1906
On the same afternoon Lady Victoria developed appendicitis and went to bed for two months. She was only in danger for a short time, but the doctor announced his intention of giving her a rest cure, and his patient, who was profoundly indifferent, made no protest. And if invalidism is a career, an illness is an adventure; moreover, no doubt, it was a relief to Victoria Gwynne to have her thinking done by some one else for a time. Isabel had thoughtfully rung up the handsomest doctor in San Francisco the moment the disease declared itself, and it was to be expected that he would find his patient interesting enough to spend an hour by her bedside daily. It was manifestly impossible to transfer a woman of Lady Victoria's heroic proportions down that rickety and almost perpendicular flight of steps to an ambulance, but the best of nurses were engaged, Anne Montgomery agreed to come every morning and attend to the housekeeping, Gwynne established a long-distance telephone beside the bed, and Mrs. Trennahan, whom Lady Victoria liked—she could not stand Mrs. Hofer—promised a daily visit; and an automobile trip to the south as soon as the doctor would permit.
It was nearly a week before Isabel, who had sat up with Gwynne during the first two nights, and been on the rush ever since, was able to return to her ranch. She had offered to remain in town altogether, but Lady Victoria replied with some show of irritation that if either she or her son sacrificed their time and interests on her account it would oppress her mind with a sense of guilt, and hinder her recovery. She would telephone to them at a certain hour every day, and if they came down once a week as usual she should enjoy seeing them, instead of being worried by a sense of obligation. In truth she was glad to be rid of them for more reasons than one.
It was late in the afternoon when Isabel arrived in Rosewater, and business detained her there for several hours. She dined with the Tom Coltons, and the conversation was a quaint mixture of babies, politics, servants, and the Hofer ball. Colton drove her home, and talked the steady monotonous stream with which he tricked the world into believing that his own ideas were still in the germ. Upon this occasion he might as well have betrayed his secrets or quoted the poets, for Isabel paid no attention whatever to his monologue. She was consumed with her desire to be alone once more. She was tired of the very sound of the human voice, and remembered with satisfaction the silence of her Chuma and the taciturnity of her men.
When she finally reached her home she illuminated it from top to bottom and wandered about in a passion of delight. Her sensation of gratitude and novelty in her solitude and freedom could not have been keener if she had been absent for six months. Although it was too cold to sit out-of-doors, she walked up and down the piazza for an hour, watching the crawling tide and the brown tumbled hills. The boat was late, and every other light was out when it appeared, a mere string of magic lanterns with a red globe suspended aloft. Isabel struck a match and answered the captain's familiar greeting from his high perch in the pilot-house; then went within, for the fog was rolling over Tamalpais, dropping down the mountains in great sea waves. But even then she would not go to bed, and lose her knowledge of recovered treasure. After a time, however, she fell asleep in her chair before the fire. She awoke suddenly, but drowsily surprised and disappointed not to find Gwynne in the chair opposite. Then she became aware of the cause of her interrupted slumbers. There was the sound of fire-arms and of barking dogs on the hills sacred to the Leghorn. In three minutes she had her skirts off, her high boots on, and was running, pistol in hand, to the colony, announcing her coming by a preliminary discharge. Then for the next hour she and her men fought one of those hordes of migratory rats that suddenly steal upon chicken-ranches and leave ruin behind them. Isabel had a genuine horror of rats. She would far rather have faced an army of snakes; but with her rubber boots, the well-trained dogs, and her accuracy of aim, she had nothing to fear. Those that were not slaughtered were finally driven off, and Isabel, content even in this phase of her strictly personal life, went to bed and slept the sleep of youth and health and an easy conscience.
The next day began the torrential rains that lasted for three weeks, almost without an hour's intermission; that wiped out the marsh, and threatened floods for all the valleys of the north. The boats no longer looked as if cutting their way through the lands, but adrift on a great lake. Tamalpais and the mountains below it had disappeared, as if hibernating, and the winds raged up and down the long valley, shaking old houses like Isabel's to their foundations, and leaving not a leaf on the trees. Nothing could be wilder or more desolate than the scene from Isabel's piazza, where, encased in rubber, she took her exercise, often battling every inch of one way against a driving wall of rain. Rosewater, or any sort of house except her own, she did not see for days at a time, nothing but that gray foaming muttering expanse of water, its flood and fall no longer distinguishable. At first she was more than content to be so isolated. Her practical life occupied little of her time; only a daily, and always unexpected, dash up the slopes to see that her men were not shirking their duties, and a weekly trip to Rosewater with her produce: she used her own incubators in bad weather. A visit to San Francisco she did not attempt, and she was quite sure that the daily conversation over the telephone—when it had not blown down—was as sufficing for Lady Victoria as for herself. She read and studied and dreamed, became indifferent to what she chose to call her failure as a society ornament, and planned a larger future; to be realized when she had come to care less for dreams and more for realities. No doubt that state of mind would develop before long, and meanwhile she might as well enjoy herself according to her present mood. Nothing could alter her belief that all unhappiness came from contacts, and certainly she had proved her theories so far, and took a pagan joy in mere living. She loved the wild battle of the elements, the waste below her garden, with as keen a sensuousness as the spring and the flowers, and often sat late in her red room by the fire to enjoy its contrast with the desolation without.
But Gwynne was not a man to be dismissed from the thoughts of any one that knew him as well as his cousin, He had taken his part in her life as a matter of course, and of late they had been very intimate. During the first days and nights of his mother's illness, they had talked, or sat in companionable silence, by the hour. She had been assailed by regrets more than once that she was to have no part in his life, that he had already won some of his hardest battles with no help of hers, and deliberately had matched their spirits and driven her off the field where she had subtly sought to manage him. She liked him the better for this, but while her vanity retired with philosophy, she regretted her inability to help him. That she had it in her to assist and encourage him in many ways, she needed to be told neither by himself nor his mother, but she was unwilling to pay the price. That she felt his charm, took an even deeper interest in him since he had announced his intention to marry her, she did not pretend to deny, and sometimes caught herself looking out upon a future in which he had as inevitable a part as if it had been decreed from the beginning of time. She also dreamed of the satisfaction and pleasure it would give her to make him really love her, become quite mad about her. But again she was unwilling to pay the price. She argued that this was merely due to the persistence of the solitary ideal; and refused to face the cowardice that lurked in the bottom of her soul. Heroic in every other development of her highly bred character, she had all the secret fear and antagonism of her sex for the other, a profound resentment of the male instinct for possession, and the deeper terror that what Gwynne might find would eventually make her wholly his. Life had given her a deep surface; the depths below it sent up rare vibrations; and her mind was seldom unoccupied. She could add layer upon layer of evasions and subtleties with no prospect of a rude disturbance; and when the wind ceased for a time she tramped over the hills. But she missed Gwynne increasingly, wondered that he did not brave the elements and come out to her; finally felt herself shamefully neglected, and would not answer his occasional telephone queries as to her well-being.