Ancestors: A Novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

  I

  For Isabel Otis the _genius loci_ had a more powerful and enduringmagnetism than any man or woman she had ever known. She had felt theconsolation of it, although without analysis, in her lonely girlhood bythe great Rosewater Marsh; definitely in Tyrol, Perugia, Toledo, inMunich where she had lingered too long, in a hundred tiny high-perchedand low-set villages of Austria and Italy of which the tourist had neverheard, at Konigsee and Pragserwildsee; and deeply in England. But noplace had ever called her, disturbed her, excited her into furiouscriticism, mockingly maintained its hold upon the very roots of herbeing, like the city of her birth. Her childhood's memories of itclustered about the old house on Russian Hill where the most cordialneighbors were goats; the beach by the Cliff House on a stormy day; longrides up and down the almost perpendicular hills of the city in theswift 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 houseson the ledge below her home; or out in the Western Addition, where analways migratory people were rivalling the splendors of Nob Hill--asthat craggy height had long since humbled South Park and Rincon Hillinto their abundant dust. She also cherished many charming memories ofher mother, with dinner or ball-gown so prudently looped under herrain-coat that it gave her slender figure the proportions of theold-fashioned hoop-skirt; always laughing as she kissed the little girlsgood-night before braving the two flights of steps to the carriage atthe foot of the cliff. Two years before her death Mrs. Otis was glad tobury her mortification and misery in Rosewater. After that Isabel hadnever so much as a glimpse of San Francisco until she was sixteen, whenher father was induced to visit his adopted daughter and take hisyoungest martyr with him. Isabel had planned for this visit throughoutsix long months, and arrived in the city of her heart radiant in a frockevery breadth of which was new--heretofore her wardrobe had risen likean apologetic ph[oe]nix from the moth-eaten remnants of her mother's oldfinery--and such uncompromising trust in the benevolence of fate as agirl rarely knows twice in a lifetime. There were three days ofenchanted prowling about the old house on Russian Hill, where, as thetenant, in the rocking-chair by the bedroom window, did not invite herto enter, she consoled herself with the views and the memories; and ofan even more normal delight in the shopping streets and gay restaurantsof a real city. After that the visit existed in her mind with theconfused outlines of a nightmare.

  Her adopted sister's peevish complaints at being obliged to remain inthe foggy windy city all summer, the crying baby, the whirlwinds of dustand shivering nights, she might have dismissed as unworthy the spirit ofsixteen, and dreamed herself happy. But Mr. Otis, who had been sober forseven months, selected this occasion for a fall which resounded fromMarket Street to Telegraph Hill, and rejuvenated the long line ofsaloons that had graced Montgomery Street since the days when "Jim" Otishad been one of the wildest spirits in the wildest city on earth. Thatwas "back in the Sixties," when his lapses were as far apart as theywere unrivalled in consumption, span, and pyrotechny. By the lateEighties he had disappeared into the north, and the careless city knewhim no more.

  During the Seventies and early Eighties there had been a period ofreform, incident upon his marriage with a pretty and high-spirited girl,and one of the city's estimable attempts to clean out its politicalstables. His brilliant and desperate encounter with Boss Buckley washistoric, but its failure, and the indifference of the gay contentedmajority to the city's underworld, soured him and struck a fatal blow atthe never vital roots of personal ambition. When he began to water theroots at his old haunts, the finish of his career and of his splendidinheritance passed into the region of problems that Time solves soeasily. When she solved his problem he was glad to subside into one ofhis cottages in Rosewater. Here he reformed and collapsed, reformed andcollapsed; but, with fewer temptations, and a remnant of his legalbrilliancy, he supported his family after a fashion; and fed his prideto the day of his death with the fact that his wife, unlike theforgotten half of many another comet, had never been obliged to do herown work.

  During that last visit to San Francisco, Isabel, guided by her amusedbrother-in-law, routed him out of no less than fourteen saloons, andspent night after night walking the streets with him to conquer therestlessness that otherwise would find a prolonged surcease beyond herinfluence. When she finally steered him back to Rosewater he fell intoan exuberant fit of repentance, during which he was so charming and solegal that Isabel forgave him, laid by her bitterness andmortification, and hoped. But although no repentance could maintain agrip upon that slippery flabby substance which he still called hischaracter, at least he never went to San Francisco again. Occasionallyhe permitted Isabel to spend a week with her sister, while he pledgedhimself to good behavior during her absence; and kept his word. Healways kept his word; and he took care to withhold it except when he wassure of himself. Isabel decided that as everything was relative it wasbetter to have a dipsomaniac as her life portion than a drinking-machineof more steady and industrious habits.

  Finally his patient clients left him, he sold the cottage inRosewater--all that remained of his inheritance--to pay its mortgages,and moved with Isabel out to the ranch-house, preserved with a fewhundred acres by the more canny and less thirsty Hiram. When the elderbrother died James would have returned forthwith to the sources ofsupply, but by this time Isabel had the upper hand, and although hedisappeared for days at a time, he was always forced to return to theranch when the small monthly sum allowed him by the terms of hisbrother's will was exhausted; no one in Rosewater would give him credit.As he invariably left a note behind him promising to "be quiet aboutit," Isabel ceased to haunt his footsteps. His appetite was far beyondhis control or hers, and as he kept his word and spent his time in theback parlor of a saloon, and had no longer the digestive capacity toachieve his former distinction, she merely sat at home and waited.Fortunately he did not live long enough after his brother hopelessly toembitter his daughter's youth. Liberty came to her when she had ceasedto hate with young intolerance and begun to pity; and before too muchlonging for freedom, and its insidious suggestions, had poisoned hernature. Indeed, when she had seen her father buried with much pomp inthe cemetery behind Rosewater, and returned to the permanent peace ofher home, she missed her cares and responsibilities, so long andsystematically borne, and mourned, not as a child for its parent, but asan adoptive mother suddenly bereft. Nevertheless, she was bent uponenjoying her freedom to the utmost and rebelled against the obduracy ofher uncle's executors, who disapproved of her pilgrimage to Europeunattended by a matron of Rosewater. Hiram Otis, who trusted no man, hadappointed four executors; and had not Judge Leslie been one of them theother three might have delayed the settling of the estate beyond thelegal term. But at the end of a year Isabel was absolute mistress of herproperty and herself.

  One of the happiest moments of her life was when she sat before herlawyer's table in San Francisco and watched the pen strokes thatcancelled the mortgage of the house on Russian Hill. The house and itsacre, encumbered by the inevitable mortgage, had been all that remainedof Mrs. Otis's personal inheritance when she left San Francisco forever. James Otis had promised his dying wife that he would never sellthe place, which she bequeathed to Isabel; and when his last client lefthim and he could no longer pay the interest, Hiram, who was moroselydevoted to his niece, met the yearly obligation: he would not redeem themortgage unless he were permitted to buy the property. But to this JamesOtis, clinging to his solitary virtue, would not consent; and Hiram,although he intended to leave all he possessed to Isabel, could notbring himself to part with any sum in four figures.

  Before leaving for Europe Isabel had leased the house to a youngnewspaper man whose wife had an income of her own, and not only anartistic appreciation of the view, but a more practical esteem for asite so far removed from the "all-night life" below. Immediately afterIsabel's return Mrs. Glait had asked permission to sublet the house,remarking cynically that time had inured her to the desultory phenomenaof journalism, but never to
the stable prospect of her husband's deathstruggle with foot-pads, or her children falling down the cliff of thiswild bit of nature in the heart of a city.

  Isabel took back her old home with another spasm of delight, and vowedthat not until she was a pauper would she part with it again. Five orsix days of every week must be spent on the chicken-ranch, which hadgrown to such proportions that she was now one of the persons thatcounted in her flourishing community. But in time she would live moreand more in her lofty home, become a notable figure in San Francisco,drawing with both hands from its varied best; and meanwhile, once aweek, she could sit for hours and look down upon the city, which, evenin rainy weather, was a wild and beautiful sight from her eyrie.

  Mrs. Otis had been a niece of the Mrs. Montgomery who had reigned onRincon Hill twenty years ago, and a cousin of the Helena Belmont who hadbeen the greatest belle the city had seen since that earlier time whenNina Randolph, Guadalupe Hathaway, Mrs. Hunt McLane, and "The ThreeMacs" had made history for themselves in spite of the momentous era ofwhich they were so unheeding a part. Mary Belmont would have been nomean heiress herself had not her father been too adventurous a spiriton the stock-market during the Belcher Bonanza excitement of 1872. For atime it looked as if Gordon Belmont would be a far richer man than hisfamous brother, Colonel Jack, always contented with a modest million;but in ten mad days there was a decline of sixty million dollars in theaggregate value of stocks on the San Francisco market; and six monthslater, when he died of sheer exhaustion, he had nothing to leave hisonly child but the house on Russian Hill, and a small income generouslysupplemented by her uncle and guardian until her marriage. She wasthirteen at her father's death, and as her mother had preceded him, shespent the following five years in a New York boarding-school. Then shereturned home, and, after a year's gayety, married James Otis. ColonelBelmont surrendered her small property. Skilfully "turned over" it wouldhave multiplied indefinitely. But James Otis and his wife knew far moreabout spending money than making it, and to-day nothing was left tocommemorate the meteoric and eminently typical career of Gordon Belmontbut the ancient structure whose nucleus he had taken over just after hismarriage as a "bad debt." His wife, too, had insisted upon living in it,for reasons subsequently understood by her daughter and Mrs. Glait, andcomplacently enlarged it with all the hideous improvements of the day.

  That part of Russian Hill conspicuous from the city is little more thana great cliff rising abruptly from the extreme north end of the gradedledge on the summit of Nob Hill, which, in its turn, almost overhangsthe steep and populous ascent from the valley. In "early days" none butthe goat could cling to those rough hills that all but stood on end, andthe brush was so thick and the titles so uncertain that their futuredistinction was undreamed of. Then came a determined period of gradingwhich embraced the heights in due course, titles were settled, and manythat foresaw the ultimate possession of that great valley now known as"South of Market Street"--but which in its haughty youth embraced SouthPark and Rincon Hill--by the tenacious sons of Erin and Germania, movedto the uplands while lots could still be bought for a song. The JackBelmonts, the Yorbas, the Polks, and others of the first aristocracy tofollow the Spanish, made Nob Hill fashionable before a new class ofmillionaires sprang up in a night, and indulged its fresh young fancywith monstrous wooden structures holding a large portion of convertedcapital. Mrs. Yorba, who led society in the Eighties, when it was asexclusive as a small German principality, was disposed to snub allparvenus. But the young people made their way. When Mary Belmontreturned from school, and, chaperoned by a widowed relative, gave atleast a dance a month until she married, and many a one after, the heirsof all grades thought nothing of leaving their carriages at the foot ofthe cliff to climb the precarious stair; groping blindly more often thannot through the rains of winter or the fogs of summer. To-day Isabel'sneighbors wisely made no such demands upon the pampered, but in thatincomparably older time the young people would have climbed to the starsfor the sake of the lavish hospitality of the gay indulgent younghostess; and if some of the youths rolled down the hill when the lightswent out, that was hardly a matter to excite indignant comment in a citywhere drink was so admittedly the curse that it was philosophicallyaccepted with such other standing evils as fogs, trade-winds,small-pox, mud-holes, dust-storms, and unmentionable politics.

  When Mary Belmont became the wife of James Otis, one of the greatestranchers in California--in which State, unlike other fervent patriots ofthat era, he had been born--and a brilliant figure in one of the mostnotable legal groups of any time, she long held her position as a socialfavorite. But children came and died too quickly for her health andfragile beauty, and the storms of life beset her. She continued to livein her inconvenient eyrie, not only in the waning hope of ultimatelyseparating her husband from the convivial beings on the lower plain, butbecause she felt an intense pride in owning a home two generations oldin that young community. She was determined that it should remain in thefamily and be occupied by at least one of her children. So the uglybrown wooden structure with its bay-windows, its central tower, itsMansard-roof--added for the servants--had, contrary to all tradition,actually joined three generations of San Franciscans in one unbrokenchain. It owed its proud position, no doubt, to the fact that when theOtis fortunes collapsed there was but one child left to inherit it andto be supported meanwhile.

  Isabel intended in time to give the house a new facade, and had gloatedover such of the Burnham plans as had been reproduced by the city press.These lovely plans were designed to make the city as classic andimposing as Nature had dreamed of when she piled up that ruggedamphitheatre out of chaos; and Isabel had long since resolved that, ifshe could not be the first to plant a bit of ancient Athens upon a brownand ragged bluff, the high tide of her fortunes should coincide with theawakening of the city to the sense of its architectural guilt. Shebanished much of the tasteless furniture of the old time, and refittedwith a stately comfort that expressed one side of her nature. She tooclung to traditions--and to the long mirrors in their tarnished giltframes, with the little shelf below; the multitude of family portraitsengraved on wood, and surrounded by a wide white margin and tiny giltframe. That they might strike no discordant note, she made use of alesson learned in London, where she had spent a month with LadyVictoria, and had the walls and wood of the living-room painted white,covered the windows and furniture with a plain stuff of a dark butneutral blue. In the dining-room were a few paintings of her New Englandand Spanish ancestors, and she disturbed them only to replace thewall-paper with leather; at the same time sending the black walnutfurniture to the auction-room.

  Being the one practical member of her family, and the product of anearthquake country, she repaired the uncertain foundations of her housebefore removing the walls that had cut up the lower floor into theconventional number of rooms and hallways. The house, of no great depth,was so close to the hill-side, still rising above it, that more than oneenterprising cook had made use of the natural ledges before the windows.Besides the kitchen department and pantries, there were now but threerooms on the lower floor: the dining-room, a small reception-room in thetower, and an immense living-room, broken by the white pillars thatsupported the storys above.

  Mrs. Belmont and Mrs. Otis, in the time-honored American fashion, hadmade a day nest of their bedroom, but Isabel was far too modern for thatlingering provincialism, and lived luxuriously in the big roomdown-stairs when she was not in the porch. She had reserved her mother'sold alcoved bedroom with its mahogany four-poster for her own use, butthe rest of the second-story rooms she had fitted for her Englishcousins, that they too might have headquarters in town.

  Neither appeared to be in any haste to visit the city of theirancestors. Gwynne had left England in October, now nearly a year ago,but, having discovered from his solicitor that he could apply forletters of citizenship as late as the end of the third year afterlanding, had announced to Isabel his intention to travel slowly aboutthe country "before settling down in its remotest part, which, fr
om allaccounts, was sufficiently unlike the rest to provincialize his point ofview unless he saw something first of the East, South, and Middle West."He had written to her several times, but only on business. She hadreturned in January, after a round of visits in England, and had put hishouse in order at once. The lease had expired, and Mr. Colton hadengaged a temporary superintendent, but Gwynne sent Isabel his power ofattorney and she was temporarily in possession. She wrote to him fromtime to time that all was well, or to send him an account of herexpenditures; but felt no promptings towards a friendly correspondencewith one who showed as little disposition to encourage it.

  From Victoria she had not heard directly since she bade her good-bye inCurzon Street, but Flora Thangue had written that her ladyship's superbhealth had (to her ill-concealed fury) given way, following an attack ofinfluenza, and she would not be able to leave her doctor for anindefinite time. A few months later she wrote that "dear Vicky" wasoutwardly herself again, but in reality very nervous, the result, nodoubt, of her illness, and of the prolonged stress of business. However,she had finally succeeded in letting the Abbey and Capheaton toadvantage, and it was on the cards that she would reach Californiabefore the end of the year. Isabel hoped that, unfed by her son'sexacting presence the maternal fires burned low; she had a clearlydefined intention to be a factor in the new career of Elton Gwynne, andno desire for the capricious interference of his mother.