Chapter VII: Part II (1)

1905

I

For Isabel Otis the _genius loci_ had a more powerful and enduring magnetism than any man or woman she had ever known. She had felt the consolation of it, although without analysis, in her lonely girlhood by the great Rosewater Marsh; definitely in Tyrol, Perugia, Toledo, in Munich where she had lingered too long, in a hundred tiny high-perched and low-set villages of Austria and Italy of which the tourist had never heard, at Konigsee and Pragserwildsee; and deeply in England. But no place had ever called her, disturbed her, excited her into furious criticism, mockingly maintained its hold upon the very roots of her being, like the city of her birth. Her childhood's memories of it clustered about the old house on Russian Hill where the most cordial neighbors were goats; the beach by the Cliff House on a stormy day; long rides up and down the almost perpendicular hills of the city in the swift cable cars; and certain candy stores on Polk and Kearney streets. At long intervals there was a children's party at one of the fine houses on the ledge below her home; or out in the Western Addition, where an always migratory people were rivalling the splendors of Nob Hill--as that craggy height had long since humbled South Park and Rincon Hill into their abundant dust. She also cherished many charming memories of her mother, with dinner or ball-gown so prudently looped under her rain-coat that it gave her slender figure the proportions of the old-fashioned hoop-skirt; always laughing as she kissed the little girls good-night before braving the two flights of steps to the carriage at the foot of the cliff. Two years before her death Mrs. Otis was glad to bury her mortification and misery in Rosewater. After that Isabel had never so much as a glimpse of San Francisco until she was sixteen, when her father was induced to visit his adopted daughter and take his youngest martyr with him. Isabel had planned for this visit throughout six long months, and arrived in the city of her heart radiant in a frock every breadth of which was new--heretofore her wardrobe had risen like an apologetic ph[oe]nix from the moth-eaten remnants of her mother's old finery--and such uncompromising trust in the benevolence of fate as a girl rarely knows twice in a lifetime. There were three days of enchanted prowling about the old house on Russian Hill, where, as the tenant, in the rocking-chair by the bedroom window, did not invite her to enter, she consoled herself with the views and the memories; and of an even more normal delight in the shopping streets and gay restaurants of a real city. After that the visit existed in her mind with the confused outlines of a nightmare.

Her adopted sister's peevish complaints at being obliged to remain in the foggy windy city all summer, the crying baby, the whirlwinds of dust and shivering nights, she might have dismissed as unworthy the spirit of sixteen, and dreamed herself happy. But Mr. Otis, who had been sober for seven months, selected this occasion for a fall which resounded from Market Street to Telegraph Hill, and rejuvenated the long line of saloons that had graced Montgomery Street since the days when "Jim" Otis had been one of the wildest spirits in the wildest city on earth. That was "back in the Sixties," when his lapses were as far apart as they were unrivalled in consumption, span, and pyrotechny. By the late Eighties he had disappeared into the north, and the careless city knew him no more.

During the Seventies and early Eighties there had been a period of reform, incident upon his marriage with a pretty and high-spirited girl, and one of the city's estimable attempts to clean out its political stables. His brilliant and desperate encounter with Boss Buckley was historic, but its failure, and the indifference of the gay contented majority to the city's underworld, soured him and struck a fatal blow at the never vital roots of personal ambition. When he began to water the roots at his old haunts, the finish of his career and of his splendid inheritance passed into the region of problems that Time solves so easily. When she solved his problem he was glad to subside into one of his cottages in Rosewater. Here he reformed and collapsed, reformed and collapsed; but, with fewer temptations, and a remnant of his legal brilliancy, he supported his family after a fashion; and fed his pride to the day of his death with the fact that his wife, unlike the forgotten half of many another comet, had never been obliged to do her own work.

During that last visit to San Francisco, Isabel, guided by her amused brother-in-law, routed him out of no less than fourteen saloons, and spent night after night walking the streets with him to conquer the restlessness that otherwise would find a prolonged surcease beyond her influence. When she finally steered him back to Rosewater he fell into an exuberant fit of repentance, during which he was so charming and so legal that Isabel forgave him, laid by her bitterness and mortification, and hoped. But although no repentance could maintain a grip upon that slippery flabby substance which he still called his character, at least he never went to San Francisco again. Occasionally he permitted Isabel to spend a week with her sister, while he pledged himself to good behavior during her absence; and kept his word. He always kept his word; and he took care to withhold it except when he was sure of himself. Isabel decided that as everything was relative it was better to have a dipsomaniac as her life portion than a drinking-machine of more steady and industrious habits.

Finally his patient clients left him, he sold the cottage in Rosewater--all that remained of his inheritance--to pay its mortgages, and moved with Isabel out to the ranch-house, preserved with a few hundred acres by the more canny and less thirsty Hiram. When the elder brother died James would have returned forthwith to the sources of supply, but by this time Isabel had the upper hand, and although he disappeared for days at a time, he was always forced to return to the ranch when the small monthly sum allowed him by the terms of his brother's will was exhausted; no one in Rosewater would give him credit. As he invariably left a note behind him promising to "be quiet about it," Isabel ceased to haunt his footsteps. His appetite was far beyond his control or hers, and as he kept his word and spent his time in the back parlor of a saloon, and had no longer the digestive capacity to achieve his former distinction, she merely sat at home and waited. Fortunately he did not live long enough after his brother hopelessly to embitter his daughter's youth. Liberty came to her when she had ceased to hate with young intolerance and begun to pity; and before too much longing for freedom, and its insidious suggestions, had poisoned her nature. Indeed, when she had seen her father buried with much pomp in the cemetery behind Rosewater, and returned to the permanent peace of her home, she missed her cares and responsibilities, so long and systematically borne, and mourned, not as a child for its parent, but as an adoptive mother suddenly bereft. Nevertheless, she was bent upon enjoying her freedom to the utmost and rebelled against the obduracy of her uncle's executors, who disapproved of her pilgrimage to Europe unattended by a matron of Rosewater. Hiram Otis, who trusted no man, had appointed four executors; and had not Judge Leslie been one of them the other three might have delayed the settling of the estate beyond the legal term. But at the end of a year Isabel was absolute mistress of her property and herself.

One of the happiest moments of her life was when she sat before her lawyer's table in San Francisco and watched the pen strokes that cancelled the mortgage of the house on Russian Hill. The house and its acre, encumbered by the inevitable mortgage, had been all that remained of Mrs. Otis's personal inheritance when she left San Francisco for ever. James Otis had promised his dying wife that he would never sell the place, which she bequeathed to Isabel; and when his last client left him and he could no longer pay the interest, Hiram, who was morosely devoted to his niece, met the yearly obligation: he would not redeem the mortgage unless he were permitted to buy the property. But to this James Otis, clinging to his solitary virtue, would not consent; and Hiram, although he intended to leave all he possessed to Isabel, could not bring himself to part with any sum in four figures.

Before leaving for Europe Isabel had leased the house to a young newspaper man whose wife had an income of her own, and not only an artistic appreciation of the view, but a more practical esteem for a site so far removed from the "all-night life" below. Immediately after Isabel's return Mrs. Glait had asked permission to sublet the house, remarking cynically that time had inured her to the desultory phenomena of journalism, but never to the stable prospect of her husband's death struggle with foot-pads, or her children falling down the cliff of this wild bit of nature in the heart of a city.

Isabel took back her old home with another spasm of delight, and vowed that not until she was a pauper would she part with it again. Five or six days of every week must be spent on the chicken-ranch, which had grown to such proportions that she was now one of the persons that counted in her flourishing community. But in time she would live more and more in her lofty home, become a notable figure in San Francisco, drawing with both hands from its varied best; and meanwhile, once a week, she could sit for hours and look down upon the city, which, even in rainy weather, was a wild and beautiful sight from her eyrie.

Mrs. Otis had been a niece of the Mrs. Montgomery who had reigned on Rincon Hill twenty years ago, and a cousin of the Helena Belmont who had been the greatest belle the city had seen since that earlier time when Nina Randolph, Guadalupe Hathaway, Mrs. Hunt McLane, and "The Three Macs" had made history for themselves in spite of the momentous era of which they were so unheeding a part. Mary Belmont would have been no mean heiress herself had not her father been too adventurous a spirit on the stock-market during the Belcher Bonanza excitement of 1872. For a time it looked as if Gordon Belmont would be a far richer man than his famous brother, Colonel Jack, always contented with a modest million; but in ten mad days there was a decline of sixty million dollars in the aggregate value of stocks on the San Francisco market; and six months later, when he died of sheer exhaustion, he had nothing to leave his only child but the house on Russian Hill, and a small income generously supplemented by her uncle and guardian until her marriage. She was thirteen at her father's death, and as her mother had preceded him, she spent the following five years in a New York boarding-school. Then she returned home, and, after a year's gayety, married James Otis. Colonel Belmont surrendered her small property. Skilfully "turned over" it would have multiplied indefinitely. But James Otis and his wife knew far more about spending money than making it, and to-day nothing was left to commemorate the meteoric and eminently typical career of Gordon Belmont but the ancient structure whose nucleus he had taken over just after his marriage as a "bad debt." His wife, too, had insisted upon living in it, for reasons subsequently understood by her daughter and Mrs. Glait, and complacently enlarged it with all the hideous improvements of the day.

That part of Russian Hill conspicuous from the city is little more than a great cliff rising abruptly from the extreme north end of the graded ledge on the summit of Nob Hill, which, in its turn, almost overhangs the steep and populous ascent from the valley. In "early days" none but the goat could cling to those rough hills that all but stood on end, and the brush was so thick and the titles so uncertain that their future distinction was undreamed of. Then came a determined period of grading which embraced the heights in due course, titles were settled, and many that foresaw the ultimate possession of that great valley now known as "South of Market Street"--but which in its haughty youth embraced South Park and Rincon Hill--by the tenacious sons of Erin and Germania, moved to the uplands while lots could still be bought for a song. The Jack Belmonts, the Yorbas, the Polks, and others of the first aristocracy to follow the Spanish, made Nob Hill fashionable before a new class of millionaires sprang up in a night, and indulged its fresh young fancy with monstrous wooden structures holding a large portion of converted capital. Mrs. Yorba, who led society in the Eighties, when it was as exclusive as a small German principality, was disposed to snub all parvenus. But the young people made their way. When Mary Belmont returned from school, and, chaperoned by a widowed relative, gave at least a dance a month until she married, and many a one after, the heirs of all grades thought nothing of leaving their carriages at the foot of the cliff to climb the precarious stair; groping blindly more often than not through the rains of winter or the fogs of summer. To-day Isabel's neighbors wisely made no such demands upon the pampered, but in that incomparably older time the young people would have climbed to the stars for the sake of the lavish hospitality of the gay indulgent young hostess; and if some of the youths rolled down the hill when the lights went out, that was hardly a matter to excite indignant comment in a city where drink was so admittedly the curse that it was philosophically accepted with such other standing evils as fogs, trade-winds, small-pox, mud-holes, dust-storms, and unmentionable politics.

When Mary Belmont became the wife of James Otis, one of the greatest ranchers in California--in which State, unlike other fervent patriots of that era, he had been born--and a brilliant figure in one of the most notable legal groups of any time, she long held her position as a social favorite. But children came and died too quickly for her health and fragile beauty, and the storms of life beset her. She continued to live in her inconvenient eyrie, not only in the waning hope of ultimately separating her husband from the convivial beings on the lower plain, but because she felt an intense pride in owning a home two generations old in that young community. She was determined that it should remain in the family and be occupied by at least one of her children. So the ugly brown wooden structure with its bay-windows, its central tower, its Mansard-roof--added for the servants--had, contrary to all tradition, actually joined three generations of San Franciscans in one unbroken chain. It owed its proud position, no doubt, to the fact that when the Otis fortunes collapsed there was but one child left to inherit it and to be supported meanwhile.

Isabel intended in time to give the house a new facade, and had gloated over such of the Burnham plans as had been reproduced by the city press. These lovely plans were designed to make the city as classic and imposing as Nature had dreamed of when she piled up that rugged amphitheatre out of chaos; and Isabel had long since resolved that, if she could not be the first to plant a bit of ancient Athens upon a brown and ragged bluff, the high tide of her fortunes should coincide with the awakening of the city to the sense of its architectural guilt. She banished much of the tasteless furniture of the old time, and refitted with a stately comfort that expressed one side of her nature. She too clung to traditions--and to the long mirrors in their tarnished gilt frames, with the little shelf below; the multitude of family portraits engraved on wood, and surrounded by a wide white margin and tiny gilt frame. That they might strike no discordant note, she made use of a lesson learned in London, where she had spent a month with Lady Victoria, and had the walls and wood of the living-room painted white, covered the windows and furniture with a plain stuff of a dark but neutral blue. In the dining-room were a few paintings of her New England and Spanish ancestors, and she disturbed them only to replace the wall-paper with leather; at the same time sending the black walnut furniture to the auction-room.

Being the one practical member of her family, and the product of an earthquake country, she repaired the uncertain foundations of her house before removing the walls that had cut up the lower floor into the conventional number of rooms and hallways. The house, of no great depth, was so close to the hill-side, still rising above it, that more than one enterprising cook had made use of the natural ledges before the windows. Besides the kitchen department and pantries, there were now but three rooms on the lower floor: the dining-room, a small reception-room in the tower, and an immense living-room, broken by the white pillars that supported the storys above.

Mrs. Belmont and Mrs. Otis, in the time-honored American fashion, had made a day nest of their bedroom, but Isabel was far too modern for that lingering provincialism, and lived luxuriously in the big room down-stairs when she was not in the porch. She had reserved her mother's old alcoved bedroom with its mahogany four-poster for her own use, but the rest of the second-story rooms she had fitted for her English cousins, that they too might have headquarters in town.

Neither appeared to be in any haste to visit the city of their ancestors. Gwynne had left England in October, now nearly a year ago, but, having discovered from his solicitor that he could apply for letters of citizenship as late as the end of the third year after landing, had announced to Isabel his intention to travel slowly about the country "before settling down in its remotest part, which, from all accounts, was sufficiently unlike the rest to provincialize his point of view unless he saw something first of the East, South, and Middle West." He had written to her several times, but only on business. She had returned in January, after a round of visits in England, and had put his house in order at once. The lease had expired, and Mr. Colton had engaged a temporary superintendent, but Gwynne sent Isabel his power of attorney and she was temporarily in possession. She wrote to him from time to time that all was well, or to send him an account of her expenditures; but felt no promptings towards a friendly correspondence with one who showed as little disposition to encourage it.

From Victoria she had not heard directly since she bade her good-bye in Curzon Street, but Flora Thangue had written that her ladyship's superb health had (to her ill-concealed fury) given way, following an attack of influenza, and she would not be able to leave her doctor for an indefinite time. A few months later she wrote that "dear Vicky" was outwardly herself again, but in reality very nervous, the result, no doubt, of her illness, and of the prolonged stress of business. However, she had finally succeeded in letting the Abbey and Capheaton to advantage, and it was on the cards that she would reach California before the end of the year. Isabel hoped that, unfed by her son's exacting presence the maternal fires burned low; she had a clearly defined intention to be a factor in the new career of Elton Gwynne, and no desire for the capricious interference of his mother.

II

As Isabel stood in her little porch that brilliant September morning, she dismissed her occasional regret that she had not remained in England for a London season. Not only had she put the time to better use on her ranch, but no doubt her agent would have relet this house, and delayed the fulfilment of one of those dreams upon which she unconsciously fed her soul. The shrieking trade-winds and the dense white fogs were hibernating somewhere out in the Pacific. All the city, in the great irregular amphitheatre below, was sharply outlined in the yellow light; Isabel wondered if the sun renewed its stores from the golden veins to north and south. On the wide broken ledge just beneath her pinnacle was the concrete evidence of an architectural orgy to be seen nowhere else on earth: wooden mansions with the pure outlines of the Renaissance; a Gothic palace with bow-windows, also of wood; a big brown-stone house in the style of New York; piles of shingles and stones; here and there a touch of Romanesque, later French, and Italian; the majority of those plutocratic and perishable masses, of no style in particular, unless it were that of Mansard combined with the criminalities of him who invented the bow-window and the irrelevant tower. On the slopes were a few old houses in gardens, some with cottage roofs, others square, brown, dusty, melancholy. But the majority were of the "house in a row" type, radiating in all directions from the "boarding-house blocks" on the lower slopes. Then, down on the plain, came the big compact masses of stone and concrete, brick and steel, devoted to business and housing of the itinerant. The lofty domes of the City Hall and a newspaper building, a few church spires and the great white-stone hotel on a crest not far from Isabel's, were the sole pretenders to architectural beauty within her ken.

Far away she could make out the Mission Church, once called after St. Francis of Assisi, now named Dolores for the vanished lake. It was the last reminder of the work of the Spanish fathers, and looked indescribably ancient in the midst of that busy and densely populated district. At night Isabel watched the lights of the electric cars flashing about that old monument of an almost forgotten conquest--like the angry haunted eyes of the padres that had labored in the wilderness for naught. But although this old church and the Presidio, which still retained its quadrangle and a few of the original adobe houses, appealed deeply to Isabel on account of the romance of Rezanov and Concha Argueello that distinguished her family, her more personal sympathies were with the streets just below her hill-top, packed as they were with memories, tragic, humorous, gay, pathetic, of a people that had made the city great.

Even the dilapidated houses, with their sixty steps or more toppling above the cut that had widened and levelled the street, had been very hospitable in their time, and Isabel knew that her mother and grandmother had toiled up those perpendicular flights in satin slippers and ballooning skirts on many a rainy night. Mrs. Otis had told her little girls stories of all those old houses, fine and simple, more particularly of the fortunate mansions on Nob Hill's brief level. Isabel longed for the time when she should enter them and pick up the threads dropped from her mother's nerveless fingers. The Belmont house was closed, the still restless Helena occupying a palace in Rome at the moment. The Polk house had been sold to the energetic son of one of the plodding old money-makers that had fought shy of stock gambling and railroads. Nicolas Hofer belonged to the latest type the prolific city had bred: the son of a millionaire, but a keen man of business, whom the wildness of the city had never tempted, highly educated, honorable, and an ardent reformer.

Magdalena Yorba--Mrs. Trennahan--like most of her old neighbors, still dwelt in the ancestral mansion, although she had given it a stucco facade and shaved off the bow-windows. In each, Isabel was sure of welcome, and she longed particularly to wander through the old Polk house, where one of her Spanish great-aunts had reigned for a time. Like all San Franciscans of family, she took more pride in her young-old city than a Roman in his Rome. Its forty-two square miles had seen so many changes, its story was so romantic and unique, that its age was not to be measured by the standards of Time. Her grandfather had stood on this hill after his Sunday climb and looked over and down a ragged wilderness to the city bursting out of its shell--a wretched huddle of shacks and tents by the water's edge. The bay no doubt was crowded with ships from every corner of the world, many of them deserted, unmanned, forced to lie idle until the return of the hungry disappointed gold-seekers. That was less than sixty years ago. In the first ten years of its rapid growth the city had burned seven times, millions blazing out in an hour.

To-day San Francisco was replete not only with life but with wealth, talents, and every variety of enterprise; it was as full of fads and cults and artistic groups as London itself; it had sent forth authors, artists, mummers, singers--and millionaires by the score. Many of the art treasures of the world had been brought here and hidden from the vulgar in those awful impermanent "palatial mansions." Some of the finest libraries of the world were here. It had its bibliomaniacs, its collectors, its precieux. And yet what a lonely city it was, stranded on the edge of the still half-vacant western section of the United States, with all the Pacific before it. Save for the rim of towns across the bay, which were little more than a part of itself, it watched the Orient alone, and was far too gay and careless, too self-absorbed and insolent, to keep its jaws on the alert. Tact it was much too high-handed to cultivate. It welcomed the hungry Oriental for so long as he was useful, and when he outstayed his welcome, incontinently kicked him out. San Francisco's intensity of independence as well as of civic pride was due in part no doubt to the isolation which compelled it to be self-centred, and to its unconscious dislike of the elder breeds beyond the Rocky Mountains; but largely to the old adventurous reckless gambling spirit and the habit of sleeping on its pistol. These first causes had developed individuality to such proportions that the hair of a Californian bristled when he was alluded to as a "Westerner," or even as a mere American.

And with time the patriotism of the San Franciscan waxed rather than waned. It was no longer the fashion to take one's money to New York, merely because of the higher cost of living that made a millionaire "feel his oats," and of the allure of the older and more difficult society to his women. San Franciscans still fled from the winds and fogs of summer to their beloved Europe, and country-house life gained ground very slowly, but deserters were few; and of late the rich men had shown their faith not only by investing the greater part of their capital in the city--until "improved real estate" was become a current phrase--but the best of them, including Hofer and the mayor who had preceded the present figurehead and his omnivorous Boss, were engaged in a desperate battle with the highly organized gang of political ruffians that owned and pillaged and dishonored the city in a manner with which nothing in the history of municipal corruption could compare save the old Tweed Ring of New York. For at least ten years previous to 1901, San Francisco had enjoyed a period of not only decent but honorable government. There was no "graft" in high places, the city was out of debt, it held up its head with the cleanest municipal governments in the land. But, as ever, the disinterested grew somnolent with content, and gave no heed to the burrowing of the hungry recuperated and wiser rats in that prolific underworld whence never a high-minded citizen emerges. The few that saw and warned were disregarded; and circumstances, proper in themselves, swelled the ranks of the petty politicians with thousands of greedy and insurgent laborers. San Francisco awoke one morning to find herself in the drag-net of a machine to which old Boss Buckley and the illustrious Tammany doffed their hats. But the majority still gave little heed, too content in their various blessings, and the gay light spirit the climate gave them, to foresee the time when their pleasant city would be utterly debauched, and life among arrogant thieves, prostitutes, and socialists have become as impracticable as it already was in Chinatown or on Barbary Coast.

A group of the more thoughtful and patriotic citizens, assisted by the one militant editor the city boasted, were doing all that was humanly possible to prevent the re-election of the mayor, who had already represented the worst element twice, and to break the power of the Boss. Isabel in her lonely ranch house, when her chickens were asleep, followed the fight with a passionate interest, and was tempted to come forth from her seclusion and meet at least the representative men of her city. But she was not yet ready to take up her own share of the burden, and was far too modest to imagine that she could be useful until she had become a person of importance in San Francisco. Nevertheless, as she looked down to-day on the sharp outlines of the city under the hard blue sky, almost glittering in their golden bath, she was impatient to become a part of its life, or at least to discuss its interests with some one. Rosewater, which of late years had become virtuous to excess, and almost blind and deaf with local pride, took no interest in San Francisco whatever, except as a market for eggs. When driven to the wall it confessed the superiority of the metropolis in the matter of shops and theatres; but its politics it invariably dismissed with adjectives more forcible than elegant.

It was at this point in Isabel's meditations that her eye happened to rove along the plank walk to the rickety old flight of steps that led from Taylor Street up Russian Hill. There was something vaguely familiar about a tall, thin, well-groomed, but by no means graceful, figure rapidly ascending the steps. In a moment her mind lost its tensity of projection and she was almost flying down her own long stair.

Gwynne broke into a run as he saw her. She wondered if he intended to kiss her, but he merely shook her hand for a full minute.

"I never in my life was so glad to see anybody!" he exclaimed, with the joyousness of a school-boy come home for his first holiday. "It was such luck to hear that you were in San Francisco."

"But why didn't you telegraph? In a way I am disappointed--glad as I am to see you. I intended to meet you at Oakland and take you directly up to Lumalitas, where everything was to have been in gala array. And how did you know I was in town?"

"While I was taking my lonely breakfast this morning--I arrived late yesterday afternoon--and glancing over one of your newspapers, my eye caught your name. I learned that 'the charming and beautiful young mistress of the old Belmont House on Russian Hill, who had excited so much interest of late, had come down as usual for Sunday."

"No?" Isabel flushed for the first time within Gwynne's knowledge of her. "That is the very only time I have been the subject of a newspaper paragraph--outside of Rosewater, which doesn't count--and I am as delighted--as I have no doubt you were the first time you saw your name in print!" she added, defiantly.

There was nothing cynical in Gwynne's smile. "I understand," he said; and then, as he ceased to smile, the light died out of his face, and Isabel noticed that it was older and thinner. It had lost more than a little of its aloof serenity, and his crest was visibly lowered. But on the whole he was improved, for he had cut his hair, his lilting locks having been too conspicuous a feature in the cartoons of _Punch_ and _Vanity Fair_. But there was something subtly forlorn about him, and Isabel's maternal promptings, once too active, but long moribund, suddenly awakened.

They mounted the steep flight of steps to the house slowly, exchanging ejaculatory remarks. When they reached the porch she motioned to a long wicker chair.

"It is only ten," she said. "Luncheon will not be ready until one, and my California hospitality demands that your entertainment shall begin at once. Make yourself comfortable while I brew you a cup of Spanish chocolate. I have actually one of the molinillos of our ancestors."

When she returned with the frothy and fragrant beverage he was standing with his hands in his pockets staring down at the city. He turned swiftly at the sound of her step on the wood, but something was rushing to the back of his eyes, and once more Isabel had the singular impression of hearing his spirit cry: "Oh God! Oh God!" But his lips were hard pressed and his eyes became suddenly contemptuous, then smiling.

"This is jolly of you," he said. "I have a weakness for chocolate--cultivated during the winter I was in Munich with my tutor. I never cared for beer--don't like anything bitter. Do you remember the Cafe Luitpoldt, and all those little tables in the garden of the Residenz--"

He paused and narrowed his eyes. Isabel had turned white. "I must hear that story," he said, quietly. "You are my only friend out here. In a way you have altered the whole course of my life. I shall always have a sense of relationship with you quite different from anything I have ever known. So there must be perfect confidence and openness between us. I told you frankly the unpleasant finish of my episode with Mrs. Kaye. I hate mystery. I saw you go white once before, when I tried to make you talk about Munich; and the romantic Flora was full of surmises. Confession is good for the soul, anyhow. I want the atmosphere cleared--not out of curiosity--I don't care tuppence about other people's affairs--but I don't know you! I must know you! I am always conscious of a wall about you--and in this damned God-forsaken country I must have one friend!" he burst out.

Isabel had quite recovered herself. "I will tell you everything, but not now. We must be in the mood. This moment I am interested in nothing but yourself. Sit down. What has happened to you in all these months? Something not altogether pleasant. Have you had any adventures? Have you been recognized?"

He had finished his chocolate, and he clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, giving the railing a slight kick.

"No," he said, grimly, "I have not been recognized. At first I avoided all the big hotels, lest I might be; then growing more secure, and disliking the inferior ones, I became quite reckless. The second time I visited New York I went to the Waldorf-Astoria, and the third time to the St. Regis. In the smoking-rooms of all the hotels and trains I talked with any one whom I found disposed to conversation. Not that I was; but I was perambulating the country for an object and determined to accomplish it. As you had told me to improve my manners I did my best, and have reason to believe that, if not effusive, I am almost cynically approachable. In New York I was at times repelled with a haughty stare or a negative frigidity which no duke I know could compass. But in Boston they were more friendly, and farther West so expansive that I was frequently invited to houses before I had presented my modest card. Very often I had long talks with newspaper men, and made no attempt to conceal the fact that I was a Britisher. Once or twice that fact was commented on, but taken as a matter of course. There are a good many Britishers in the United States. My identity was never suspected. I never saw a newspaper paragraph about myself."

He laughed, but looked at her between lids so narrowed that she could not see the expression of his eyes. She nodded, smiling; and she could make her smile very sweet and encouraging.

"The time came when I felt like a shipwrecked mariner. Stranded! Abandoned! Forgotten! Finally--take all the circumstances into consideration and make due allowance--I felt that I would risk everything to see my name in print once more. I arrived in Chicago late one night. There had been a break-down that doubled the time of the beastly trip. I went to its first hotel and registered myself as Elton Gwynne. The night clerk, with the haughty indifference of the stage duke, or the New-Yorker who fancies himself, called a bell-boy and turned his back on me. I remained in Chicago three days. Not a reporter sent up his card. Not a line appeared in a newspaper. It was the most chastening experience of my life. No doubt it did me good. My ego has actually felt lighter." He smiled. But he added in a moment: "It left a scar, nevertheless."

"Never mind," said Isabel, consolingly. "All that will read delightfully in your biography. What on this difficult globe is not difficult, first, last, and always? The only thing for you to do is to snap your fingers at everything, as we do out here, and see nothing in the future but success. How do you like the land of your birth?"

"I hate it!" he said intensely. "Washington is a crude unwieldy village. New York is like one of those nightmares a certain class of writers project and label 'Earth in the Year 2000.' Chicago is the entrails of the universe. The small interior towns and villages of the Eastern States are open mausoleums for people so old and so dried up that their end will be not death but desiccation. There is nothing picturesque in those old towns, for they were dead before they were civilized. Some of the cities and villages of the South are certainly attractive to look at and have a background of a sort, but they are as lifeless as their negroes. The cities of the West are hives, and when you have seen one you have seen all. Its smaller communities are horrors, pure and simple. Much of the country is magnificent. The Adirondacks, the Hudson River, Yellowstone, those great prairies and deserts, atone for a good deal. The last three weeks I have spent in southern California. It seemed to me--below Santa Barbara, at least--little more than a reclaimed desert--and with nothing of the wonderful atmospheric effects of the great interior deserts; nothing but dirt and a hideous low shrub caked with prehistoric dust. Precious little of it reclaimed at that. I am glad that ranch is in good hands. I never want to see the place again. That eternally grinning sky! That dead atmosphere! It blunted my nerves for the time, but the reaction is all the worse. However--" He stood up and leaned over the railing. "I did not expect the earthly paradise. I am not going to treat you to a continued diatribe--"

"But you must like California--love it!" cried Isabel, in alarm. "Of course you have hated everything--natural enough--but not California! It is your State, your home, your future. You must begin by liking it, at least."

"Very well, mentor, I shall do my best. One might certainly indulge in an illusion or two up here. I thought as I walked--climbed--through the city, guided a part of the way by a messenger-boy, who ejaculated at intervals, 'Say, mister!' and described Nob Hill as the 'millionaire bunch,' that I had seldom seen so many ugly buildings together; but from this perch of yours it looks quite beautiful. Still I long for the country. Can we go to the ranch this afternoon?"

"Why not?" Isabel stifled a sigh. She had intended to ride all round the city on the electric cars; but she felt as if she had an adopted homesick child on her hands, and he was a responsibility that she had deliberately assumed. Moreover, she felt deeply sorry for him.

"You can express all your luggage but a portmanteau, and we will go in my launch. It is down on the bay side of the Hill. We must start at four to catch the tide. You have no idea how cosey and pretty your ranch-house looks, and I have sent out my uncle's law--and farm--library. I have arranged everything with Judge Leslie, and you enter his office at once. He is the first lawyer of northern California. I wrote you that it would be impossible to conceal the truth from him, as his firm has done all the legal business of the estate for the last thirty years, and he knows your mother has only one son. But he is the more interested. No one else knows but Mr. Colton and his son Tom--your Rosewater bankers and agents. Your secret is safe with them. Gwynne is not an uncommon name in California, although some of its letters have been dropped. Lumalitas has been leased for so many years that your name has ceased to be associated with it in the public mind, and the deeds are so deeply buried in the archives of St. Peter--the county-seat--that the most curious would hardly attempt to unearth them. Of course most townspeople all through the State take in a San Francisco paper, and your name has doubtless appeared now and again in the telegrams. But they are not the sort that take the least interest in the career of a young Englishman--those that do, at all events, are few and far between. Judge Leslie is deeply interested; so is Tom Colton, the only son of the bank, so to speak. He is a Democrat, by-the-way--but I don't suppose you have made up your mind--"

"I have quite made up my mind. In practice one party seems about as bad as the other, but at least the Democratic ideals more nearly correspond with my own. Besides, the Democratic party is the under dog, and that always appeals to me, to say nothing of the fact that it is weak in strong men, that all its salient leaders are what you so elegantly term 'blatherskites.' If I go in for American politics, I must fight so hard that I cannot help becoming absorbed body and soul; with only the present and the future--no past. Let us take a walk over these hills."

III

"Do you run this thing yourself?" asked Gwynne, as they boarded the launch, which was at anchor by the end of the sea wall at the foot of Russian Hill.

"Rather. How do you expect me to make a fortune in this paradise of the labor-union if I don't do things myself? I have a hard time being economical, and I suspect that where I save once I spend twice, but I try not to think about it. Theories make life so palatable! This old launch belonged to Uncle Hiram. I had it repaired, and take my eggs to the hatcheries and my produce to Rosewater three times a week. There I deal direct with the San Francisco buyers--and in this launch; it serves me very well as an office. Then I come down in it every week. The railroad is exorbitant, and the boats are too slow. It may be that gasolene and repairs cost more than a railroad fare once a week, but I have abstained from making a comparison. The trip is so delightful!"

The launch was about twenty feet long with a small cabin and a fresh coat of brown paint. It shot lightly over the smooth water, and Gwynne sat on top of the cabin above Isabel swinging his long legs, and looked with some envy at the hundreds of yachts that skimmed the bay. They appeared and vanished about the corners of the Islands and promontories like birds swooping after prey. The Islands and all the mainland had lost their greens long since, but the burnt grasses shone in the sun like hammered gold; were tan and brown and fawn on the shadowed eastern slopes. The chain of mountains beyond the towns across the bay and facing San Francisco glittered like bronze, but the lofty volcanic peak of Monte Diablo, farther still, was a pale and misty blue. North of the Golden Gate and high above the mountains of Marin County, Mount Tamalpais was so intense and hard a blue, and was cut against the fleckless sky with so sharp an outline, that it produced in Gwynne a vague sense of unreality and uneasiness. The Marconi poles on the summit looked like the masts of a mammoth ship, and every window of The Tavern, close by them, shone like a plate of brass.

They steered for the southern point of Angel Island, and Gwynne looked about him with much interest. The mainland of the great northern cove and the eastern side of the Islands were thick with trees: oaks, buckeye, willows, madrono. And almost as thickly set, although sometimes half hidden, were the villas: light and airy of architecture, gayly painted, with broad verandas and overhanging vines. At the foot of Belvedere and the little town of Tiburon were house-boats, in which people lived for eight months of the year.

And everywhere, people, people, people. They swarmed in the yachts, on the house-boats, on the driveways, the verandas. Gwynne twisted about and looked at San Francisco. The palaces were on the heights and in the Western Addition--out towards the Presidio and the Golden Gate; but hundreds of tiny dwellings clung to the precipitous sides of Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill as if their foundations were talons. And each had its bit of garden, or its balcony full of flowers. Telegraph Hill, the great bluff where the city turned almost at a right angle from north to south, was given over largely to Mexicans and Italians, and was uncommonly vivid. And the streets were full of people. The city had turned itself inside out. Everywhere were bright gowns and parasols, whizzing cars packed to the rails.

And the wealthy class by no means monopolized the bay with their yachts and luxurious launches. There were fishing-smacks filled with whole families of Italians and Chinese; in fact every tongue floated over the water in the course of a brilliant Sunday afternoon. And at the docks there were steamers, sailing vessels, from all the ports of the world, a forest of spars and funnels; odd little Italian craft and even a Chinese junk. A man-of-war was coming down from Mare Island. Gwynne had seen a big Australian liner flying the Union Jack enter the Golden Gate as the launch rounded Angel Island. It made him homesick, and he was not sorry to lose sight of it.

They passed steamboats crowded with holiday seekers coming home from a day's outing in Sausalito, San Rafael, Mill Valley, sporting parks; the majority noisy and vulgar, but a mass of color. It was a scene of surpassing variety, life, gayety, prosperity, importance. Gwynne, as the light electrical breeze began to prick his veins, experienced a sensation of pride in the country where his lines were cast, in those ancestors of his that had memorably helped to develop its vast resources: a tremendous concession, for he had barely acknowledged these ancestors before. A slight meed of resignation descended upon him. He smiled down upon Isabel, who was frowning at the sun and sighing for her forgotten veil; she had a tender regard for her complexion. Gwynne thought her very pretty in her smart crash suit and sailor hat, not nearly so severe and fateful in appearance as when she had adjusted herself to the formalities of Capheaton; although he remembered that he had heard much discussion of her beauty and had not been unappreciative himself. But he liked her far better here in California. Her eyes were more alert, her voice was less monotonous; and those little black moles looked particularly fascinating on the ivory white of her skin, fairly luminous in the sunlight. He fancied they would drift into matrimony; and that she appeared to be as indifferent and passionless as she was handsome and clever but the better suited his present mood. His love for Mrs. Kaye had died a sudden and violent death, but it had left him callous, somewhat contemptuous of the charms of woman. He doubted if his heart would ever beat high in his breast again, but in the course of events he should need a partner, and Isabel seemed to him fashioned to be the helpmate of a busy and ambitious statesman.

But all he said was: "You have a little freckle on your nose. I saw it come."

Isabel shrugged her shoulders and sniffed. He lost interest in her for the moment, for he distrusted a woman without vanity. He knew girls too little to suspect that the most business-like were often smitten with a desire to pose; and were as likely to forget the pose of to-day in the naturalness of to-morrow. Secretly, Isabel was grievously afflicted at the thought of the freckle, and did not speak for some time, recalling the antidotes of her early girlhood, when she and Anabel Leslie experimented in secret with various beauty recipes cut from the newspapers. She smiled as she recalled that Anabel, who had pretty golden hair, had washed it with lye to acquire a reddish tinge, and been forced to retire for a month; and a semi-tragic experience of her own--smothered from crown to toe in a blanket taking a hot-air bath for the benefit of her complexion, the spirit lamp, in a wash-basin under the chair, exploded, and there was one interminable moment of panic, and several days of discomfort. She quite forgot her companion in these lighter reminiscences of a period that seemed far more than ten years agone.

Gwynne had discovered at Capheaton that one of his cousin's charms was her absence of effort in conversation and a corresponding indifference to effort in others. They did not exchange a syllable as they sped up the wider expanse of the bay east of the Islands, and he watched the hills and mountains close on his left, with their bright little towns and sombre depths of forest. Many of the rounded cones of the foothills were bare, and so was the rocky crest of Tamalpais, but the old redwoods still held triumphant possession of several of the slopes and all of the canyons. Here and there factories and warehouses marred the almost primeval beauty of the scene, but to-day at least there was no smoke to cobweb the radiant sky. Even the Chinese shrimp-pickers were lounging on the beach before their little shack village.

They passed the last of the towns. Towers and sharp roofs rose above the mass of cultivated trees in some private park; the trees a motley collection of pines and palms, eucalyptus and oak, madrono, laurel, locust, and acacia. The gardens were full of children and birds. On the roads horses in old-fashioned buggies danced at automobiles whizzing by. In the yachts even the men had laid aside their keen anxious look--as peculiar to the young San Franciscan of business as to the New-Yorker or Westerner--and were bent upon absolute relaxation for the day. One millionaire was alone in his big luxurious launch, a broad grin on his homely ingenuous countenance, and even his mouth open to inhale the clean and sparkling air. His hands were clasped on his curves.

"He inherited," said Isabel, in reply to Gwynne's comment that he did not look as if he ever expended his energies in the piling of dollars. "And he doesn't want any more. But they all look well enough. It is not only the climate but the cooking."