Part 41 (1/2)
Her trained features did not betray her, but Isabel saw the figure under the loose gown grow rigid and brace itself against the back of the chair. And as Isabel stared at her, with the desperate courage born of the sudden plunge, it seemed to her that she felt a vibration from the nausea, the disgust, the hatred of life, the death-rattle of great pa.s.sions dying hard. She wondered again, if, given the same conditions, she would have differed much from the woman she had brought to bay. Her early trials and provincial upbringing had developed her Puritan inheritance, but she had had flas.h.i.+ng and startling glimpses of her depths now and again. For a moment she felt the waters of an immemorial ennui rise high in her own soul, then drop to the grinning skulls and sparkless ashes of old pleasures. She shuddered back, and raised her eyes once more to the haughty mask opposite.
”I think I understand,” she said, gently. ”But you must go. I kept him from seeing you to-night. But he would find out in time. As you know how he believes in you, you can imagine the consequences. I suppose you have not done anything so public before, or I should have heard of it. I vaguely recall that women can look on at prize-fights from private boxes. Last night, it isn't likely that any one noticed. Or if they did they would question the evidence of their senses in the morning, the best of them. So please go.”
She paused. Lady Victoria stared at her without the slightest change of expression. Isabel continued imperturbably. ”London is so vast--if you must have that sort of liberty, for heaven's sake go where it is most likely to be overlooked--and where libel laws are operative. For all its license, San Francisco is one of the most censorious and unrelenting societies in the world, and has more old-fas.h.i.+oned people than New York.
If you become the talk of the town, and those awful weekly papers find you out, Elton will be a long while living it down. It will make ridiculous all his efforts at reform. Perhaps he would no longer care. I fancy it would affect him that way.”
She rose, and Lady Victoria rose also and walked to the door. As she opened it she smiled grimly. ”You have courage,” she said. ”I am more than ever convinced that you are the wife for Jack. I will go.”
PART III
1906
I
On the same afternoon Lady Victoria developed appendicitis and went to bed for two months. She was only in danger for a short time, but the doctor announced his intention of giving her a rest cure, and his patient, who was profoundly indifferent, made no protest. And if invalidism is a career, an illness is an adventure; moreover, no doubt, it was a relief to Victoria Gwynne to have her thinking done by some one else for a time. Isabel had thoughtfully rung up the handsomest doctor in San Francisco the moment the disease declared itself, and it was to be expected that he would find his patient interesting enough to spend an hour by her bedside daily. It was manifestly impossible to transfer a woman of Lady Victoria's heroic proportions down that rickety and almost perpendicular flight of steps to an ambulance, but the best of nurses were engaged, Anne Montgomery agreed to come every morning and attend to the housekeeping, Gwynne established a long-distance telephone beside the bed, and Mrs. Trennahan, whom Lady Victoria liked--she could not stand Mrs. Hofer--promised a daily visit; and an automobile trip to the south as soon as the doctor would permit.
It was nearly a week before Isabel, who had sat up with Gwynne during the first two nights, and been on the rush ever since, was able to return to her ranch. She had offered to remain in town altogether, but Lady Victoria replied with some show of irritation that if either she or her son sacrificed their time and interests on her account it would oppress her mind with a sense of guilt, and hinder her recovery. She would telephone to them at a certain hour every day, and if they came down once a week as usual she should enjoy seeing them, instead of being worried by a sense of obligation. In truth she was glad to be rid of them for more reasons than one.
It was late in the afternoon when Isabel arrived in Rosewater, and business detained her there for several hours. She dined with the Tom Coltons, and the conversation was a quaint mixture of babies, politics, servants, and the Hofer ball. Colton drove her home, and talked the steady monotonous stream with which he tricked the world into believing that his own ideas were still in the germ. Upon this occasion he might as well have betrayed his secrets or quoted the poets, for Isabel paid no attention whatever to his monologue. She was consumed with her desire to be alone once more. She was tired of the very sound of the human voice, and remembered with satisfaction the silence of her Chuma and the taciturnity of her men.
When she finally reached her home she illuminated it from top to bottom and wandered about in a pa.s.sion of delight. Her sensation of grat.i.tude and novelty in her solitude and freedom could not have been keener if she had been absent for six months. Although it was too cold to sit out-of-doors, she walked up and down the piazza for an hour, watching the crawling tide and the brown tumbled hills. The boat was late, and every other light was out when it appeared, a mere string of magic lanterns with a red globe suspended aloft. Isabel struck a match and answered the captain's familiar greeting from his high perch in the pilot-house; then went within, for the fog was rolling over Tamalpais, dropping down the mountains in great sea waves. But even then she would not go to bed, and lose her knowledge of recovered treasure. After a time, however, she fell asleep in her chair before the fire. She awoke suddenly, but drowsily surprised and disappointed not to find Gwynne in the chair opposite. Then she became aware of the cause of her interrupted slumbers. There was the sound of fire-arms and of barking dogs on the hills sacred to the Leghorn. In three minutes she had her skirts off, her high boots on, and was running, pistol in hand, to the colony, announcing her coming by a preliminary discharge. Then for the next hour she and her men fought one of those hordes of migratory rats that suddenly steal upon chicken-ranches and leave ruin behind them.
Isabel had a genuine horror of rats. She would far rather have faced an army of snakes; but with her rubber boots, the well-trained dogs, and her accuracy of aim, she had nothing to fear. Those that were not slaughtered were finally driven off, and Isabel, content even in this phase of her strictly personal life, went to bed and slept the sleep of youth and health and an easy conscience.
The next day began the torrential rains that lasted for three weeks, almost without an hour's intermission; that wiped out the marsh, and threatened floods for all the valleys of the north. The boats no longer looked as if cutting their way through the lands, but adrift on a great lake. Tamalpais and the mountains below it had disappeared, as if hibernating, and the winds raged up and down the long valley, shaking old houses like Isabel's to their foundations, and leaving not a leaf on the trees. Nothing could be wilder or more desolate than the scene from Isabel's piazza, where, encased in rubber, she took her exercise, often battling every inch of one way against a driving wall of rain.
Rosewater, or any sort of house except her own, she did not see for days at a time, nothing but that gray foaming muttering expanse of water, its flood and fall no longer distinguishable. At first she was more than content to be so isolated. Her practical life occupied little of her time; only a daily, and always unexpected, dash up the slopes to see that her men were not s.h.i.+rking their duties, and a weekly trip to Rosewater with her produce: she used her own incubators in bad weather.
A visit to San Francisco she did not attempt, and she was quite sure that the daily conversation over the telephone--when it had not blown down--was as sufficing for Lady Victoria as for herself. She read and studied and dreamed, became indifferent to what she chose to call her failure as a society ornament, and planned a larger future; to be realized when she had come to care less for dreams and more for realities. No doubt that state of mind would develop before long, and meanwhile she might as well enjoy herself according to her present mood.
Nothing could alter her belief that all unhappiness came from contacts, and certainly she had proved her theories so far, and took a pagan joy in mere living. She loved the wild battle of the elements, the waste below her garden, with as keen a sensuousness as the spring and the flowers, and often sat late in her red room by the fire to enjoy its contrast with the desolation without.
But Gwynne was not a man to be dismissed from the thoughts of any one that knew him as well as his cousin, He had taken his part in her life as a matter of course, and of late they had been very intimate. During the first days and nights of his mother's illness, they had talked, or sat in companionable silence, by the hour. She had been a.s.sailed by regrets more than once that she was to have no part in his life, that he had already won some of his hardest battles with no help of hers, and deliberately had matched their spirits and driven her off the field where she had subtly sought to manage him. She liked him the better for this, but while her vanity retired with philosophy, she regretted her inability to help him. That she had it in her to a.s.sist and encourage him in many ways, she needed to be told neither by himself nor his mother, but she was unwilling to pay the price. That she felt his charm, took an even deeper interest in him since he had announced his intention to marry her, she did not pretend to deny, and sometimes caught herself looking out upon a future in which he had as inevitable a part as if it had been decreed from the beginning of time. She also dreamed of the satisfaction and pleasure it would give her to make him really love her, become quite mad about her. But again she was unwilling to pay the price. She argued that this was merely due to the persistence of the solitary ideal; and refused to face the cowardice that lurked in the bottom of her soul. Heroic in every other development of her highly bred character, she had all the secret fear and antagonism of her s.e.x for the other, a profound resentment of the male instinct for possession, and the deeper terror that what Gwynne might find would eventually make her wholly his. Life had given her a deep surface; the depths below it sent up rare vibrations; and her mind was seldom unoccupied. She could add layer upon layer of evasions and subtleties with no prospect of a rude disturbance; and when the wind ceased for a time she tramped over the hills. But she missed Gwynne increasingly, wondered that he did not brave the elements and come out to her; finally felt herself shamefully neglected, and would not answer his occasional telephone queries as to her well-being.
II
Three days of floundering through the mud between Lumalitas and Rosewater exhausted Gwynne's patience, and he engaged a furnished suite of rooms on Main Street, moved in his law library, Imura Kisaburo Hinomoto, and several easy-chairs, invested in a red wall-paper for his sitting-room, and was immediately so comfortable, and so relieved to be rid of his dripping sighing trees and flooded valley, that he was almost happy. As he looked down from his window upon the slope of the street crowded with muddy wagons and men in oil-skins and high rubber boots, he recalled the ironical picture Isabel had drawn, that memorable night at Capheaton, of his own future appearance; and as he could not ride out to Old Inn in any other garb, an excess of vanity deterred him from going at all. To be sure he could drive out in a closed surrey, but he would have felt equally ridiculous, and Isabel, beyond doubt, would scorn him.
Better let her think him indifferent for a while; it might do her good.
He could save himself from discourtesy by telephoning occasionally, and, for the matter of that, the less he thought of her at present the better.
For the first time he came intimately in contact with the men of Rosewater: ”leading citizens” too busy to call upon him at Lumalitas, or to sit down in their places of business for a chat during the day, and too well trained to ask strangers home for dinner, were any hospitable instincts left in them. But they soon discovered that his rooms were very comfortable and inviting, his whiskey and tobacco ”above par.” The homeless citizens of Rosewater, while their wives wrangled at bridge or five-hundred, fell into the habit of ”dropping in at Gwynne's,” instead of going to the Lodge or the dingy back room of some saloon or lawyer's office. They were at liberty to take off their coats and put their feet on the railing surrounding the large iron stove that sat well out into the room. There were even spittoons for such as clung to the old tradition; and in a short time the large newly built, almost luxurious room took on somewhat of the character of that forum of an older time, the corner grocery. Judge Leslie seldom honored these a.s.semblies, as he was tired at night and rejoiced in a comfortable home; nor did Tom Colton, whose domestic virtues were p.r.o.nounced; but Mr. Wheaton came, and Mr. Haight, Mr. Boutts, and other solid business men old enough to be Gwynne's father; and they were all deeply interested in Rosewater first, State politics second, and national affairs once in four years; or oftener if there was any pyrotechnical departure from routine.
European politics interested them not at all, and if they had any suspicion of Gwynne's real status, they were too accustomed to minding their own business to take any liberties with his reserve.
But they were fully alive to the importance of his addition to the community. He was a large landholder, selling many small farms to acceptable persons; he spent money freely, buying everything he needed for his household and farm in Rosewater, instead of sending to the city; he was studying law with a view to practising in their midst; and now that Judge Leslie--who proclaimed him a marvel--was threatening to retire, his keen and cautious fellow-citizens needed nothing more than a man of first-cla.s.s legal ability to take care of their great and varied interests and defend them against the corporation bogie. They found themselves hinting that he should engage in politics as well, when his probationary years were over.