The Californians Part 29

"No power on earth can make me marry him."

Her father searched her countenance. He knew her character. Did it not have that iron of New England in it for which he would have sold his birthright? He might turn her into the street, and it would avail him nothing. Again his features relaxed, this time not with surprise and consternation, but with abject fear. He shuddered from head to foot; then his hands shot up to receive his face. He groaned and rocked from side to side.

Magdalena was aghast. What feeling was alive in her united in filial tenderness. She went to him and put her hands uncertainly about his head, then stroked his hair awkwardly: she was little used to endearments.

"I never thought--" she stammered. "I never thought--"

"Thirty years I work like the slave, and now all going! Eeram, he have the death-tick in him: I hear! And now I no go to have the son, and I go to die in the streets like the others; with no one cents! _Ay! yi! ay!

yi!_"

Magdalena was p.r.i.c.ked with a new fear: Was her father insane? She had heard of the "fixed idea." This weevil had been burrowing in his brain for more than a quarter of a century. She went back to her chair and said a.s.sertively,--

"You are one of the ablest financiers in California: everybody says so.

Nothing can change that, whether uncle dies or not. This is all a fancy of yours. You don't half appreciate yourself. And you are tired out to-night, and have not been well lately--"

"All going! All going! _Ay de mi! Ay de mi!_ Why I no dying with the wife and the little boy? Make myself over, and now the screws go to drop out my character, and I am like before."

Magdalena had an inspiration. "Take me into the bank," she said eagerly.

"Teach me everything. I am sure I can learn. Then I will look after everything when uncle dies. I want to work--"

Don Roberto dropped his hands and gave a low roar. "The women all fools, and you the more big fool I never see. You throw way the clever man like he is old hat, and think you can manage the bank! _Madre de Dios!_ Si I no feel like old clothes, no more, I beating you. To-morrow I do it."

His eyes kindled at the prospect. "To-morrow si you no say you marry Trennahan, I beating you till you are black like my hat."

What remained of Magdalena's apathy left her then. She stood up and faced him, drawing her heavy brows together after his own fas.h.i.+on. "You will never beat me again," she said. "Let us have an understanding on that subject before we go to bed to-night. I am your daughter, and I shall always obey you except where the question of my marrying is concerned. But if you ill-treat me I shall leave your house and not return. I am of age, and I have my aunt to go to. Now, unless _you_ promise _me_ that you will never raise your hand to me again, I will leave for Santa Barbara to-night."

Again Don Roberto stared at her. But his surprise pa.s.sed quickly. He was too shrewd a judge of human nature to doubt her. If she had inherited the iron of her mother's ancestors, she had also inherited the pride of the Yorbas: she would not permit her womanhood to be outraged. But he could have his revenge in other ways; and he would take it. He gave the promise and ordered her sullenly to send the butler to help him up to bed.

XVI

During the following week Don Roberto was very ill. The doctor came three times a day. Mrs. Yorba and Magdalena sat up on alternate nights.

Mr. Polk was constantly at the bedside. When he retired to s.n.a.t.c.h an hour's sleep, Don Roberto's temperature became alarming; of the presence of his wife and daughter he took no notice whatever.

As the ego must enter into all things, Magdalena, despite her alarm and pity, was grateful for the diversion. The interview with her father had roused her abruptly and finally; and during that night her misery had raged in every part of her. It is true that in the long watches thought fairly stamped in her brain, but it was rudely brushed aside every little while by the imperious wants of the sick man, or the whispered remarks of the professional nurse. At other times she slept heavily or received the numerous friends who came to inquire for the eminent citizen who had dined out too often during the gayest season in many years.

Don Roberto recovered, and his convalescence was as memorable as his previous social activity. No nurse would remain more than thirty-six hours at any price; and even his wife, whose ideas of marital duty were as rigid as her social code, lost her patience upon one occasion and rated him soundly. Mr. Polk was the only person he treated with common decency. As for Magdalena, he might have been a sultan and she his meanest slave. But Magdalena was rather pleased than otherwise. Her conscience had flagellated her as the immediate cause of his illness, and she strove by every act of devotion to make amends.

As soon as he was sufficiently recovered, he was taken, in a special car, to Fair Oaks, to absorb the sun on his s.p.a.cious verandahs.

Magdalena had asked the doctor to order Southern California, but the order had been received with such a roar of fury that the subject was not resumed. Magdalena was forced to return to Menlo Park.

She spent the night walking the floor of her room, struggling for endurance to face the places eloquent of Trennahan. There were so many of them! Helena simply would not have returned; no power short of physical force could have compelled her. More than once Magdalena wished that she was cast in her friend's anarchic mould. She felt that did her grip upon herself relax she should scream aloud and grovel on the very boards that had had their share in her brief love-life. But she was Magdalena Yorba, the proudest woman in California; in the very hour of her discovery, when she had been possessed of a blind terror rather than grief, she had remembered to be thankful that the world could not pity her. Even the genuine sympathy of Tiny would have been gall in a raw wound. She was looking thinner and plainer than ever, but her father's illness would account for that. She must set her features in steel and lock them, keep her emotions for the night.

The next day she visited every spot a.s.sociated with Trennahan,--not once, but many times. She had made up her mind with the right instinct that the thing to do was to blunt her sensibilities. By the third day she had ordered the earlier a.s.sociations on duty, and managed to confuse them somewhat with those which had held possession for so brief a time.

She was determined to succeed. She had no right to love the husband of another woman, and suffering was something so much more terrible than anything her imagination had ever hinted that she was frantic to get rid of the load as quickly as possible. By and by she would go back to her writing; and that, and her duties, should be every bit of her life henceforth.

At the end of a week she discovered that she was still receptive to the aesthetic delights. It was early spring. The soft air caressed the senses, perfumed with violet and lilac, Castilian roses, new clover, and the breath of mountain forests, brought on the long sighs of the wind.

Never was there such a _bouquet_ since Time began. Over a high bush on the lawn opposite her window the long "bridal wreaths" tumbled. The meadows were full of mustard, the bright green leaves hardly visible, so thick were the yellow blossoms.

Once she rode to the foot-hills, escorted by d.i.c.k. They were covered with yellow and purple lupins, miniature jungles which harboured nothing more sanguinary than the gopher and the cotton-tail. The tawny poppies had hills all to themselves, a blaze of colour as fiery as the sun to which they lifted their curved drowsy lips. The Mariposa lilies grew by the creeks, in the dark shade of meeting willows. The gold-green moss was like plush on the trees. From the hills the great valley looked like a dense forest out of which lifted the tower of an enchanted castle. Not another signal of man was to be seen, nothing but the excrescence on the big wedding-cake house of a Bonanza king. Beyond the hills rose the slopes of the mountains, with their mighty redwoods, their dark untrodden aisles, their vast primeval silences. Magdalena was thankful that Nature had not ceased to be beautiful, and pressed her hands against her heart to stifle its demand; Nature commands union, and has no sympathy for aching solitude.

Meanwhile Don Roberto was recovering rapidly. From the hour that he could walk briskly about the garden his voluble irascibility left him, and he reverted to something more than his old taciturnity; he rarely opened his mouth except to put the plainest of food into it, even to speak to Mr. Polk. His brows were lowered constantly over heavy brooding eyes; his lips seemed set with a spring. When he finally addressed his wife, it was to tell her that she must manage with one butler and one housemaid. Coincidently he dismissed two of the gardeners and commanded the one retained, and d.i.c.k, to plant in a part of the lawns that there might be less water used. Himself came from town every evening and worked in the garden for two hours, besides arising at five in the morning and working until breakfast. He sold his finest carriage horses to Mr. Geary; and when one of the two remaining was temporarily disabled, he rode to and from the station in the spring wagon. The monthly allowance of his wife and daughter was suspended for the summer.

Mrs. Yorba, tall, garbed in black, stalked about the house with the expression of an outraged empress; Magdalena, being the cause of the outrage, was rarely addressed. She ostentatiously made over several of her old frocks and coldly requested her daughter to make her own bed.

She kept all the windows in the house, with the exception of one in each room, closed and shuttered, as she was deprived of both service and water. The house seemed perpetually expectant of funeral guests, its silence only broken by Mrs. Yorba's heavy sighs.

Magdalena had certainly succeeded in making three people miserable; she could only hope that she had been more fortunate with the other two. She spent most of her time out of doors, riding or walking until her strength was exhausted. She was profoundly grateful that she was to take little part in the socialities of the summer. To dance and picnic and tennis and ride to the hills, exactly as she had done when quite another person! She infinitely preferred the disapproval of her parents and the freedom they gave her.

XVII

Trennahan had written to Magdalena from the Islands, acknowledging the letter she had written him after her interview with her father, and accepting his dismissal. He returned to San Francisco the last of May.

Almost immediately she received a letter from Helena announcing her engagement to him.

Helena, while in Southern California, had written to Magdalena with her accustomed regularity. The letters were bitter with self-reproach alternated with the very joy of being alive in that opulent southern land. When she wrote of the engagement she a.s.sured the dearest friend she had on earth that if things had turned out differently she should have gone away and got over it somehow, but as Magdalena's decision was irrevocable she intended to be the happiest girl in the world; it wouldn't do anybody a bit of good if she wasn't. Magdalena felt no bitterness toward her. She had lost Trennahan; the woman mattered nothing. She would rather it were Helena than another; for who else could make him so happy? But she knew that she should see less of Helena in the future, and she hardly knew whether she were glad or sorry. She wished that she had the courage to ask her to keep him away from Menlo Park this summer.

The other girls moved down, bringing many guests, and she saw them daily; habit is not broken in a moment. They pa.s.sed through Fair Oaks as usual on their afternoon drives, stopping for a chat; in their char-a-bancs or on the verandah. It was some time before they discovered the changes in the Yorba household, and when they did they merely shrugged their shoulders at the old don's eccentricities. The big parlours were certainly to be regretted; but there were other parlours that were not half bad, and it was terribly up-hill work entertaining Don Roberto. They were profoundly sorry for Magdalena, and were so insistent in their demands that she should spend much of her time with them that she found her solitude far less complete than she had hoped.

But Helena and Trennahan were not to come down until the first of July; they had gone with Colonel Belmont to the Yosemite, Geysers and Big Trees.

XVIII

Trennahan in that first month thought little of Magdalena. He hardly knew whether he were happy or not; he certainly was intoxicated. Helena was both impa.s.sioned and shy, a companion to whom words were hardly a necessary medium for thought, and magnificently uncertain of mood.

Moreover, whether riding a donkey up the steep dusty grades of the Yosemite, or half veiled in a mist of steam, reeking of h.e.l.l, or standing with wondering eyes and parted lips among the colossal trees of Calaveras, she was always beautiful. And Trennahan wors.h.i.+pped her beauty with the strength of a pa.s.sion which had sprung from a long and recuperative sleep. That he was twice her age mattered nothing to him now. Nothing mattered but that she was to be wholly his.

The morning after his return to Menlo he awoke with a confused sense that he should be late for his morning ride with Magdalena. He laughed as his senses rattled into place, but he sighed just after; and both the laugh and the sigh were Magdalena's, grim as the former may have been.

That had been a time of peace and perfect content, and he could never forget it, not though he lived long years of unimaginable bliss with Helena--which he probably would not. A part of his life, limited and stunted a part as it was, belonged irrevocably to Magdalena. He concluded, after some hard thinking, that it was his best part. He had given her something of his soul, and he had no wish to take it back. He had given her the reviving aspirations of an originally n.o.ble nature; the sun of her had shone upon the barren soil, and the harvest was hers.

He was an unimaginative man, but he was inclined to believe that if there was a future existence, Magdalena would belong to him then and for ever, that something even less definable than the soul of each belonged to the other. For there was nothing to be ashamed of in his love for Helena. She appealed as powerfully to his mind and heart as to his pa.s.sion. But there was something beyond all, and he had no name for it,--unless it were that principle of absolute good as distinguished from its grades and variations; and it belonged to the girl whom he certainly no longer wanted in this life.

He wished that he had suggested to Helena to spend the summer in San Rafael or Monterey. Menlo Park belonged to Magdalena; he found himself hating the thought of having a series of very perfect memories disturbed, even by the most pa.s.sionately loved of women. And so Magdalena had her first revenge.

He went reluctantly enough to Fair Oaks in the afternoon. The very leaves whispered as they drove through the woods. He had protested, but Helena must see 'Lena at once; she could never be entirely happy until she had looked into 'Lena's eyes and convinced herself that they were quite unchanged. And Trennahan must go, too, and have it over.

Trennahan, who only crossed her whims for the pleasure of making up with her later, admitted that she was right, and went.

Mrs. Yorba was on the verandah receiving Mrs. Geary and Mrs. Brannan.

Magdalena was upstairs in her room. The monotony of those afternoon receptions had taken its place among the distasteful things of life, and she was determined not to go down until she was sent for. Each time she heard wheels she went to the window and looked out. The third time she saw Trennahan and Helena. The very bones of her skeleton seemed to fall upon each other; she sank to the ground with less vigour than a shattered soldier. But in a moment she gave a hard gasp and pressed her hands to her face. Then she heard Helena's voice,--that sweet husky voice which was not the least potent of her charms.

"'Lena! 'Lena! Well, I'll go look for her."

Magdalena scrambled to her feet and fled down the hall to her mother's dressing-room. There, in a cupboard, was always a decanter of sherry; for Mrs. Yorba, after her neuralgic attacks, was often faint. Magdalena filled a gla.s.s, drank it, and blessed the swift fire which shook her will free and made a disciplined regiment of her nerves. She was so delighted at her sudden mastery over herself that she ran out into the hall, caught Helena in her arms, and kissed her demonstratively. Helena burst into tears. "You are the best girl on earth," she sobbed. "And I feel so wicked; but I am so happy."