Concha, after her father left her, sat for a long while in an attitude
of such complete repose that Sturgis, watching her miserably from the
veranda, remembered the consolations of his sketch book; and he was
able to counterfeit the graceful, proud figure, under the wall and
roses, before she stirred.
Concha had sent her father away deeply puzzled. When, after embracing
her with unusual emotion, he had informed her of his consent to her
marriage, she had received the news as a matter of course, her hopes
and desires having mounted too high to contemplate a fall. Then the
Commandante, after dwelling at some length upon his discussions with
the Governor and the priests, and admonishing her against conceiving
herself too important a factor in what might prove to be an alliance of
international moment (she had laughed merrily and called him the most
callous of parents and subtlest of diplomats), had announced with some
trepidation and his most official manner that the consent of the Pope
and the King would be sought by Rezanov in person, involving a delay
and separation of not less than two years. But to his surprise she did
not fling herself upon his neck with blandishments and tears. She
merely became quite still, her light high spirits retreating as a
breeze might before one of Nature's sudden and portentous calms. Don
Jose, after a fruitless attempt to recapture her interest, mounted his
horse and rode away; and Concha sat down on a bench under the wall and
thought for an hour without moving a finger.
Her first sensation was one of bitter anger and disappointment with
Rezanov. He had, apparently, in the first brief interview with their
tribunal, given his consent to this long delay of their nuptials.
Her thoughts since his advent had flown on many journeys and known
little rest. She had been rudely awakened and stripped of her girlish
illusions in those days and nights of battle between pride and her
dazzled womanhood when, in the new humility of love, she believed
herself to be but one of a hundred pretty girls in the eyes of this
accomplished and fortunate Russian. The interval had been brief, but
not long enough for the grandeur in her nature to awaken almost
concurrently with her passions, and she had planned a life, in which,
guided and uplifted by the star of fidelity, and delivered from the
frivolous and commonplace temptations of other women, she should devote
herself to the improvement and instruction not only of the Indians but
of the youth of her own class. The schools founded by the estimable
and enterprising Borica had practically disappeared, and she was by far
the best educated woman in California. For such there was a manifest
and an inexorable duty. She would live to be old, she supposed, like
all the Arguellos and Moragas; but hidden in her unspotted soul would
be the flame of eternal youth, fed by an ideal and a memory that would
outlive her weary, insignificant body. And in it she would find her
courage and her inspiration, as well as an unwasting sympathy for those
she taught.
Then had come the sudden and passionate wooing of Rezanov. All other
ideals and aspirations had fled. She had alternated between the tragic
extremes of bliss and despair. So completely did the ardor of her
nature respond to his, so fierce and primitive was the cry of her ego
for its mate, that she cared nothing for the distress of her parents
nor the fate of California. There is no love complete without this
early and absolute selfishness, which is merely the furious
determination of the race to accomplish its object before the spirit
awakens and the passions cool.
Last night life had seemed serious; she had been girlishly,
romantically happy. It is true that her heart had thumped against the
wall as he kissed her, and that she had been full of a wild desire to
sing, although she could hardly shape and utter the words that danced
in her throbbing brain. But she had been conscious through it all of
the romantic circumstance, of the lonely beauty of the night, of the
delightful wickedness of meeting her lover in the silence and the dark,
even with a wall ten feet high between them. For the wall, indeed, she
had been confusedly and deliciously grateful.
And this was what a man's love came to: ardors by night and expedience
by day! Or was it merely that Rezanov was the man of affairs always,
the lover incidentally? But how could a man who had seemed the very
epitome of all the lovers of all the world but a few hours before,
contemplate, far less permit, a separation of years? Poor Concha
groped toward the great unacceptable fact of life the whole, lit by
love its chief incident; and had a fleeting vision of the waste lands
in the lives of women occupied only with matrimony. But she dropped
her lashes upon this unalluring vision, and as she did so, inevitably
she began to excuse the man.
None knew better than she every side of the great question that was
shaking not only her life but California itself. Appeal from the
dictum of state and clergy would be a mere waste of time. The only
alternative was flight. That would mean the wreck of Rezanov's avowed
purposes in coming to this quarter of New Spain, and perhaps of others
she dimly suspected. It would mean the very acme of misery for his
Sitkans, and an indefensible blow to the Company. It might even prove
the fatal mistake in his career, for which his enemies were ever on the
alert. He was not communicative about himself except when he had an
object in view, but he had told her something of his life, and his
officers and Langsdorff had told more. He was no silly caballero
warbling and thrumming at her grating when she longed for sleep, but a
man in his forties whose passions were in the leash of a remarkably
acute and ambitious brain. She even thrilled with pride in his
strength, for she knew how he loved her; and although his part was
action, her stimulated instincts taught her that she would rarely be
long from his mind. And what was she to seek to roll stumbling blocks
into the career of a man like that? In this very garden, for four long
days, she had dreamed exalted dreams of the manifold gifts she should
develop for his solace at home and his worldly advancement. She had
once felt all a girl's impatience when her mother's tears made her
father's departure on some distant mission more difficult than need be,
and although she knew now that her capacity for tenderness was as
great, she resolved to mould herself in a larger shape than that.
But she sighed and drooped a little. The burden of woman's waiting
seemed already to have descended upon her. Two years were long--long.
There might be other delays. He might fall ill; he had been ill before
in that barbarous Russian north. And in all that time it was doubtful
if she received a line from him, a hint of his welfare. The Boston and
British skippers came no more, and it was certain that no Russian ship
would visit California again until the treaty was signed and official
news of it had made its slow way to these uttermost shores. She had
resented, in her young ambition and indocility, the chance that had
stranded her, equipped for civilization, on this rim of the world, but
never so much as in that moment, when she sat with arrested breath and
realized to the full the primitive conditions of a country thousands of
miles from the very outposts of Europe, and with never the sight of a
letter that did not come from Spain or one of her colonies.
"Would that we lived a generation later," she thought with a heavy
sigh. "Progress is almost automatic, and to a land as fertile and
desirable as this the stream must turn in due course. But not in my
time. Not in my time."
She rose and leaned her elbows in the embrasure of the grille, where
Santiago had restored the bars, and looked out over the fields of grain
planted by the padres, the immense sand dunes beyond that shut the
lovely bay from sight; the hills embracing the primitive scene in a
frowning arc. With all her imagination it was long before she could
picture a great city covering that immense and almost deserted space.
A pueblo in time, perhaps, for Rezanov had awakened her mind to the
importance of the harbor as a port of call. Many more adobe homes
where the sand was not hot and shifting, a few ships in the bay when
Spain had been compelled to relax her jealous vigilance--or--who
knew?--perhaps!--a flourishing colony when the Russian bear had
devoured the Spanish lion. She knew something and suspected more of
the rottenness and inefficiency of Spain, and, were Russia a nation of
Rezanovs, what opposition in California against the tide thundering
down from the north? Then, perhaps, the city that had travelled from
the brain of the Russian to hers when the fog had rolled over the
heights; the towers and palaces and bazaars, the thousand little golden
domes with the slender cross atop; the forts on the crags and the
villas in the hollows, and on all the island and hills. But when she
and her lover were dust. When she and her lover were dust.
But she was too young and too ardent to listen long to the ravens of
the spirit. Two years are not eternity, and in happiness the past
rolls together like a scroll and is naught. She fell to dreaming. Her
lips that had been set with the gravity of stone relaxed in warm
curves. The color came back to her cheek, the light to her eyes. She
was a girl at her grating with the roses poignant above her, and the
world, radiant, alluring, and all for her, swimming in the violet haze
beyond.