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Vere as by an almost negative stolidity. This at least provided her
with an unruffled front for trying occasions—others besides the
Arcots were insensible of her offerings—which in the United States
of America would have been admiringly characterized as "nerve."
This manner became solidified after her popular husband's death,
and if it was generally referred to as "aplomb" or "poise," allowances
must be made for the poverty of the average vocabulary.
It is not difficult for a clever, handsome, correct, and wealthy woman
to reach and hold a distinctive position even in London, that world's
headquarters of individualities. In addition to a judiciously lavish
hospitality, it is only necessary to personalize intelligently, and this
Mrs. Kaye did with an industry that would have carried her to
greatness had she been granted a spark of the divine fire. She
cultivated the great and the fashionable in art, letters, and the
drama, mixed them tactfully with her titles, attended the banquets of
the ruling class in Bohemia attired flatteringly in her best, and
founded a society for the study of Leonardo da Vinci. She became
intimate with several royal ladies, who were charmed with her
endless power to amuse them and her magnificent patronage of
their charities; and she formed close relations with other dames but
a degree less exalted, and generally more discriminating. She
cultivated a witty habit of speech, the society of cabinet ministers,
and her chef was a celebrity. Her gowns would have been notable in
New York, and she was wise enough to avoid eccentricity and openly
to regard all forms of sensationalism with a haughty disdain.
Her attitude to men was equally well-advised. Detrimentals and
ineligibles never so much as came up for inspection; she had a far-
reaching sense of selection and a proper notion of the value of time.
Therefore, the many that had the run of her luxurious mansion
contributed personally to her prestige, and she flattered herself that
her particular band was little less distinguished than the Royal
Household. And they invariably found her witty, entertaining, or, like
Madame Récamier, ready to listen "avec seduction." Her knowledge
of politics was practically unbounded.
In such moments as she happened to be alone with any of her
swains, she became distractingly personal, inviting, gently repelling,
afforded dazzling glimpses of possibilities awaiting time and the
man: so accomplishing the double purpose of agreeably titillating
her own depths and wearing the halo of a well-behaved Circe.
Altogether her success was what it always must be when brains and
ambition, money and a cold heart are allied; but it was small wonder
if the head of the daughter of the House of Tippett was a trifle
turned and certain of her perceptions were blunted.
Although ofttimes large with complacency, she by no means lost
sight of her original purpose to wed a coronet, and if she endured
four years of widowhood it was merely because she knew that she
could afford to wait for transcendence. This she had finally run to
earth in Lord Brathland, imminent heir to a dukedom, and personally
more agreeable to her than any man in London. That he was
notoriously inconstant but added zest to the chase, and it was,
perhaps, the illusion she at times achieved of a certain resemblance
to the ladies of his preference that finally overcame his intense
aversion from respectability. He had offered himself to her on the
day of his undoing.
This was the woman with whom Elton Gwynne was infatuated at the
most critical moment of his career. Of her profound aybsses he
suspected nothing. She reigned in his imagination as the unique
woman in whom intellect and passion, tenderness and all the social
graces united in an exquisite harmony. There had been a time when,
dazzled by the brilliancy of his ascending star, and Brathland being
but a name to her, she had considered marriage with a man who
assuredly would be the next leader of a Liberal House, and was no
less certain of being prime-minister. She was under no delusion that
she could one day induce him to accept a peerage, but she was
reasonably sure that Zeal would not marry again, and there were
times when the heir looked so ill that she tightened her bonds about
the heir-presumptive, while assuring him that she was too much in
love with liberty to think of marriage. Even when Zeal came back
from Norway or Sorrento looking almost well, she never permitted
Gwynne to escape, to see so much as a corner of her ego that might
disturb the image of herself she had created in his mind; and when
she met Brathland and her senses swam with the subtle scent of
strawberry leaves, she saw no reason for losing the stimulating
society and flattering attentions of the brightest star in the political
firmament. Therefore, when he was ready to hand, in the crushing
hour of her riven ambitions, and his own of serenest effulgence, she
promptly reflected that the distance between a marquisate and a
dukedom was quickly traversed by a powerful statesman.
Meanwhile, although Elton Gwynne would no doubt be a hideous
trial as a husband, his wife's position, supported by a million in the
funds and another in Chicago, would be one of the most brilliant in
England. And she too had seen Lord Zeal in Piccadilly on Saturday.
 XIX
The sudden elevation of her Jack to a marquisate, beside whose
roots, gripping the foundations of Britain's aristocracy, and ramifying
the length and breadth of its society, the lost dukedom was a mere
mushroom, created for a favorite of the last George, and notorious
for its mésalliances, did not cost Mrs. Kaye a moment's loss of poise.
She merely wondered that she had ever questioned her star. People
that disliked her found a subtle suggestion of arrogance in her
manner, and the slight significant smile on her large firm lips was a
trifle more stereotyped. Those that she favored with the abundance
of her offerings remembered afterwards that she had never been so
brilliant as during the month that followed the announcement of her
bethrothal, and attributed the fact to the electrified springs of
affection.
Gwynne and she had been invited to the same houses for the rest of
the autumn, but he cancelled his engagements while begging her to
fulfil hers, as he should be too busy to entertain her were she so
sweet as to insist upon coming to Capheaton. This she had not the
least intention of doing, for she not only yearned for the additional
tribute due to her, but she always avoided long sojourns in Lady
Victoria's vicinity, knowing her as a woman of caprice, who often
dropped people as abruptly as she took them up. Susceptible to the
charm of novelty, so far Mrs. Kaye had wholly pleased her; but the
clever Julia gauged the depths of her future mother-in-law's credulity
and kept her distance. With all her reason for self-gratulation, in the
depths of her cynical soul she was quite aware of her natural
inferiority to the women she emulated in all but their license. That
prerogative, with the wisdom that had marked her upward course,
she had flagrantly avoided, knowing that the world is complacent
only to those that fire its snobbishness, never to those that fan the
flame; and while she bitterly envied these women, she never forgot
the market value of her own unimpeachable virtue. She could not in
any case have been the slave of her passions, but her serenity was
sometimes ruffled as she reflected that, in spite of eminence
achieved, her caution in this and in other respects branded her in
her secret soul as second rate.
But if she tactfully did not insist upon flying to Capheaton, she wrote
such charming letters, happily free of solecisms, that Gwynne
wondered at his failure to sound the depths of her charm. But he
refrained from meeting her, and the reason was that he was slowly
working towards a momentous decision, and wished to arm himself
at all points before braving her possible disapproval. When he was
his cool normal collected self again, he gave way to his impatience
to see the woman he had every reason to believe was deeply in love
with him. He telegraphed her a peremptory appeal to go up to her
house in London, and she was too wise to refuse. It was now
October and London quite bearable. She telegraphed to her servants
to strip her house of its summer shroud, and returned early on the
day of his choice.
It is hardly necessary to state that Mrs. Kaye lived in Park Lane. She
had cultivated half-tones with a notable success, but to symbolize
her new estate was a temptation it had not occurred to her to resist.
Shortly after her return from India she had bought a large house in
the façade of London, and furnished it with a luxury that satisfied
one of the deepest cravings of her being, while her admirable sense
of balance saved her from the peculiar extravagances of the cocotte.
She had seen Lady Victoria's expressive boudoir at Capheaton, and
its mate in Curzon Street, and relieved the envy they inspired in a
caustic epigram that happily did not reach the insolent beauty's ear.
"These old coquettes," she had lisped, with an amused uplift of one
eyebrow. "They surround themselves with the atmosphere of the
demi-monde and forget that a wrinkle is as fatal as a chaperon."
The pictures in her own house were as correct as they were costly,
and she had no boudoir. She invariably received her guests in the
drawing-room, an immense and unique apartment, with a frieze of
dusky copies of old masters, all of a size, and all framed in gilt as
dim with time. From them depended a tapestry of crimson silk
brocade of uncheckered surface. By a cunning arrangement of
furniture the great room was broken up into a semblance of smaller
ones, each with its group of comfortable chairs, its tea-table, or
book case, or cabinet of bibelots, or open hearth. And all exhaled
the inviting atmosphere of occupation.
Mrs. Kaye, rested, and more self-possessed than if the hastening
lover had been the late Lord Brathland, but agreeably stirred
nevertheless, awaited the new peer in a charming corner before a
screen of dull gold, the last reviews on a table beside her, the
afternoon sun shining in on her healthy unworn face. When he
entered and advanced impetuously across the room she decided that
he certainly was a dear, even if he lacked the fascination of
Brathland and his kind. And his halo was almost visible. She
therefore yielded enchantingly when he enveloped her, smothered
her, stormed her lips, and even pulled her hair. She finally got him
over to the little sofa—she had advanced to meet him—but remained
in his arm, the very picture of tender voluptuous young womanhood.
Indeed, she was well pleased, and found her Jack, with that light
blazing in his eyes, quite handsome, and fascinating in his own
boyish imperious self-confident way.
It was half an hour before she rang for tea, and then she looked so
pretty and domestic on the other side of the little table, with its
delicate and costly service, that Gwynne was obliged to pause and
summon all his resolution before proceeding to another subject that
possessed him as fully as herself; but he succeeded, for not even
passion could turn him from his course; and she gave him his
opening.
"Poor Lord Strathland!" she exclaimed, with a tear in her throat. "He
was always so jolly and amusing, quite the most cheerful person I
ever met. And before your cousin became—lost his health—we were
great friends. Indeed he never quite forgot me. But it was for you I
was so horribly cut up. I cried for two nights."
"Did you? But I was positive you did not make those tears in your
first letter with your hair-brush." He laughed like a happy school-boy,
while she protested with a roughish expression that made her look
like a very young girl.
"It need not prevent our immediate marriage," he said. "What do
you say to the last of this month?"
"I could get ready. Only girls, who never have any clothes, poor
things, get trousseaux in these days. I had set my heart upon
spending the honeymoon at the Abbey, but it would be rather
indecent yet awhile; don't you think so?"
He had not an atom of tact and rushed upon his doom. "We shall
have to cut the Abbey," he said, firmly. "I start for California three
weeks from to-day."
"Indeed?" she said, stiffly. "I should have thought you would have
consulted me. Not but that I shall be enchanted to visit California,
but—well, you are rather lordly, you know."
"My dear girl, I have been too harassed to consider the amenities.
And when a man is rearranging his whole life he must isolate himself
or run the risk of clouds in his judgment."
He paused. She disguised her mortification and answered, kindly: "I
can understand that in this sudden demand for readjustment you
have had many bad moments. It was far too soon for you to go up
to the Peers'. But with your marvellous energies, your genius—there
is no other word for it—you can soon astonish the world anew with a
patent for defossilization. At all events the Peers' will enter upon a
new life as a sort of mastodon cave swept out and illuminated by the
most energetic and aspiring of knights-errant."
Gwynne laughed dryly. "The rôle does not appeal to me; nor any
other in the same setting. I have done a month of the hardest
thinking of my life. Everything that went before looks like child's
play. I have arrived at the definite conclusion that my career in
England has come to a full stop, and I have made up my mind to
create another—out of whole cloth—in the United States."
She stared at him, her face not yet unset, but her eyes expanding
with incredulous apprehension. "You mean to desert England?" she
asked, quietly.
"Forever. Absolutely. It is all or nothing. I cannot become an
American citizen until five years after entering the country, and I do
not wish to lose any valuable time. Having made up my mind, I have
ceased to wonder if I shall like it. That is now beside the question. I
shall drop my title as a matter of course, and hope that I shall pass
undiscovered as John Gwynne. In short, I shall begin life all over
again—as if I were a criminal in disguise instead of the sport of
circumstances. I have ceased to regret the inevitable and begun to
be stimulated by the thought of a struggle to which all that I have
had here was a mere game, and I am sure that you, with your
brains and energy, will enjoy the fight as much as I. I am not going
into the wilderness. We shall be only two hours from San Francisco,
which I am told is the only city in America that in the least suggests
Europe; it should be very attractive. On the ranch you shall have
every comfort and luxury. You must be sick of London, anyhow. You
have conquered everything here."
He paused and regarded her in some trepidation. In spite of his self-
confidence he had had his moments of doubt. And although he had
anticipated tears and remonstrance, he was unprepared for the more
subtle weapon of amusement, flickering through absolute calm. He
suddenly wished that she were younger. He had never given a
thought to her age before, but he remembered that she had lived for
two years longer than himself, and it made him feel even less than
thirty.
"My dear boy," she said, wonderingly, "I never heard anything so
romantic and impossible. Of course it is the American cousin with
whom you have been shut up all these weeks that has been putting
such preposterous ideas into your head. I always said that nature
just missed making you a poet. But if you wish to work out your
manifest destiny—to be immortalized in history—you will remind
yourself that England is the one place on earth where an Anglo-
Saxon can cut a really great figure. Not only because he has the
proper background of traditions, but because he has an audience
trained to recognize a man's greatness during his lifetime. If you go
in for those unspeakable American politics you will never be given
credit for anything higher than your medium; in other words, should
you develop into a statesman on American lines you would never be
recognized for anything but a successful politician. Even if you
survived in their hurly-burly of history, you would be judged by
contemporary standards—infused with a certain contempt because
you were not American-born."
"I have thought it all out. The obstacles to greatness, even more
than to success, have whetted my appetite for the struggle. I must
fight! fight! fight! I must exercise my powers of usefulness to some
good end, and now, now, when I am young and ardent. I should go
mad sitting round doing nothing. I have no temper for attacking the
passive resistance of inertia. I want to fight out in the open. If I fail I
will take my beating like a man. But I have not the least intention of
failing. I am acutely aware of the powers within me, and I can use
them anywhere."
"Then why not in the Upper House?" she asked, quickly.
"For the reasons I have given you, and because I should fear the
results on my character. You know what it means to be a peer of
Great Britain. Flattery without accomplishment is demoralizing—
would be to me, at all events. It is wine to me when I am achieving,
but it would drug me in idleness. Are you so wedded to London?"
"London is the raison d'être of life. Has it occurred to you," she
asked, gently, "that I might refuse to go to America?"
"I was afraid the idea would be something of a shock, but I was sure
you would see the matter in my light."
"It is not wanting in power! But it seems that I am. I have never
aspired to the rôle of Amelia Sedley. I have, in fact, rather a
pronounced individuality; and yet you have taken upon yourself to
dispose of my future as if I were a slip of eighteen—delighted at the
prospect of a husband."
"Indeed you are wrong!" he cried, distressed to have bruised so
beloved an ego. "But, I repeat, it was a question I was forced to
decide alone. Nor would it have been fair to ask you to assume any
part of so great a responsibility. Do you suppose I did not think of
that? Do you suppose I have ever lost sight of your happiness? Let
me think for both and you shall not regret it."
She could have smiled outright at this evidence of the
ingenuousness of man, but her breast was raging with a fury of
disappointment and consternation. She kept her eyes down lest they
should betray her. But suddenly she had an inspiration. She
controlled herself with a masterly effort, flooded her eyes with
tenderness, raised them, and said, softly:
"I do love London, love it with what I called a passion before I—
before we met. And I cannot believe that this extraordinary
resolution of yours has had time to mature. Promise me at least that
you will not apply for letters of citizenship for at least a year after
your arrival—"
"I shall apply the day after I arrive in Rosewater." He steeled himself,
for he had had his experience of woman's wiles; and his faith in
masculine supremacy as a habit did not waver. "I only regret that
the time of probation must be so long. I am on fire to throw myself
into the arena—however, there will be opportunities to make myself
known and felt. I have decided to study law meanwhile—and the
law, it seems, is a career in itself in America."
And then he watched her eyes, fascinated. They slowly hardened,
until, with the sun slanting into them, they looked like bronze. She
was too intent upon studying his own to hide them, and upon
arriving at a final conclusion. She reached it in a moment, for to her
habit of rapid thought and her understanding of the workings of the
masculine mind she owed no little of her supremacy among the
clever women of London.
"I see that your decision is irrevocable," she said. "You are yourself;
no one could make or unmake you, and God forbid that I should try.
But—and I forbear to lead up to it artistically—I dissever myself from
your chariot wheels. I am not afraid of being crushed, for no doubt
you would always remember to be polite, if not considerate. I am
not sure that you would even permit me to become unrecognizable
with dust. But I am no longer plastic. I am thirty-two, and I am as
much I as you are you. I shall watch you from afar with great
interest, and I sincerely hope, for both your sakes, that Miss Otis will
succeed in marrying you. I cannot fancy anything more suitable."
He had turned white, but he looked at her steadily. He felt as if the
round globe were slipping from under him; and vaguely wondered if
she had gone about alluding to him as "the marquess." Then he
sprang to his feet, lifted her forcibly from her chair, deposited her on
the sofa, and taking her in his arms defied her to dismiss him, to live
without him. As the body, so yielding before, declined even to
become rigid in resistance, he poured out such a flood of pleading
that, believing passion had conquered reason, she flung her arms
about his neck and offered to marry him on the morrow if he would
promise to remain in England. But there was a crystal quality in
Gwynne's intellect that no passion could obscure. He merely
renewed his pleadings; and then she slipped out of his embrace and
rose to her feet.
"We are wasting time," she said. "I always drive before dinner, and I
cannot go out in a tea-gown." She paused a moment to summon
from her resources the words that would humiliate him most and
slake the desire for vengeance that shrieked within her. She had
never hated any one so bitterly before, not even in her youth, when
snubs were frequent. For the third time she watched a coronet slip
through her strong determined impotent fingers. She could forgive
her husband and Brathland their untimely deaths, but for this young
man, passionately in love with her, who tossed the dazzling prize
aside as an actor might a "property crown," she felt such a rage of
hatred that for almost a moment she thought of giving her inherited
self the exquisite satisfaction of scratching his eyes out. But it was
too late in her day to be wholly natural, and, indeed, she preferred
the weapons the world and her ambitions had given her. As he rose
and stared at her doubtingly, she said, without a high or a sharp
note, in her clear lisping voice:
"I think it wise to put an end to all this by telling you that I was
engaged to Lord Brathland when he died. I was more in love with
him than I ever shall be with any one again. You caught me in the
violence of the rebound, for I was confused with grief, and
distraction was welcome: you are always sufficiently amusing. I have
not the least idea it would ever have come off, for, to tell you the
truth, my friend, you are too hopelessly the enfant gaté for a woman
who is neither young enough nor old enough to crave youth on any
terms. As a husband, I fear, not to put too fine a point on it, you
would be a bore. At the risk of being thought a snob—to which I am
quite indifferent—I will add that as plain John Gwynne you seem to
have so shrunk in size as to have become as insignificant as most
men are, no doubt, when you catch a glimpse of their
unmanufactured side. However"—with the air of a great lady
dismissing an object of patronage—"I wish you good-fortune, and
sincerely hope that we shall one day read of John Gwynne, senator,
and recall for a moment the brilliant Elton Gwynne so long forgotten
in this busy London of ours."
During quite half of her discourse Gwynne had felt his soul writhe
under a rain of hot metal, gibber towards some abyss where it could
hide its humiliation and its scars for ever. His brain seemed vacant
and his very nostrils turned white. But like many clever people
goaded to words by a furious sense of failure, she overshot her
mark, and before she finished his pride had made a terrified rebound
and taken complete possession of him. He still felt stripped, lashed,
a presumptuous youth before a scornful woman in the ripeness of
her maturity, but it was imperative for his future self-respect that he
should reassert his manhood and retire in good order. He let her
finish, and then, as she stood with a still impatience, he lifted his
eyes and drew himself up. His face was devoid of expression. His
eyes did not even glitter; he might have been listening with
voluntary politeness to the speech of majesty laying a corner-stone.
"You are quite right," he said. "You have given me the drubbing I
deserve, and I am grateful to you. It was the only thing I needed to
snap my last tie with England and brace me for the struggle in
America. It emboldens me to ask another favor—that you will regard
what I have told you of my plans as confidential. I shall give out that
I am going to travel for a time. As I believe I mentioned, I do not
wish to be recognized in the United States; and that by the time I
have made my new name my old one will be forgotten, is one of the
sure points upon which I have reckoned. Have I your promise?"
"My oath!" she said, flippantly; and although she was not generous
enough to admire, and still felt as if the world itself were a corpse,
every inherited instinct in her united in a visible respect for a poise
that was a gift of the centuries, not a deftly manufactured mask.
She rang the bell and extended her hand. Gwynne shook it politely;
and a moment later was walking down Park Lane in that singular
state of elation that in mercurial natures succeeds one of the brutal
blows of life, when all the forces of the spirit have leaped to the
rescue.
PART II
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