out of the window, as Hallie
and I sometimes did when a ship was coming in, we could see northward
as far as North Beach, and Alcatraz Island; and from Abby's room across
the hall we could continue the panorama around to Russian Hill, whose
high crown cut off the Golden Gate. It was a favorite game of ours,
hanging out the window, with our heads in the palm leaves, to pretend
stories of what we saw going on in the city beneath.
All sorts of strange and interesting things went on in the city. We
could see the signals run up on Telegraph Hill when a ship was sighted.
And then the "express" would go dashing furiously down some street
below us, the pony at gallop; and the line would form in front of the
post-office and stretch like a black snake up Washington Street. Or we
watched the yellow omnibuses laboring down Washington Street like
clumsy beetles. It seemed to me that a city was the most delightful
and absorbing plaything a child could have, and it was a hard arbitrary
blow of fate that took me from it to the convent school at Santa Clara.
But if to leave the city was hard, it was terrible indeed to leave the
house, the familiar rooms, the familiar footsteps and voices that I
loved, and listened for. I had never been away from father and Abby in
my life, and though Hallie Ferguson and Estrella Mendez went also, I
was very homesick.
There was nothing at all interesting at the convent,--nothing but
pepper trees, and nun's black hoods, and books. Even when we walked
out there were only the dreary Santa Clara flats with the mountains so
distant on the horizon that their far-awayness made me want to cry.
The only nice thing about the convent was the vacation that took us
away from it, back, out of the burning summer valley to the bay, the
rows of gray-faced houses, the shipping and the wind. Each time I came
back it was with the rapture one must feel returning to some long left,
beloved place and finding it unchanged.
The palm, the cypress hedges, the sunny conservatory, the low, long
rooms beyond it, the dark hall, and narrow, precipitous stair were
always adorably the same. But around them the city was growing with
such speed that each time I returned I had to learn to know it afresh.
Already there were several blocks of houses beyond ours, and the second
year I came home from the convent Hallie Ferguson told me her father
was going to move because there was a gambling-house going up across
the street from them, "and build," Hallie expressed it, "in a more
fashionable neighborhood."
It was at the foot of Chestnut Street Hill their new house was
building, and that vacation we used often to walk over with
Abby--Estrella, Hallie and I--across the city and across the North
Beach district--to play in the building house. It was going up with
the same furious speed that was accomplishing the whole city. It
seemed that we had hardly stopped looking through the skeleton supports
at the bay before the plaster was drying on the solid walls; that we
had hardly ceased walking on the great naked flooring beams before the
smooth floor itself was palpitating under the feet of the dancers at
the housewarming.
I remember sitting up with Hallie through the earlier part of that
evening, and with a sort of worship, looking for the first time at
women with uncovered necks and arms emerging white as wax from their
diaphanous or glittering gowns. To me they were radiant, transported
to a sphere of existence beyond my own, something I never would attain
to. I recall them as a vague, dreamlike spectacle. In all of it there
is but one incident that I remember clearly; and that is, when whirling
out of the crowd and into an empty space, that the dancers had left
clear for a moment, came a couple--a large blond girl and a young man,
a boy, hardly as old as she, but so handsome, so dark, so full of life,
and a sparkling sort of mischief, that it made one feel quite gay just
to look at him. As they danced past the place where Hallie and I were
sitting he was holding his partner's gauzy train in his long, fine
fingers, and they went by us laughing.
"Who is that?" I whispered.
"That's Johnny Montgomery," Hallie whispered back.
"Who's he?"
"Why don't you know?" Hallie cried. She dearly loved to give
information. "The Montgomerys were one of the very best families here;
and he's the last of them. Old lady Montgomery died the year we went
away to school, and he had heaps of money--but he lost it."
My sole performance in this line had been the dropping of a two-bit
piece down a crack in the board walk, and before I had time to ask how
Johnny Montgomery had managed to lose sight of "heaps," Mr. Ferguson
came up and asked, "Don't you little girls want some ice-cream?" so I
forgot to say any more about it.
That same season there was another notable occasion, when Hallie led me
to the bedroom of her grown-up sister, and exhibited to me with
awe-struck pride the dress her sister was to wear to the Sumner Light
Guards' ball that night. It was a blue tulle with a fine frost of
spangles over the bodice, and it seemed too dazzling to belong to a
creature less wonderful than a fairy. But when Hallie went on, in a
cautious whisper lest we be discovered, to confide to me that when she
was grown up and out of school her mother had promised to give her a
party, and that, since I was her best friend, of course she was going
to invite me first of all, I began to realize that I, too, might some
day grow up into a young lady, and be laced into a gown perhaps as
beautiful as the one spread out on the bed before us.
Such a dazzling idea gave me an entirely new set of fancies, and was a
pleasant book companion and bedfellow to take back to the convent.
Hallie, who was a year older and half a head taller than I, had already
begun to lengthen her dresses, and do up her hair, and I found it
humiliating to be so small that at sixteen I had still to wear mine
down my back in long curls, and my skirts above my ankles. The only
thing that comforted me was that whenever father came to see me he
always said:
"Child, how tall you are! You're almost a woman!" and though he was
the one person who seemed to think so it was quite sufficient for me.
When my graduation day came I was much excited to think how absolutely
grown-up I would appear to him in my first long frock, but when I came
to him after the exercises were over, he looked at me as if he were
sad, and said, "Child, how little you are!"
That was a dreadful disappointment to me, but when I reminded him how
he had always told me I was tall, he laughed, and said: "You were tall
for a school-girl, but you're very little to be the mistress of a
house."
That puzzled me; but on the way home, driving up through the valley, he
told me more about what he meant. He said, "Now that you have stopped
being a child you are going to be a very gay young lady; going to have
fine gowns, and dance about like a butterfly; and you're going to keep
on being my little girl; but at the same time I am afraid you will have
to be a little lady of the house, too, and take care of me, and
Abby--now that Abby's rheumatism is so bad--and go to call on the
ladies who were your mother's friends, and are going to be yours. Do
you think you are tall enough to do all that?"
I was so surprised and so happy that I hugged him right there in the
buggy, and said: "Do you really mean it?"
Father laughed, just as he does to cover up being rather serious, and
said: "You are your mother's daughter, for she was a little fair woman,
but there was never anything too big for her to manage."
I was happier than ever to hear him say that--he so seldom spoke of
mother--and the idea of a whole house to manage, and of sitting at the
foot of the table, and calling on grown-up married women seemed to me
as merry and exciting as going to parties, and having beaus.
I had not been in the city for a year, spending my last vacations at
the ranch at Menlo Park; and though I knew from what Hallie had told
me, that the city was very different, yet when I got out of the buggy
in front of the house the look of the street startled me. For a moment
even the house seemed strange. But that was only because the other
houses were all about it. As far as one looked up the hill there was
nothing but thick houses, and queer little shops were crowding up the
block so close that we had the appearance of being almost down-town.
Even inside the house looked different, but quite beautifully
different, done over with lovely, fresh papers, and Japanese mattings;
but what touched and pleased me most of all was to find the picture of
mother, which had used to hang over father's dressing-table, now in my
room, above my bed. "You need it now more than I do," he said, and
though I couldn't see just why I needed it, I loved to look at it. The
amusing part of it was that mother in the picture was holding me--a
little me--a baby two years old. Myself would never look out at me.
But mother looked always, with the same half-brave, half-timid glance,
when, sitting on the bed, I made her my confidences.
With all my new responsibilities, and my new clothes I felt as if I had
somehow been "done over" too. Yet it was surprising how quickly I
became used to the patter of my long petticoats around my feet as I
walked, the weight of all my hair upon my head, and my stately pouring
of the tea at the foot of the dinner-table. Father's friends were
always coming in and out, and staying to luncheon or dinner, and with
their high silk hats, their elegant bows to me, and their laughing at
things I said which were not in the least funny, at first they confused
me not a little. But I grew accustomed to them, too; I grew even to
like them, especially Mr. Dingley, father's greatest friend, who was
the district attorney. He was a big, dark man, with a broad face, and
a frown that never came out of his forehead. He looked frightfully
severe, but I soon found out he was really quite easy-going, much more
so than father, and often I could get around Mr. Dingley when father,
for all his being pleasant, wouldn't have given an inch. But father
said he had to be very stern, or other people would spoil me. By that
he meant not so much Mr. Dingley, who was the same to everybody, as
Senora Mendez, who had been mother's greatest friend. She had been a
New England girl, who, in the early days of California, had married a
Spanish gentleman. She was lovely to me. It was at her house that I
went to my first ball. Except the Fergusons', hers was the only house
in the city with rooms large enough to dance in, and that ball is still
the most dazzling I can remember. I wore a rose-colored tulle skirt
with a peasant waist of rose-colored satin, and father, for a great
surprise, had given me a pair of pink silk stockings. No other girl in
town had such a beautiful thing, and in the dressing-room they would
not let me go down until I had shown them. The lighted dancing-rooms,
and all the strange people, and my tall partners made me nearly die of
shyness, but I danced two large holes in the toes of my lovely
stockings, and afterward father teased me, and said he found he had
suddenly become very popular with the young men. He had never been so
called upon in his life.
But most of our parties were not such elegant affairs, though sometimes
they were even more fun, like the Fergusons' calico ball, where I wore
my grandmother's gingham, and prunella shoes; or the party the Sumner
Light Guards gave, which was the prettiest of all on account of the
young men's uniforms, and the way we sat around the little refreshment
tables between dances with our mothers and our partners, the band
playing all the time, and every one so gay.
I sometimes went to as many as four parties a week, so that in the
morning it was all I could do to be up in time to see breakfast on the
table. I found out that being a housekeeper meant more than long
petticoats, and pouring tea. It meant being all over the house before
ten in the morning, for, as Abby said, a house has a lot of strings to
it, and unless you keep them all tied up tight something's going to
sag. But I enjoyed my authority of the house, and my liberty abroad
seemed like license to me. I felt launched on a wide sea of life.
The city itself was changed to my new horizon. It was larger, more
complicated, with more masts in the harbor, new streets and horse-car
lines, and every one moved about in it like the pieces of a Chinese
puzzle. The friends who had lived close about us had all moved
westward or southward with the trend of the city, and between Telegraph
and Chestnut Street Hills there were some very, fine houses. I was
often running over there to see Hallie or Estrella, and my shortest way
lay past the convent that stood a little apart in the middle of the
settlement. Next to it, but facing on another street, was a house
which had been built at the same time as the convent. The convent wall
came up at its back. On the other three sides was a high fence. Over
the fence only the upper story could be seen, and it had a look so
still and closed up, that it brought back to me that feeling of mystery
the city used to give me as a child. But I never noticed or wondered
about it particularly until one day when I saw an open carriage waiting
in front of the steps.
While I was looking a woman came out of the gate, and got into the
carriage. She was Spanish, I saw at a glance, and big, and all in
sweeping black, but instead of being dark she was tawny, with a
wonderful glow of copper-colored hair through her black lace veil, and
in all my life I had never seen a creature move so gracefully as she.
It was like watching a beautiful cat. I asked Estrella Mendez who she
was, and Estrella blushed, and said she did not know. And when I asked
was she sure, because I knew the woman was Spanish, Estrella got quite
angry, and said she wasn't supposed to know all the Spanish people in
the city, and especially if they didn't have husbands. That surprised
me, for the woman had looked quite like a great lady, and when I went
home I spoke to father about it.
He said he feared Estrella was right--we none of us knew the Spanish
woman. "But," I told him, "she looks like a queen; and she has a
beautiful carriage." He laughed and said yes, she had money, and a
good deal of influence in high places, but the women she knew were not
the sort of people I would care about; and he finished by saying I was
a silly child to go staring at strange "greasers."
I did hate to have father laugh at me, but I couldn't help looking at
her slyly when now and then I saw her about the city. She was like no
other Spanish woman I had ever seen. Most of them are as white as
callas, powdered over the lashes; but you could see the strong bloom of
her skin even through the thick coat of rice powder she wore, and her
lashes were lovely. I noticed that because she kept them half down,
and looked out through them. But the most fascinating thing about her
was the way she moved, like something flowing; and once in a shop I
heard her speak, and her voice was so attractive, sweet and rather
thick, with such a gracious, petting sound to it! But she was always
alone. With it all she seemed to be mysterious, like her quiet
closed-up house. I got to making up stories about her, and sometimes
in my room, in front of my mirror, I practised looking out through my
lashes. But it was a nuisance, for though they weren't short they
curled back so suddenly that it didn't look right; and my hair being
blond and flying into corkscrews, and my being so little, and
forgetting not to step on my flounces when I tried to "sweep,"
altogether made it rather a failure, in spite of the black lace shawl.
But though I thought about her I didn't say anything more to father or
Abby, because questions that hadn't bothered them when I was little
seemed to worry them now. Father was for ever talking of the things I
must not do. One was not to be about in our neighborhood alone. It
was changing. And above all never to go over to Dupont Street, for
that, he said was getting to be notorious, and he hated to have it so
near. It was only a block below us, but it seemed to me very quiet,
and though Mr. Rood's gambling-house was on the corner there was never
any noise there, only such fine young men, and some that I knew, all
the time going in and out of it.
But that pleased father least of anything, and he asked me how would I
like to move over to the North Beach district, where all my friends
were. Talking it over with Hallie and Estrella I liked the idea very
much. But when I came home again to the old house, with the long
windows, and the palm, and the long steps up to the conservatory, and
all the rooms I knew, the very idea that I could have thought for a
moment of going away from it gave me a lump in my throat.
So I had to tell father that I couldn't. He pinched my cheek, and
said: "Next year, then;" and so we stayed on. This was in February,
1865.
CHAPTER I
THE BASKET OF MUSHROOMS
The seventh of May was my father's birthday. I always planned some
little surprise for him beside his present, and this morning I had got
up very early, before any one else was stirring, to slip down to the
Washington Street market for some fine fresh mushrooms. He was
extravagantly fond of them, but we seldom had them because Abby was
getting too old to be up for early marketing, and father always said
that mushrooms should come in with the dew to be good.
I had bought a little straw basket, green and red, and lined it with
leaves; and now I put on my white flounced gown and my flat green hat,
so that when I should come in with my basket as they sat at breakfast
it would seem like a little fete. Then I went a-tiptoe down the stairs
that would creak, for I could hear Lee, the China boy, stirring in the
kitchen, and it would have spoiled everything to be caught going out
with my empty basket. When I had let myself into the street I felt
very naughty and festive in my furbelows at such an hour of the
morning. The city seemed so dim and still and empty that the rustle of
my petticoats sounded loud as I walked along.
The Washington Street market was fully six blocks away, and they seemed
the longer for being so quiet. When I got there the men were still
taking the crates off the carts, and the stalls were not set out yet.
It took me a long time to find what I wanted, so that when I came out
the wagons were clattering on Montgomery Street, and in one or two
shops the shutters were already down. That made me hurry, for I was
afraid of being late. I flew along with my basket in one hand and my
flounces in the other. The sunlight had caught the gilt ball on the
flagstaff of the Alta California building, and the sky that had been
misty was now broad blue above the gray housetops. In my flurry I
found myself on Dupont Street before I knew it; but after all it was
the shortest way, and everything was quiet, not a blind turned. The
houses on either hand were locked and silent, and nothing moved in the
steep little street but the top of the green-leafed tree half-way up
the block.
I was walking on the upper side of the street, and drawing near the
corner. I was opposite Mr. Rood's gambling-house, which was shuttered
tight, and looked as blank as the rest, with only the slatted
half-doors of the bar and the dark spaces above and below them to
suggest that it had an inside. I was just thinking I heard people
talking there, when suddenly a sharp splitting noise seemed to ring
inside my head, the slatted doors flew open and a man fell out
backward. He fell in a heap on the sidewalk; and over him, almost upon
him, leaped another man, with such a rush, such a face, and such a wild
look, that he filled the street with terror.
I stood there, staring stupidly, too stunned to realize what had
happened. He saw me, and for an instant he stood, with the pistol
smoking in his hand--the handsomest man I ever saw in my life, and the
most terrible. Then he flung the pistol into the street and ran.
He ran down Dupont, and disappeared into Washington; and all the while
I stood there, listening to the terrible loud clatter his feet made in
the silence. I looked across the street, and blue smoke was drifting
out of the slatted door over the man who lay still. Then there seemed
to come over me at once the meaning of the horrible thing that had
happened, and I ran.
I heard a shutter flung open in the street behind me. I saw a glitter
near the curb, a flash of steel, a shine of mother-of-pearl, and that
was the pistol he had flung away. I felt suffocating, and my feet
seemed weighted with lead as if I were running in a dream. And,
strange enough, what filled me with the wildest terror was not the
sight of the thing that lay still on the pavement under the drifting
smoke, but the sound of those furiously running feet, dying away and
away into the sleepy city. I felt as if I myself were a criminal
pursued, as if the house was the one refuge that would save me, and
with a thousand horrors at my heels I burst in upon father just sitting
down with Mr. Dingley, in the quiet, sunny dining-room.
At sight of me both jumped up.
"What's the matter, child?" father said.
[Illustration: "What's the matter, child?" father said.]
I looked around, and realized I was still clutching my basket, though
all the mushrooms had fallen out, and my foot was through a torn
flounce, and my hat hanging on my neck. My mouth was dry. For a
moment I couldn't get a word off my tongue; and then, "He fell, he
fell!" I said, and, "He is gone!"
"Where was it?" The words seemed to be in Mr. Dingley's voice, yet
came as if from, far off.
"Mr. Rood's gambling-house!" I gasped, and felt the top of my head
getting cold and the floor beginning to move under me. I had a dim
impression of Mr. Dingley rushing out of the room with his napkin still
in his hand; then I found myself sitting on the sofa, with a stinging
taste of brandy on my tongue, and heard father's voice saying, "Can't
you tell me, child?"
"Oh," I said, "he's dead!" And then I poured all the story out in a
breath. I saw father's face growing more and more keen and grave and I
could feel his fingers gently around my arm as if he feared my turning
faint again. Indeed the room around me seemed unreal, but what had
happened in the street was still fearfully clear. It was cut into my
mind as if it were still before my eyes, the toppling lurch of the
falling body, the silk hat rolling into the gutter, and then that fine
terrible gentleman that had sprung out after. The moment had stamped
him as clear in my memory as years could have done. I could tell how
very tall he was, how dark, how his brows made one black bar across his
forehead, how his eyes were set deeply under them, how his chin was
wide and keen and his left cheek flicked by a white scar near the
mouth. At the time in my furious excitement I only knew that I must
tell some one everything, or the thing would kill me. But whether it
was father's strange stern face, his seeming so calm and going out so
quietly, and yet in such haste; or whether it was some memory of the
hunted look of the man who had flung away the pistol, I wished I had
not described him so exactly. It would have been easy enough to have
said I could not remember him clearly.
I was so stunned by what had happened before my eyes that I could not
even formulate in my thoughts what it had been. The very impression of
terror that remained with me was confused, and mixed with wounding
pity. For though he had looked so wild I could not remember that he
had seemed ferocious or afraid. The look I remembered had not been
fear of what was going to happen to him, but horror of what had been
done--and horror at sight of me.
Voices in the street, sounding unwontedly loud and excited, reached me.
People were hurrying past the house--all hurrying downward in the same
direction. I saw Lee run across the yard and stand peering out of the
side gate. I put my hands over my ears, and up and down, up and down I
walked; and back and forth Abby followed me with a little plaid shawl
she was trying to put over my shoulders.