A Daughter Of The Vine Part 24

Mrs. Earle was as little changed as Mrs. McLane, and her still flas.h.i.+ng eyes challenged him at once. Guadalupe Hathaway was unmarried and had grown stout; but she was as handsome as of old.

They all received him with flattering warmth, "treated him much better than he deserved," Mrs. McLane remarked, "considering he had never written one of them a line;" and he felt the past growing sharp of outline. There were several very smart young ladies present, two of whom he remembered as awkward little girls. The very names of the others were unknown to him. They knew of him, however, and one of them affected to disapprove of him sharply because he had "fought against the flag." Mrs.

McLane took up the cudgels for her South, and party feeling ran high.

Nina Randolph's name was not mentioned. He wondered if she were dead.

Not so much as a glance was directed toward the most momentous episode of his life. Doubtless they had forgotten that he had once been somewhat attentive to her. But his memory was breaking in the middle and marshalling its forces at the farther end; the events of the intervening ten years were now a confused ma.s.s of shadows. Mrs. Earle sang a Mexican love-song, and he turned the leaves for her. When he told Guadalupe Hathaway that he was glad to find her unchanged, she replied:--

"I am fat, and you know it. And as I don't mind in the least, you need not fib about it. You have a few grey hairs and lines; but you've worn better than our men, who are burnt out with trade winds and money grubbing."

He remained an hour. When he left the house, he walked rapidly out of the Park, casting but one hasty glance to the right, crossed the city and went straight to the house of Molly Shrops.h.i.+re's sister. It also was unchanged, a square ugly brown house on a corner over-looking the blue bay and the wild bright hills beyond. The houses that had sprung up about it were cheap and fresh, and bulging with bow-windows.

"Yes," the maid told him, "Miss Shrops.h.i.+re still lived there, and was at home." The room into which she showed him was dark, and had the musty smell of the unpopular front parlour. A white marble slab on the centre table gleamed with funereal significance. Thorpe drew up the blinds, and let in the sun. He was unable to decide if the room had been refurnished since the one occasion upon which he had entered it before; but it had an old-fas.h.i.+oned and dingy appearance.

He heard a woman's gown rustle down the stair, and his nerves shook.

When Miss Shrops.h.i.+re entered, she did not detect his effort at composure. She had accepted the flesh of time, and her hair was beginning to turn; but she shook hands in her old hearty decided fas.h.i.+on.

"I heard yesterday that you were here," she said. "Take that armchair. I rather hoped you'd come. We used to quarrel; but, after all, you are an Englishman, and I can never forget that I was born over there, although I don't remember so much as the climate."

"Will you tell me the whole story? I did not intend to come to see you, to mention her name. But it has come back, and I must know all that there is to know--from the very date of my leaving up to now. Of course, she wrote me that you were in her confidence."

She told the story of a year which had been as big with import for one woman as for a nation. "Mr. Randolph died six months after the wedding,"

she concluded, wondering if some men were made of stone. "It killed him. He did not see her again until he was on his death-bed. Then he forgave her. Any one would, poor thing. He left his money in trust, so that she has a large income, and is in no danger of losing it. She lives with her mother at Redwoods. Clough died some years ago--of drink. It was in his blood, I suppose, for almost from the day he set foot in Redwoods he was a sot."

"And Nina?"

"Don't try to see her," said Miss Shrops.h.i.+re, bluntly. "You would only be horrified,--you wouldn't recognise her if you met her on the street.

She is breaking, fortunately. I saw her the other day, for the first time in two years, and she told me she was very ill."

"Have you deserted her?"

"Don't put it that way! I shall always love Nina Randolph, and I am often sick with pity. But she never comes here, and one _cannot_ go to Redwoods. It is said that the orgies there beggar description. Even the Hathaways, who are their nearest neighbours, never enter the gates. It is terrible! And if your letter had come six days earlier, it would all have been different. But she was born to bad luck."

Thorpe rose. "Thank you," he said. "Are your sisters well? I shall be here only a few days longer, but I shall try to call again."

She laid her hand on his arm. She had a sudden access of vision. "Don't try to see Nina," she said, impressively.

"G.o.d forbid!" he said.

VII

He slept not at all that night. He had thought that his days of poignant emotion were over, that he had worn out the last of it on the blood-soaked fields of Virginia, on nights between days when Death rose with the sun; but up from their long sleep misery and love rose with the vigour of their youth, and claimed him. And the love was for a woman who no longer existed, whose sodden brain doubtless held no memory of him, or remembered only to curse him. He strove to imagine her as she must be. She rose before him in successive images of what she had been: from the night he had met her to the morning of their last interview on the mountain,--a series of images sometimes painful, always beautiful. Then his imagination created her as she must have been during the months of her solitude in the midst of a wild and beautiful country, when in her letters she had sent him so generous and so exquisite a measure of herself; then the last months, when he would have been half mad with love and pity if he had known. Nor was that all: it seemed to him in the torments of that night that he realised for the first time what he had lost, what poignant, enduring, and varied happiness might have been his during the past ten years. Instead, he had had excitement, honours, and mental activity; he had not been happy for an hour. And the possibility of such happiness, of union with the one woman whom he was capable of pa.s.sionately loving with soul and mind and body, was as dead as his youth, buried with the soul of a woman whose face he would not recognise. She was above ground, this woman, and a different being! He repeated the fact aloud; but it was the one fact his imagination would not grasp and present to his mental vision. It realised her suffering, her morbid despair, her att.i.tude to herself, to the world, and to him, when she had decided to marry Clough; but the hideous metamorphosis of body and spirit was outside its limitations.

In the morning he asked his sister-in-law if she would leave California at the end of the week. She was a methodical and slow-moving little person, and demurred for a time, but finally consented to make ready.

Her business affairs--which consisted of several unsold ranches--could be left in the hands of an agent; there was little more that her brother-in-law could do.

Harold's remains had been temporarily placed in the receiving vault on Lone Mountain. Thorpe went out to the cemetery in the afternoon to make the final arrangements for removing them to England.

Lone Mountain can be seen from any part of San Francisco; scarcely a house but has a window from which one may receive his daily hint that even Californians are mortal. Here is none of the illusion of the cemetery of the flat, with its thickly planted trees and shrubbery, where the children are taken to walk when they are good, and to wonder at the glimpses of pretty little white houses and big white slates with black letters. The s.h.i.+ning tombs and vaults and monuments, tier above tier, towering at the end of the city, flaunt in one's face the remorselessness and the greed of death. In winter, the paths are running brooks; one imagines that the very dead are soaked. In summer, the dusty trees and shrubs accentuate the marble pride of dead and living men.

Behind, higher still, rises a bare brown mountain with a cross on its summit,--Calvary it is called; and on stormy nights, or on days when the fog is writhing in from the ocean, blurring even that high sharp peak, one fancies the trembling outlines of a figure on the cross.

To-day the tombs were scarcely visible within the fine white mist which had been creeping in from the Pacific since morning and had made a beautiful ghost-land of the entire city. The cross on Calvary looked huge and misshapen, the marbles like the phantoms of those below. The mist dripped heavily from the trees, the walks were wet. It is doubtful if there is so gloomy, so disturbing, so fascinating a burying-ground on earth as the Lone Mountain of San Francisco.

The s.e.xton's house was near the gates. Thorpe completed his business, and started for the carriage which had brought him. He paused for a moment in the middle of the broad road and looked up. In the gently moving mist the shafts seemed to leave their dead, and crawl through the groves, as if to some ghoulish tryst. Thorpe thought that it would be a good place for a man, if lost, to go mad in. But, like all the curious phases of California, it interested him, and in a moment he sauntered slowly upward. His own mood was not hilarious, and although he had no wish to join the cold hearts about him, he liked their company for the moment.

Some one approached him from above. It was a woman, and she picked her way carefully down the steep hill-side. She loomed oddly through the mist, her outlines s.h.i.+fting. As she pa.s.sed Thorpe, he gave her the cursory glance of man to unbeautiful woman. She was short and stout; her face was dark and large, her hair grizzled about the temples, her expression sullen and dejected, her attire rich. She lifted her eyes, and stopped short.

"Dudley!" she said; and Thorpe recognised her voice.

He made no attempt to answer her. He was hardly conscious of anything but the wish that he had left California that morning.

"You did not recognise me?" she said, with a laugh he did not remember.

"No."

He stared at her, trying to conjure up the woman who had haunted him during the night. She had gone. There was a dim flash in the eyes, a broken echo in the voice of this woman, which gave him the impression of looking upon the faded daguerreotype of one long dead, or upon a bundle of old letters.

Her face dropped under his gaze. "I had hoped never to see you again,"

she muttered. "But I don't know that I care much. It is long since I have thought of you. I care for one thing only,--nothing else matters.

Still, I have a flicker of pride left: I would rather you should not have seen me an ugly old sot. I believe I was very pretty once; but I have forgotten."

Thorpe strove to speak, to say something to comfort the poor creature in her mortification; but he could only stare dumbly at her, while something strove to reach out of himself into that hideous tomb and clasp the stupefied soul which was no less his than in the brief day when they had been happy together. As long as that body lived on, it carried his other part. And after? He wondered if he could feel more alone then than now, did it take incalculable years for his soul to find hers.

She looked up and regarded him sullenly. "You are unchanged," she said.

"Life has prospered with you, I suppose. I haven't read the papers nor heard your name mentioned for years; but I read all I could find about you during the war; and you look as if you had had few cares. Are you married?"

"No."

"You have been true to me, I suppose." And again she laughed.

"Yes, I suppose that is the reason. At least I have cared to marry no other woman."

"Hm!" she said. "Well, the best thing you can do is to forget me. I'm sorry if I hurt your pride, but I don't feel even flattered by your constancy. I have neither heart nor vanity left; I am nothing but an appet.i.te,--an appet.i.te that means a long sight more to me than you ever did. To-morrow, I shall have forgotten your existence again. Once or twice a year, when I am sober,--comparatively,--I come here to visit my father's tomb. Why, I can hardly say, unless it is that I find a certain satisfaction in contemplating my own niche. I am an unconscionable time dying."

"Are you dying?"

"I'm gone to pieces in every part of me. My mother threw me downstairs the other day, and that didn't mend matters."

"Come," he said. "I have no desire to prolong this interview. There is a private carriage at the gate. Is it yours? Then, if you will permit me, I will see you to it."

She walked beside him without speaking again. He helped her into her carriage, lifted his hat without raising his eyes, then dismissed his carriage, and walked the miles between the burying-ground and his hotel.

VIII