The Doomswoman Part 21

A servant met him on the veranda and conducted him to his room; it was late, and every one else was dressing for dinner. He changed his riding-clothes for the evening dress of modern civilization, and went at once to the drawing-room. Here all was luxury, nothing to suggest the privations of a new country. A thick red carpet covered the floor, red arras the walls; the music of Mozart and Beethoven was on the grand piano. The furniture was rich and comfortable, the large carved table was covered with French novels and European periodicals.

The candles had not been brought in, but logs blazed in the open fireplace. As Estenega crossed the room, a woman, dressed in black, rose from a deep chair, and he recognized Chonita. He sprang forward impetuously and held out his arms, but she waved him back.

"No, no," she said, hurriedly. "I want to explain why I am here. I came for two reasons. First, I could refuse the Princess Helene no longer; she goes so soon. And then--I wanted to see you once more before I leave the world."

"Before you do what?"

"I am not going into a convent; I cannot leave my father. I am going to retire to the most secluded of our ranchos, to see no more of the world or its people. I shall take my father with me. Reinaldo and Prudencia will remain at Casa Grande."

"Nonsense!" he exclaimed, impatiently. "Do you suppose I shall let you do anything of the sort? How little you know me, my love! But we will discuss that question later. We shall be alone only a few moments now.

Tell me of yourself. How are you?"

"I will tell you that, also, at another time."

And at the moment a door opened, and the governor and his wife entered and greeted Estenega with cordial hospitality. The governor was a fine-looking Russian, with a spontaneous warmth of manner; the princess a woman who possessed both elegance and vivacity, both coquetry and dignity; she could sparkle and chill, allure and suppress in the same moment. Even here, rough and wild as her surroundings were, she gave much thought to her dress; to-night her blonde harmonious loveliness was properly framed in a toilette of mignonette greens, fresh from Paris. A moment later Reinaldo and Prudencia appeared, the former as splendid a caballero as ever, although wearing the chastened air of matrimony, the latter pre-maternally consequential. Then came the officers and their wives, all brilliant in evening dress; and a moment later dinner was announced.

Estenega sat at the right of his hostess, and that trained daughter of the salon kept the table in a light ripple of conversation, sparkling herself, without striking terror to the hearts of her guests. She and Estenega were old friends, and usually indulged in lively sallies, ending some times in a sharp war of words, for she was a very clever woman; but to-night he gave her absent attention: he watched Chonita furtively, and thought of little else.

Her eyes had darker shadows beneath them than those cast by her lashes; her face was pale and slightly hollowed. She had suffered, and not for her mother. "She shall suffer no more," he thought.

"We hunt bear to-night," he heard the governor say at length.

"I should like to go," said Chonita, quickly. "I should like to go out to-night."

Immediately there was a chorus from all the Other women, excepting the Princess Helene and Prudencia; they wanted to go too. Rotscheff, who would much rather have left them at home, consented with good grace, and Estenega's spirits rose at once. He would have a talk with Chonita that night, something he had not dared to hope for, and he suspected that she had promoted the opportunity.

The men remained in the dining-room after the ladies had withdrawn, and Estenega, restored to his normal condition, and in his natural element among these people of the world, expanded into the high spirits and convivial interest in masculine society which made him as popular with men as he was fascinating, through the exercise of more subtle faculties, to women. Reinaldo watched him with jealous impatience; no one cared to hearken to his eloquence when Estenega talked; and he had come to Fort Ross only to have a conversation with his one-time enemy. As he listened to Estenega, shorn, for the time-being, of his air of dictator and watchful ambition, a man of the world taking an enthusiastic part in the hilarity of the hour, but never sacrificing his dignity by a.s.suming the role of chief entertainer, there grew within him a dull sense of inferiority: he felt, rather than knew, that neither the city of Mexico nor gratified ambitions would give him that a.s.sured ease, that perfection of breeding, that calm sense of power, concealing so gracefully the relentless will and the infinite resource which made this most un-Californian of Californians seem to his Arcadian eyes a being of a higher star. And hatred blazed forth anew.

As the men rose, finally, to go to the drawing-room, he asked Estenega to remain for a moment. "Thou wilt keep thy promise soon, no?" he said when they were alone.

"What promise?"

"Thy promise to send me as diputado to the next Mexican Congress."

Estenega looked at him reflectively. He had little toleration for the man of inferior brain, and, although he did not underrate his power for mischief, he relied upon his own wit to circ.u.mvent him. He had disposed of this one by warning Santa Ana, and he concluded to be annoyed by him no further. Besides, as a brother-in-law, he would be insupportable except at the long range of mutual unamiability.

"I made you no promise," he said, deliberately; "and I shall make you none. I do not wish you in the city of Mexico."

Reinaldo's face grew livid. "Thou darest to say that to me, and yet would marry my sister?"

"I would, and I shall."

"And yet thou wouldst not help her brother?"

"Her brother is less to me than any man with whom I have sat to-night.

Build no hopes on that. You will stay at Santa Barbara and play the grand seigneur, which suits you very well, or become a prisoner in your own house." And he left the room.

x.x.xI.

An hour later they a.s.sembled in the plaza to start for the bear hunt.

Reinaldo was not of the party.

Estenega lifted Chonita to her horse and stood beside her for a moment while the others mounted. He touched her hand with his:

"We could not have a more beautiful night," he said, significantly.

"And I have often wished that my father had included this spot when he applied for his grant. I should like to live with you here. Even when the winds rage and hurl the rain through the very window pane, I know of no more enchanting spot than Fort Ross. The Russians are going; some day I will buy it for you."

She made no reply, but she did not withdraw her hand, and he held it closely and glanced slowly about him. Always, despite his bitter intimacy with life, in kins.h.i.+p with nature, perhaps in that moment it had a deeper meaning, for he saw with double vision: She was there; and, with him, sensible not only of the beauty of the night, but of the indefinable mystery which broods over California the moment the sun falls. Perhaps, too, he was troubled by a vague foreboding, such as comes to mortals sometimes in spite of their limitations: he never saw Fort Ross again.

On the horizon the fog crouched and moved; marched like a battalion of ocean's ghosts; suddenly cohered and sent out light puffs of smoke, as from the crater of a spectral volcano. The moon, full and bright and cold, hung low in the dark sky: one hardly noted the stars. The vast sweep of water was as calm as a lake, dark and metallic like the sky, barely reflecting the silver light between. But although calm it was not quiet. It greeted the forbidding rocks beyond the sh.o.r.e, the long irregular line of stark, storm-beaten cliffs, with ominous mutter, now and again throwing a cloud of spray high in the air, as if in derisive proof that even in sleep it was sensible of its power. Occasionally it moaned, as if sounding a dirge along the ma.s.s of stones which storms had hurled or waves had wrenched from the crags above,--a dirge for beheaded Russians, for him who had walked the plank, or for the lover of Natalie Ivanhoff.

Here and there the cliffs were intersected by deep straggling gulches, out of whose sides grew low woods of brush; but the three tables rising successively from the ocean to the forest on the mountain, were almost bare. On the highest, between two gulches, on a knoll so bare and black and isolated that its destiny was surely taken into account at creation, was a tall rude cross and a half hundred neglected graves. The forest seemed blacker just behind it, the shadows thicker in the gorges that embraced it, the ocean grayer and more illimitable before it. "Natalie Ivanhoff is there in her copper coffin," said Estenega, "forgotten already."

The curve of the mountain was so perfect that it seemed to reach down a long arm on either side and grasp the cliffs. The redwoods on its crown and upper slopes were a ma.s.s of rigid shadows, the points, only, sharply etched on the night sky. They might have been a wall about an undiscovered country.

"Come," cried Rotscheff, "we are ready to start." And Estenega sprang to his horse.

"I don't envy you," said the Princess Helene from the veranda, her silveren head barely visible above the furs which enveloped her. "I prefer the fire."

"You are warmly clad?" asked Estenega of Chonita. "But you have the blood of the South in your veins."

They climbed the steep road between the levels, slowly, the women chattering and asking questions, the men explaining and advising.

Estenega and Chonita having much to say, said nothing.

A cold volume of air, the m.u.f.fled roar of a mountain torrent, rushed out of the forest, startling with the suddenness of its impact. Once a panther uttered its human cry.

They entered the forest. It was so dark here that the horses wandered from the trail and into the brush again and again. Conversation ceased; except for the m.u.f.fled footfalls of the horses and the speech of the waters there was no sound. Chonita had never known a stillness so profound; the giant trees crowding together seemed to resent intrusion, to menace an eternal silence. She moved her horse close to Estenega's and he took her hand. Occasionally there was an opening, a well of blackness, for the moon had not yet come to the forest.

They reached the summit, and descended. Half-way down the mountain they rode into a farm in a valley formed by one of the many basins.

The Indians were waiting, and killed a bullock at once, placing the carca.s.s in a conspicuous place. Then all retired to the shade of the trees. In less than a half-hour a bear came prowling out of the forest and began upon the meal so considerately provided for him. When his attention was fully engaged, Rotscheff and the officers, mounted, dashed down upon him, swinging their la.s.sos. The bear showed fight and stood his ground, but this was an occasion when the bear always got the worst of it. One la.s.so caught his neck, another his hind foot, and he was speedily strained and strangled to death. No sooner was he despatched than another appeared, then another, and the sport grew very exciting, absorbing the attention of the women as well as the energies of the men.

Estenega lifted Chonita from her horse. "Let us walk," he said.

"They will not miss us. A few yards farther, and you will be on my territory. I want you there."

She made no protest, and they entered the forest. The moon shone down through the lofty redwoods that seemed to sc.r.a.pe its crystal; the monotone of the distant sea blended with the faint roar of the tree-tops. The vast gloomy aisles were unbroken by other sound.

He took her hand and held it a moment, then drew it through his arm.

"Now tell me all," he said, "They will be occupied for a long while.

The night is ours."

"I have come here to tell you that I love you," she said. "Ah, can _I_ make _you_ tremble? It was impossible for me not to tell you this; I could not rest in my retreat without having the last word with you, without having you know me. And I want to tell you that I have suffered horribly; you may care to know that, for no one else in the world could have made me, no one else ever can. Only your fingers could twist in my heart-strings and tear my heart out of my body. I suffered first because I doubted you, then because I loved you, then the torture of jealousy and the pangs of parting, then those dreadful three months when I heard no word. I could not stay at Casa Grande; everything a.s.sociated with you drove me wild. Oh, I have gone through all varieties! But the last was the worst, after I heard from you again, and all other causes were removed, and I knew that you were well and still loved me: the knowledge that I never could be anything to you,--and I could be so much! The torment of this knowledge was so bitter that there was but one refuge,--imagination. I shut my eyes to my little world and lived with you; and it seemed to me that I grew into absolute knowledge of you. Let me tell you what I divined. You may tell me that I am wrong, but I do not believe that you will. I think that in the little time we were together I absorbed you.

"It seemed to me that your soul reached always for something just above the attainable, restless in the moments which would satisfy another, fretted with a perverse desire for something different when an ardent wish was granted, steeped, under all wanton determined enjoyment of life, with the bitter knowing of life's sure impotence to satisfy. Could the dissatisfied darting mind loiter long enough to give a woman more than the promise of happiness?--but never mind that.