Isabel sat idly on the veranda of her old hotel as was her habit in the evening hour. There had been no heavy rains as yet to freshen the hills and swell the tides until the salt waters scalded the juices from the marsh grass, turning it from green to bronze and red; and the barometer was stationary. A cool wind came in from the sea with the flood, and Isabel enjoyed the beauty that was hers all the more luxuriously in her thick shawl of white wool. A great part of the valley north and south was within the range of her vision, and it was suffused with gold under a sky that looked like an inverted crucible pouring down its treasures in the prodigal fashion of the land. Facing her house and on the opposite side of the marsh, at its widest here, was a high wall of rock, from which the valley curved backward on either side, tapering to the great level in the north, but on the south halting abruptly before the mass of mountains following the coast line and topped by the angular shoulder of Tamalpais; coal black to-night against the intense gold of the West.
She had not seen Gwynne for several days, and half expected that he would come to-night. These were busy days, and she saw less of him than formerly, although he snatched an hour for shooting whenever he could, and occasionally rode over for supper; and they saw much of each other during the weekly visit to the city. Their relations were easy and sexless. He refused to talk of chickens, but they had many other interests in common. She had by no means forgotten his outbreak in the launch, and had scowled at her arms for quite a week as she brushed her hair for bed, but that episode was now several weeks old, and she had ceased to harbor resentment. But she was subtly out of conceit with herself and life, resentful that she missed any one, after her long triumph in freedom from human ties; also resentful of the respect and interest with which Gwynne had inspired her, particularly since his summary expulsion of her will from the battle ground where it was becoming accustomed to easy triumphs. She had no love for him, and she was as satisfied with the life she had chosen as ever, but she was beginning to feel a sense of approaching confusion, where readjustment would once more be necessary. The future looked longer, and she was losing her pleasant sense of finality. She had guessed long ago that the only chance of escaping the terrible restlessness that pursues so many women, like enemies in the unseen world converted into furies, was to caress and hug the present, fool the ego into the belief that it wanted nothing beyond an imminent future, certain of realization, which should be as all-possessing as the present. But she had been wise enough to do little analysis, either of her depths or of life, and her time was full enough.
"Are you asleep?" asked a polite voice. Gwynne swung himself over the low railing of the veranda.
"I did not hear your horse." It would be long before he could surprise her into any sort of emotion again.
"Good reason. I walked. I read Cooley until I had an alarming vision of the Constitution of the United States writ black upon the sunset, so I thought it was high time to walk it off. Naturally my footsteps led me here."
"That was nice of them. Mac will drive you home, or you can have my horse."
"It is like you to plan my departure before I have fairly arrived. May I sit down?"
Isabel shivered. The glow had gone, there was only the intense dark fiery blue behind the stars—silver and crystal and green; one rarely sees a golden star in California. There were scattered lights in Rosewater and on the hillsides; and the night boat winding through the marsh was a mere chain of colored lights; here and there a lamp on a head mast looked like a fallen star.
"That is the way I generally feel after the glow has disappeared," said Gwynne, abruptly. "Let us go in."
There were blazing logs on the hearth, and a comfortable chair on either side. The room looked very red and warm and seductive. As they passed the table Isabel half lifted one of the English Reviews for which she subscribed. "There is an allusion to you here," she said. "I meant to send it to you. I fancy they want you back. It is very complimentary."
But Gwynne concealed the promptings of vanity and took one of the chairs at the fireside, asking permission to light his pipe. She noted, as she settled herself opposite, that there was less of repose in his long figure than formerly, something of repressed activity, and his rather heavy eyes were colder and more alert.
"It all seems a thousand years ago," he said. "I am John Gwynne. I doubt if I shall ever love your California, but I am interested—this mass of typical Europeans not yet Americanized—no common brain to work on, no one set of racial peculiarities. And the law has me fast. I have become frightfully ambitious. Talk about your Hamilton. I too walk the floor till the small hours, repeating pages aloud. My Jap thinks me mad, and no doubt is only induced to remain at his post by the excellence of my tobacco, and the fact that his education is unhindered by much service. While I am packing my own brain cells I infer that he is attending a night school in St. Peter, for I hear him returning at all hours; and he certainly shows no trace of other dissipation. We have never exchanged ten sentences, but perhaps we act as a mutual stimulus."
"Don't you love California the least little bit?" asked Isabel, wistfully. "Or San Francisco?"
"I have liked San Francisco too well upon several occasions—when I have run down to spend the night at the Hofers—or have fallen in with Stone on my way back from Berkeley, and been induced to stay over. Hofer and that set seem to be content with living well; they are too serious for dissipation. But Stone! Of course such men die young, but they are useful in exciting the mind to wonder and awe. I don't think I am in any danger of becoming San Franciscan to the point of feeding her insatiable furnaces with all the fires of my being, but there is no denying her fascination, and it has given me a very considerable pleasure to yield to it. Whether I shall practise law there—change my base—I have not yet had time to think it out."
"A country lawyer's is certainly no career."
"This is a good place to begin politically. San Francisco is too hard a nut to crack at present. If I could become powerful in the State, the Independent leader they need, then I might transfer my attentions to that unhappy town. Even Hofer and all the rest of the devoted band seem to be practically helpless since the re-election of the mayor. What could I do—at present?"
"With a big legal reputation made in San Francisco you could travel very fast and far. And you would be learning every thread of every rope, become what is technically known as 'on'; and then when the time came—"
"I hate so much waiting! The shortest cut is here in the country. I shall manage these men far better than Colton, who is the crudest type of American politician. Nothing could be simpler than his program: abuse, promise. Nothing simpler than his ambition: all for himself, and the devil take the hindmost. I have yet to hear him utter a sentiment that betrays any love of his country or desire to serve her, any real public spirit. Those are the sentiments I am trying to cultivate for this accidental land of my birth, for without them ambition is inexcusable and endeavor a hollow sham."
"And can't you?" Isabel left her chair and stood by the mantel-piece. It was the first time he had spoken of himself with any approach to confidence since the day of his arrival. "Sometimes I repent the share I had in your coming to America—not that I flatter myself I had much to do with it—" she added, hastily. "But my being there may have turned the scale. You might have gone off to rule a South American Republic—"
"I should have done nothing so asinine, and you had everything to do with my coming here. Not that I hold you responsible. You gave a hint, and I took it."
"And you don't regret it?"
"Why waste time in regret? I can go back any moment. Not that I have the least intention of doing anything of the sort."
He was pleasantly tired in mind and body, and the warm homelike room caressed his senses. He settled himself more deeply in Hiram Otis's old chair and looked up at Isabel. She had laid aside the white shawl, but wore a red Indian scarf over her black gown. The gown was cut out in a square at the neck; she always dressed for her lonely supper, and she had put a red rose in her hair, in the fashion of her California grandmothers. With her face turned from the light, her eyes with their large pupils looked black.
"I shall stay in California, like or no like," continued Gwynne. "But I did not walk five miles to talk politics with a woman after a day of law and the citizens of Rosewater. Where did you get that curious old-fashioned scarf?"
"I found it in a trunk of my mother's. Doubtless it belonged to her mother. I also found this." She indicated a fine gold chain and heart of garnets that lay on her white neck. The humor in his eyes had quickened into admiration; he reflected that the various streams in her composition might not be so completely blended as would appear upon that normally placid surface. The feeling of uneasiness which he had peremptorily dismissed stole over him once more. She looked wholly Spanish, and put out the light of every brunette he knew. Dolly Boutts, whom he still admired at a distance, although he fled at her approach, was a bouncing peasant by contrast; and several well-bred and entertaining young women of the same warm hues that he had met during the past few weeks in San Francisco suddenly seemed to be the merest climatic accidents beside this girl who unrolled the pages of California's older past and afforded him a fleeting vision of those lovely do馻s and fiery caballeros for whom life was an eternal playground. That they were his progenitors as well as hers he found it difficult to realize, he seemed to have inherited so little of them; but they had flown generously to Isabel's making, and to-night she gave him that same impression of historic background as when she turned the severity of her profile up on him and suggested a doughtier race.
"It was about the same time," he said, abruptly.
"What?"
"While our Spanish ancestors were playing at this end of the continent, our 'American' forefathers were bracing themselves against England. It was in 1776 that the Presidio and Mission of San Francisco were founded, was it not? Curious coincidence. Perhaps that is what gives you your sense of destiny."
"I have no sense of destiny."
"Oh, but you have. Now I know that you are quite Spanish to-night. It is your more ordinary mood of calm unvarnished—not to say brutal—directness that gives you your greatest charm as a comrade—even while you repel as a woman."
"Do I repel as a woman?" Isabel had placed one foot on the fender, one hand on the mantel-piece, and as she leaned slightly towards him, the red glow of the lamps and the mellow old scarf softening her features, the small square of neck dazzlingly white, and the position revealing the lines of her figure against the high flames of the logs, she looked more lovely than he had ever seen her. Like all racial beauties, bred by selection, she needed the arts of dress and furnishings to frame her. It is only your accidental or peasant beauty that can defy "clothes"; and Isabel's looks in ordinary ranch and riding costumes made no impression on Gwynne whatever. But to-night her appeal was very direct, although he had not the least idea whether she was posing or was entirely natural in an unusual mood. He had no intention of being made a fool of, however, and answered with the responsive glow in his eyes due a pretty and charming woman:
"Sometimes. Not to-night. If you would remain Spanish with no Revolutionary lapses, I make no doubt I should fall in love with you, and then perhaps you would fall in love with me merely because of my own lack of picturesqueness, and we should live happily ever after."
"What a bore." Isabel sniffed, and moved her gaze to the fire. But she did not alter her attitude.
"Are you really happy?" asked Gwynne, curiously.
"Of course. So much so that it begins to worry me a little. My puritanical instincts dictate that I have no right to be quite happy. What slaves we are to the old poisons in our blood! I live by the light of my reason, and all is well until one of those mouldy instincts, like a buried disease germ, raps all round its tomb. Then I feel nothing but a graveyard of all my ancestors. I don't let them out, and my reason continues its rule, but they keep me from being—well—entirely happy, and I resent that."
"I should say it was not the Puritans but your common womanly instincts that were thumping round their cells. You have no right to be happy except as Nature intended when she deliberately equipped you, and that is in making some man happy."
"That is one of those superstitions I am trying to live down while I am still young. Your mother is unhappy, under all her pride, because she has outlived youth and beauty and all they meant to her—she made them her gods, and now they have gone, and she doesn't know which way to turn. Ennui devours her, and she is too old to turn her brains to account, too cynical for the average resource of religion, and too steeped, dyed, solidified, in one kind of womanism to turn at this late date to any other. But there are so many resources for the woman of to-day. The poor despised pioneers have done that for us. Of course it has not killed our natural instincts, and if I had not fallen in love when I did, no doubt I should still be looking about for an opportunity. It is my good-fortune that I was delivered so soon. I wish all women born to enjoy life in its variety could be freed of that terrible burden of sex as early as I was."
"I suppose you would like to rid men of it too."
"I do not waste any thought on men; so far as I have observed they are able to take care of themselves."
"A woman incapable of passion is neither more nor less than a failure."
"I have seen so many commonplace women capable of it! Look at Mrs. Haight and Paula."
"I never look at Mrs. Haight, but as for Mrs. Stone I can quite conceive that if she had better taste she would be almost charming. She embodies youth properly equipped."
"For reproduction, you mean. That is the reason that the silliest, the meanest, the most poisonous girl can always find a husband if she is healthy. It is no wonder that some of us want a new standard."
Gwynne laughed. "Schopenhauer suits you better when you are out on the marsh in rubber boots and a shooting-jacket. Do you realize that if you persist in this determination to camp permanently in the outer—and frigid—zone, you will never be the centre of a life drama? That, I take it, is what every woman desires most. You had a sort of curtain-raiser—to my mind, hardly that. First love is merely the more picturesque successor of measles and whooping-cough. In marriage it may develop into something worth while, but in itself amounts to nothing—except as material for poets. But the real drama—that is in the permanent relation. This relation is the motive power of the great known dramas of the world. Life is packed with little unheard of dramas of precisely the same sort—the eternal duet of sex; nothing else keeps it going. Now, it is positive that a woman cannot have a drama all by herself—"
"Not a drama in the old style. But that is what we are trying to avoid. Are there not other faculties? What has civilization done for the world if it is to be everlastingly sex-ridden? What is the meaning of this multitude of faculties that progress has developed? What is the meaning of life itself—"
"Oh, are you aiming to read the riddle of life?"
"I mean to pass my own life in the effort. Men have failed. It is our turn. But if I say any more I suppose you will pinch me again."
"No," said Gwynne, smiling. "I feel much more like kissing you—ah!"
He had the satisfaction of seeing her eyes blaze. His pipe was finished; he clasped his hands behind his head and almost lay down in his deep chair. "I am just tired enough to be completely happy, and if I can look at you I am willing to listen like a lamb all night."
"And be convinced of nothing." Isabel tossed her head and returned to her chair. It faced him and he could still look at her. They watched each other from opposite sides of the hearth with something of the unblinking wariness of a dog and a cat, and no doubt had they possessed caudal appendages they would have lashed them slowly.
"I don't say that," he replied, in a moment. "I believe I intimated that I came here to-night with a purpose. It was to tell you that I have thought more or less about what you said in the boat that morning, and that I can understand, if I cannot agree with you. No doubt the times have bred a certain class of women too good for mere matrimony. I have seen many that were miserably thrown away; although I will confess that the only remedy that occurred to me was a better man. But if you and your like—are there really any others?—if you, let us say, are groping towards some new solution of life, some happiness recipe that will benefit the few that deserve it, far be it from a mere man to—well—pinch you. You—you individually—have so many highly developed faculties that I can conceive your finding sufficient occupation through them, a filling up of time;—and no doubt idleness and the vain groping after sex happiness are the principal reasons for the failure of so many women. But work does not give happiness; it merely diminishes the capacity and opportunities for unhappiness. I take it that you, with all your gifts and the immense amount of thought you have bestowed on the subject, are striving for something higher than that. Besides, I had your lucid exposition of your mission. I now have an additional reason for remaining in California—to watch the new century plant flower. Like other commonplace mortals, however, my instincts fight for the only solution of happiness I know anything about. I still think that as the wife of some ambitious public man you would find a far better market for your gifts than to stand as a sort of statue of Independence on the top of Russian Hill with only San Francisco to admire. And if you passionately loved the man—"
"Now you are spoiling everything. But it is handsome of you to admit that I am not a fool; and that you have thought my theories worth turning over in your busy mind is a compliment I duly appreciate."
"Even a sneer cannot spoil your loveliness to-night, so I don't mind the sarcasm in the least. But it is true that in my few unoccupied intervals—as, for instance, when Imura Kisaburo Hinamoto is shaving me, and I have, by an excess of politeness, made sure that he will not cut my throat—I have had visions of you on that ungainly pedestal with all San Francisco kneeling at the base. It is quite conceivable. I am a born leader myself. I recognize certain attributes in you. The town is on the qui vive to know you. Mrs. Hofer is determined that you shall be the sensation of her ball, and no doubt that will be the commencement of your illustrious career. When you are really grown into your pedestal like one of Rodin's statues, you are certain to have a most illustrious and distinctive career—and accomplish much good. But you will be terribly lonely."
"I should not have time. And if I am a born leader, how, pray, could I yoke comfortably with any man? I should despise a slave, and the same roof will not shelter two leaders."
"I am not so sure of that, if both were working to the same end. It takes two halves to make a whole. If women have so far been the subordinate sex, no doubt it is merely the result of those physical disabilities which enabled man to gain the ascendency during the long centuries of struggle with nature. But your sex is rapidly altering all that. We shall see woman's suffrage in our time—and be better for it. I have never been opposed to it—and that is proof enough of the progress the idea has made, for I am arbitrary and masculine enough. Then—now, no doubt—women will be as much partners as wives, and I grant the relationship might be vastly more interesting than marriage in the old style. And I will even concede that it may be the only sort of marriage for a man of my type—with a pretty woman, of course; hanged if I could marry the finest woman in the world if she were ugly; and if this be true—if men really need women enough to make such a concession as I am making this moment, then I fancy that women will retain enough of their original generosity to meet our demands."
"You do not need any woman. In England I fancied that your mother meant a great deal to you, but I don't believe you have missed her at all—or that you will mourn when she returns to England. I was more than ready to take her place; you actually stirred my maternal instincts when you arrived, you looked so forlorn. But you spurned me, and now you have grown too independent even to illustrate your own theories."
"I did not spurn you. Some day I may tell you why I did not come to you in my dark hours, but not now."
"Why not now?"
"Because I do not choose to. And seductive as you look I am not to be made a fool of to gratify one of your whims—of which you are quite as full as the least emancipated woman I ever saw."
To this Isabel deigned no reply, and a silence ensued. She transferred her gaze to the fire, and her mind revolved in search of new arguments, but it was tired and worked slowly. She concluded to change the subject and offer to read him the article in the Review, so complimentary to himself; but she turned her head to discover that he was sound asleep.
She laughed, half vexed, half amused. Then she laid a rug lightly over his knees, and softly replenished the fire. The room was deliciously warm, her own chair very comfortable. She too fell asleep.
She was rudely awakened. Gwynne was shaking her by the shoulder, and his face was white with consternation.
"Good God!" he exclaimed. "Do you know what time it is? It is two o'clock! Why did you let me sleep? Those old tabbies—"
"They must be asleep too," said Isabel, indifferently. "Come out, and I will hold the lantern while you saddle Kaiser."