Chapter III: Book I: I (3)

Patience slipped to the floor and looked through the window. The moon flooded the old town. The ruined fort on the hill had never looked more picturesque, the pines above more calm. In the hollow near the blue waters the white arms of Junipero Serra’s cross seemed extended in benediction. The old adobes were young for the hour. One might fancy Isabel Herrara walking down from the long house on the hill, her _reboso_ fluttering in the night wind, old Pio Pico, glittering with jewels, beside her.

And in the wide street before the Custom House, surrounded by a hooting mob, the refuse of the saloons, was a cursing gesticulating woman. Her black hair was unbound, her garment torn. She flung her fists in the face of those that sought to hold her.

“Patience Sparhawk!” she shrieked. “Patience Sparhawk! Come down here to your mother. Come down here this minute. Come, I say,” and a volley of oaths followed, greeted with a loud cackling laugh by the rabble.

Patience saw Mr. Foord, clad in his dressing-gown, go forth. She flung on her clothes hastily and ran down the stair. Her mother and Mr. Foord were in the kitchen.

“Oh, she’ll come back,” Mrs. Sparhawk was saying. “I’ll see to that. How do you like a row under your windows? Well, I’ll come here every night unless she comes home. You’ll put me in the Home of the Inebriates, will you? Think she’ll like to have that said of her mother when she’s grown up? Not Patience Sparhawk. I know her weak point. She’s as proud as hell, and I’m not afraid of going to any Home of the Inebriates.”

Patience pushed open the door. “I’m going with you,” she said. “Now get out of this house as fast as you can.”

“Oh, Patience,” exclaimed Mr. Foord. His old cheeks were splashed with tears.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” said Patience, her hands clenching and quivering. “I didn’t think she’d do this, or I wouldn’t have stayed. What a return for all your kindness!”

“Patience,” said the old gentleman, “promise me that you will come to see me to-morrow. Promise, or I shall not let you go. She can do her worst.”

“Well, I’ll come.”

She ordered her mother to follow her out of the back door that they might avoid the expectant mob. Mrs. Sparhawk walked unsteadily, but received no assistance from her daughter. If she had fallen, Patience could not have forced herself to touch her. Had the woman been a reeling mass of physical corruption, a leper, a small-pox scab, the girl could not have shrunken farther from her.

They did not speak until they ascended the hill behind the town and entered the woods. Patience never recalled that night without inhaling the balsamic odour of the pines, the heavy perfume of forest lilies, without seeing the great yellow stars through the uplifted arms of the trees. It was a night for love, and its guest was hate.

No more terrible conversation ever took place between mother and daughter. After that night they never spoke again.

XVI

The next morning Patience, after breakfast, carried a pair of tongs and a newspaper up to her room. She spread the newspaper on the table, then with the tongs extracted Byron from beneath the bed and laid it on the paper. She wrapped it up and tied it securely without letting her hands come in contact with the cover. That same afternoon she carried the book to the Custom House and threw it behind a row of tall volumes in one of the cases. Long after, Mr. Foord found it there and wondered. He was not at home when she arrived. When he returned she was deep in his arm-chair, reading Gibbon’s “Rome.” He was not without tact, and determined at once to ignore the events of the previous day and night.

“What!” he exclaimed, “are you really giving poor old Gibbon a trial at last? And after all your abuse? But perhaps you won’t find him so dry, after all.”

“I wish to read what is dry,” said Patience. “I’m going to take a course in ancient history.”

“No more poetry and novels?”

“Not a line.” She spoke harshly, and compelled herself to meet Mr. Foord’s eyes. Her own were as hard and as cold as steel. All the soft dreaming light of the past two months had gone out of them. They were the eyes neither of a girl nor of a woman. They looked the eyes of a sexless intellect.

Patience had done the one thing which a girl of fifteen can do when crushed with problems; she had twitched her shoulders and flung them off. She comprehended that her intellect was her best friend, and plunged her racked head into the hard facts which required utmost concentration of mind. The sweet vague dreams of the past were turned from in loathing. If she thought of them at all it was with fierce resentment that she had become conscious of her womanhood. The stranger was thrust out of memory. She went no more to the tower. The owl hooted in his loneliness, and she drew the bed-clothes over her ears. When she walked through the woods, to and from the town, she recited Gibbon in synopsis. She spent the day in Mr. Foord’s library, returning home in time to get supper. She did her household duties mechanically, and the eyes of mother and daughter never met. The man Oscar kept out of her way.

Miss Galpin had gone to San Francisco and would return no more: she was to marry. Rosita was visiting in Santa Barbara. Manuela, now a young lady, was devoting the greater part of her time to the Hotel Del Monte, where the flower and vegetables of San Francisco gather in summer. She went up to the tanks in the morning and to the dances in the evening; and informed Patience, one day as they met on the street, that she was having a perfectly gorgeous time, and had met a man who was too lovely for words.

The long hot days and the foggy nights wore slowly away. Patience grew thinner, her face harder. Mr. Foord did his best to divert her, but his resources were limited. She peremptorily forbade him to allude to the romance of Monterey, and he took her out in his old buggy and talked of Gibbon’s “Rome.”

Once they drove through the grounds of Del Monte,—the trim artificial grounds that are such an anomaly in that valley of memories. On the long veranda of the great hotel of airy architecture people sat in the bright attire of summer. Matrons rocked and gossiped; girls talked eagerly to languid youths that sat on the railing. It was all as unreal to Patience as the fairy-land of her childhood, when she had hunted for fays and elves in the wood. She stared at the scene angrily, for the first time feeling the sting of the social bee.

“A vain frivolous life those people lead,” remarked Mr. Foord, who disapproved of The World. “A waste of time and God’s best gifts, which makes them selfish and heartless. Empty heads and hollow hearts.”

But Patience, gazing at those girls in their gay dainty attire, the like of which she had never seen before, experienced a sudden violent wish to be of them, empty head, hollow heart, and all. They looked happy and free of care. The very atmosphere of the veranda seemed full of colour and music. Above all, they were utterly different from Patience Sparhawk, blessed and enviable beings. Even the frivolity of the scene appealed to her, so sick unto death of serious things.

XVII

One day, late in September, Patience, as usual, left Monterey at half past four in order to reach home in time to cook the supper. Nature had smiled for so many successive days that she wondered if the lips so persistently set must not soon strain back and reveal the teeth. The sun, poised behind the pine woods, flooded them with yellow light. As Patience walked through the soft radiance she set her teeth and recalled the chapters of Thiers’ “French Revolution,” through which she had that day plodded. But her head felt dull. She realised with a quiver of terror that she was beginning to feel less like an intellect and more like a very helpless little girl. Once she discovered her curved arm creeping to her eyes. She flung it down and shook her head angrily. Was she like other people?

Mingling with the fragrance of the pines it seemed to her that she smelt smoke. She hoped that her woods were not on fire. She walked slowly, indisposed as ever to return home, the more so to-day as she felt herself breaking.

“I wish the sun would not grin so,” she thought. “I’ll be glad when winter comes.”

The smell of smoke grew stronger. She left the woods. A moment later she stood, white and trembling, looking down upon Carmel Valley. The Sparhawk farmhouse was a blazing mass of timbers. A volume of smoke, as straight and full as a waterspout, stood directly above it. Men were running about. Their shouts came faintly to her.

Patience pressed her hands convulsively to her eyes. She clutched her head as if to tear out the terrible hope clattering in her brain, then ran down the hill and across the valley, feeling all the while as if possessed by ten thousand devils.

“Oh, I’m bad, bad, bad!” she sobbed in terror. “I don’t, I don’t!”

As she reached the scene the roof fell in. She glanced hastily about. The men, withdrawn to a safe distance, were gathered round the man Oscar. One was binding his hands and face. As they saw Patience they turned as if to run, then stood doggedly.

“Where is she?” Patience asked.

There was an instant’s pause. The crackling of the flames grew louder, as if it would answer. Then one of the men blurted out: “Burnt up in her bed. She was drunk. We was all in the field when the fire broke out. When we got here Oscar tried to get at her room with a ladder, but it was no go. Poor old Madge.”

Patience without another word turned and ran back to the woods. She ran until she was exhausted, more horrified at herself than she had been at any of her unhappy experiences. After a time she fell among the dry pine needles, her good, as she expressed it, still trying to fight down her bad. She felt that the demon possessing her would have sung aloud had she not held it by the throat. She conjured up all the horrible details of her mother’s death and ordered her soul to pity; but her brain remarked coldly that her mother had probably felt nothing. She imagined the charred corpse, but it only offended her artistic sense.

Finally she fell asleep. The day was far gone when she awoke. She lay for a time staring at the dim arches above her, listening to the night voices she had once loved so passionately. At last she drew a deep sigh.

“I might just as well face the truth,” she said aloud. “I’m glad, and that’s the end of it. It’s wicked and I’m sorry; but what is, is, and I can’t help it. We’re not all made alike.”

XVIII

Patience was once more installed in Lola’s room. Mr. Foord applied for letters of guardianship, which were granted at once. But as he had feared, she was left without a penny. He wrote to his half-sister, asking her if she would take charge of his ward. Miss Tremont replied in enthusiastic affirmation. Miss Galpin invited Patience to spend two weeks with her in San Francisco, offering to replenish the girl’s wardrobe with several of her own old frocks made over.

Those two weeks seemed to Patience the mad whirl of excitement of which she had read in novels. She had never seen a city before, and the very cable cars fascinated her. To glide up and down the hills was to her the poetry of science. The straggling city on its hundred hills, the crowded streets and gay shop windows, the theatres, the restaurants, China Town, the beautiful bay with its bare colorous hills, surprised her into admitting that life appeared to be quite well worth living after all. When she returned to Monterey she talked so fast that Mr. Foord clapped his hands to his ears, and Rosita listened with expanded eyes.

“Ay, if I could live in San Francisco!” she said, plaintively. “I acted all summer, Patita, but I got tired of the same people, and I want to go to the big theatres and see the real ones do it. I’d like to hear a great big house applauding, only I’d be so jealous of the leading lady.”

Patience was to start, immediately after Christmas, by steamer for New York. Mr. Foord spent the last days giving her much good advice. He said little of his own sorrow to part from her. Once he had been tempted to keep her for the short time that remained to him, but had put the temptation aside with the sad resignation of old age. He knew Patience’s imperative need of new impressions in these her plastic years.

The day before she left she went over to Carmel to say good-bye to Solomon. He flapped his wings with delight, although he could not see her, and nestled close to her side in a manner quite unlike his haughty habit. Patience thought he looked older and greyer, and his wings had a dejected droop. She took him in her arms with an impulse of tenderness, and this time he did not repulse her.

“Poor old Solomon,” she said, “I suppose you are lonely and forlorn in your old age, but this old tower wouldn’t be what it is without you. It’s too bad I can’t write to you as I can to my two or three other friends, and you’ll never know I haven’t forgotten you, poor old Solomon. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I wonder if owls do suffer too. You look so wise and venerable, perhaps you are thinking that lonely old age is terrible—as I know Mr. Foord does.”

Solomon pecked at her mildly. Her gaze wandered out over the ocean. She wondered if a thousand years had passed since she had dreamed her dreams. Their very echoes came from the mountains of space.

When she went away Solomon followed her to the head of the stair. She looked upward once and saw him standing there, with drooping wings and head a little bent. The darkness of the stair gave him vision, and he fluttered his wings expectantly, as she paused and lifted her face to him. But when she did not return he walked with great dignity to his accustomed place against the wall, nor even lifted up his voice in protest.

The next morning Rosita accompanied her to the station and wept loudly as the train approached. But Patience did not cry until she stood in her stateroom with Mr. Foord.