The Splendid Idle Forties: Stories of Old California

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

  NATALIE IVANHOFF: A MEMORY OF FORT ROSS

  At Fort Ross, on the northern coast of California, it is told that anastonishing sight may be witnessed in the midnight of the twenty-thirdof August. The present settlement vanishes. In its place the Fortappears as it was when the Russians abandoned it in 1841. Thequadrilateral stockade of redwood beams, pierced with embrasures forcarronades, is compact and formidable once more. The ramparts are pacedby watchful sentries; mounted cannon are behind the iron-barred gatesand in the graceful bastions. Within the enclosure are the low logbuildings occupied by the Governor and his officers, the barracks of thesoldiers, the arsenal, and storehouses. In one corner stands the Greekchapel, with its cupola and cross-surmounted belfry. The silver chimeshave rung this night. The Governor, his beautiful wife, and their guest,Natalie Ivanhoff, have knelt at the jewelled altar.

  At the right of the Fort is a small "town" of rude huts whichaccommodates some eight hundred Indians and Siberian convicts, theworking-men of the company. Above the "town," on a high knoll, is alarge grist-mill. Describing an arc of perfect proportions, its midmostdepression a mile behind the Fort, a great mountain forms a naturalrampart. At either extreme it tapers to the jagged cliffs. On its threelower tables the mountain is green and bare; then abruptly rises aforest of redwoods, tall, rigid, tenebrious.

  The mountain is visible but a moment. An immense white fog-bank whichhas been crouching on the horizon rears suddenly and rushes across theocean, whose low mutter rises to a roar. It sweeps like a tidal waveacross cliffs and Fort. It halts abruptly against the face of themountain. In the same moment the ocean stills. It would almost seem thatNature held her breath, awaiting some awful event.

  Suddenly, in the very middle of the fog-bank, appears the shadowy figureof a woman. She is gliding--to the right--rapidly and stealthily. Youthis in her slender grace, her delicate profile, dimly outlined. Her longsilver-blond hair is unbound and luminously distinct from the whitefog. She walks swiftly across the lower table of the mountain, thendisappears. One sees, vaguely, a dark figure crouching along the lowerfringe of the fog. That, too, disappears.

  For a moment the silence seems intensified. Then, suddenly, it iscrossed by a low whir--a strange sound in the midnight. Then a shriekwhose like is never heard save when a soul is wrenched without warningin frightfullest torture from its body. Then another and anotherand another in rapid succession, each fainter and more horrible insuggestion than the last. With them has mingled the single frenzied cryof a man. A moment later a confused hubbub arises from the Fort andtown, followed by the flashes of many lights and the report of musketry.Then the fog presses downward on the scene. All sound but that of theocean, which seems to have drawn into its loud dull voice all the angersof all the dead, ceases as though muffled. The fog lingers a moment,then drifts back as it came, and Fort Ross is the Fort Ross of to-day.

  And this is the story:--

  When the Princess Helene de Gagarin married Alexander Rotscheff, shelittle anticipated that she would spend her honeymoon in the northernwilds of the Californias. Nevertheless, when her husband was appointedGovernor of the Fort Ross and Bodega branch of the great Alaskan FurCompany, she volunteered at once to go with him--being in that stage ofdevotion which may be termed the emotionally heroic as distinguishedfrom the later of non-resistance. As the exile would last but a fewyears, and as she was a lady of a somewhat adventurous spirit, to saynothing of the fact that she was deeply in love, her interpretation ofwifely duty hardly wore the hue of martyrdom even to herself.

  Notwithstanding, and although she had caused to be prepared a large caseof books and eight trunks of ravishing raiment, she decided that life ina fort hidden between the mountains and the sea, miles away from eventhe primitive Spanish civilization, might hang burdensomely at suchwhiles as her husband's duties claimed him and books ceased to amuse. Soshe determined to ask the friend of her twenty-three years, the CountessNatalie Ivanhoff, to accompany her. She had, also, an unselfish motivein so doing. Not only did she cherish for the Countess Natalie a realaffection, but her friend was as deeply wretched as she was happy.

  Two years before, the Prince Alexis Mikhailof, betrothed of NatalieIvanhoff, had been, without explanation or chance of parting word,banished to Siberia under sentence of perpetual exile. Later had comerumour of his escape, then of death, then of recapture. Nothing definitecould be learned. When the Princess Helene made her invitation, it wasaccepted gratefully, hope suggesting that in the New World might befound relief from the torture that was relived in every vibration of theinvisible wires that held memory fast to the surroundings in which theterrible impressions, etchers of memory, had their genesis.

  They arrived in summer, and found the long log house, with its lowceilings and rude finish, admirably comfortable within. By aid of thegreat case of things Rotscheff had brought, it quickly became an abodeof luxury. Thick carpets covered every floor; arras hid the rough walls;books and pictures and handsome ornaments crowded each other; everychair had been designed for comfort as well as elegance; the diningtable was hidden beneath finest damask, and glittered with silver andcrystal. It was an unwritten law that every one should dress for dinner;and with the rich curtains hiding the gloomy mountain and the longsweep of cliffs intersected by gorge and gulch, it was easy for thegay congenial band of exiles to forget that they were not eating thedelicacies of their French cook and drinking their costly wines in theOld World.

  In the daytime the women--several of the officers' wives had braved thewilderness--found much diversion in riding through the dark forestsor along the barren cliffs, attended always by an armed guard. DiegoEstenega, the Spanish magnate of the North, whose ranchos adjoined FortRoss, and who was financially interested in the Russian fur trade, soonbecame an intimate of the Rotscheff household. A Californian by birth,he was, nevertheless, a man of modern civilization, travelled, astudent, and a keen lover of masculine sports. Although the mostpowerful man in the politics of his conservative country, he was anAmerican in appearance and dress. His cloth or tweed suggested thecolorous magnificence of the caballeros as little as did his thinnervous figure and grim pallid intellectual face. Rotscheff liked himbetter than any man he had ever met; with the Princess he usually wagedwar, that lady being clever, quick, and wedded to her own opinions.For Natalie he felt a sincere friendship at once. Being a man of keensympathies and strong impulses, he divined her trouble before he heardher story, and desired to help her.

  The Countess Natalie, despite the Governor's prohibition, was addictedto roving over the cliffs by herself, finding kinship in the sterilecrags and futile restlessness of the ocean. She had learned thatalthough change of scene lightened the burden, only death would releaseher from herself.

  "She will get over it," said the Princess Helene to Estenega. "I was inlove twice before I met Alex, so I know. Natalie is so beautiful thatsome day some man, who will not look in the least like poor Alexis, willmake her forget."

  Estenega, being a man of the world and having consequently outgrown thecynicism of youth, also knowing women better than this fair Minervawould know them in twenty lifetimes, thought differently, and a battleensued.

  Natalie, meanwhile, wandered along the cliffs. She passed the townhurriedly. Several times when in its vicinity before, the magnetism ofan intense gaze had given her a thrill of alarm, and once or twice shehad met face to face the miller's son--a forbidding youth with theskull of the Tartar and the coarse black hair and furtive eyes of theIndian--whose admiration of her beauty had been annoyingly apparent. Shewas not conscious of observation to-day, however, and skirted the cliffsrapidly, drawing her gray mantle about her as the wind howled by, butdid not lift the hood; the massive coils of silver-blond hair kept herhead warm.

  As the Princess Helene, despite her own faultless blondinity, hadpronounced, Natalie Ivanhoff was a beautiful woman. Her profile had thedelicate effect produced by the chisel. Her white skin was transparentand untinted, but the mouth was scarlet. The large long eyes of achangeful blue-
gray, although limpid of surface, were heavy with thesadness of a sad spirit. Their natural fire was quenched just as theslight compression of her lips had lessened the sensuous fulness oftheir curves.

  But she had suffered so bitterly and so variously that the points hadbeen broken off her nerves, she told herself, and, excepting when hertrouble mounted suddenly like a wave within her, her mind was tranquil.Grief with her had expressed itself in all its forms. She had known whatit was to be crushed into semi-insensibility; she had thrilled as thetears rushed and the sobs shook her until every nerve ached and her veryfingers cramped; and she had gone wild at other times, burying her head,that her screams might not be heard: the last, as imagination picturedher lover's certain physical suffering. But of all agonies, none couldapproximate to that induced by Death. When that rumour reached her,she realized that hope had given her some measure of support, andhow insignificant all other trouble is beside that awful blank, thatmystery, whose single revelation is the houseless soul's unreturningflight from the only world we are sure of. When the contradicting rumourcame, she clutched at hope and clung to it.

  "It is the only reason I do not kill myself," she thought, as she stoodon the jutting brow of the cliff and looked down on the masses of hugestones which, with the gaunt outlying rocks, had once hung on the faceof the crags. The great breakers boiled over them with the ponderositypeculiar to the waters of the Pacific. The least of those breakers wouldcarry her far into the hospitable ocean.

  "It is so easy to die and be at peace; the only thing which makes lifesupportable is the knowledge of Death's quick obedience. And the tragedyof life is not that we cannot forget, but that we can. Think of being anold woman with not so much as a connecting current between the memoryand the heart, the long interval blocked with ten thousand petty eventsand trials! It must be worse than this. I shall have gone over the clifflong before that time comes. I would go to-day, but I cannot leave theworld while he is in it."

  She drew a case from her pocket, and opened it. It showed the portraitof a young man with the sombre eyes and cynical mouth of the northernEuropean, a face revealing intellect, will, passion, and muchrecklessness. Eyes and hair were dark, the face smooth but for a slightmustache.

  Natalie burst into wild tears, revelling in the solitude that gave herfreedom. She pressed the picture against her face, and cried her agonyaloud to the ocean. Thrilling memories rushed through her, and she livedagain the first ecstasy of grief. She did not fling herself upon theground, or otherwise indulge in the acrobatics of woe, but she shookfrom head to foot. Between the heavy sobs her breath came in hard gasps,and tears poured, hiding the gray desolation of the scene.

  Suddenly, through it all, she became conscious that some one waswatching her. Instinctively she knew that it was the same gaze which sooften had alarmed her. Fear routed every other passion. She realizedthat she was unprotected, a mile from the Fort, out of the line of itsvision. The brutal head of the miller's son seemed to thrust itselfbefore her face. Overwhelmed with terror, she turned swiftly and ran,striking blindly among the low bushes, her glance darting from right toleft. No one was to be seen for a moment; then she turned the corner ofa boulder and came upon a man. She shrieked and covered her face withher hands, now too frightened to move. The man neither stirred norspoke; and, despite this alarming circumstance, her disordered brain,in the course of a moment, conceived the thought that no subject ofRotscheff would dare to harm her.

  Moreover, her brief glance had informed her that this was not themiller's son; which fact, illogically, somewhat tempered her fear. Sheremoved her hands and compelled herself to look sternly at the creaturewho had dared to raise his eyes to the Countess Natalie Ivanhoff. Shewas puzzled to find something familiar about him. His grizzled hairwas long, but not unkempt. The lower part of his face was covered bya beard. He was almost fleshless; but in his sunken eyes burnedunquenchable fire, and there was a determined vigour in his gauntfigure. He might have been any age. Assuredly, the outward seeming ofyouth was not there, but its suggestion still lingered tenaciously inthe spirit which glowed through the worn husk. And about him, in spiteof the rough garb and blackened skin, was an unmistakable air ofbreeding.

  Natalie, as she looked, grew rigid. Then she uttered a cry of rapturoushorror, staggered, and was caught in a fierce embrace. Her stunnedsenses awoke in a moment, and she clung to him, crying wildly, holdinghim with straining arms, filled with bitter happiness.

  In a few moments he pushed her from him and regarded her sadly.

  "You are as beautiful as ever," he said; "but I--look at me! Old,hideous, ragged! I am not fit to touch you; I never meant to. Go! Ishall never blame you."

  For answer she sprang to him again.

  "What difference is it how you look?" she cried, still sobbing. "Is itnot _you?_ Are not you in here just the same? What matter? What matter?No matter what you looked through, you would be the same. Listen," shecontinued rapidly, after a moment. "We are in a new country; there ishope for us. If we can reach the Spanish towns of the South, we aresafe. I will ask Don Diego Estenega to help us, and he is not the man torefuse. He stays with us to-night, and I will speak alone with him. Meetme to-morrow night--where? At the grist-mill at midnight. We had betternot meet by day again. Perhaps we can go then. You will be there?"

  "Will I be there? God! Of course I will be there."

  And, the brief details of their flight concluded, they forgot it and allelse for the hour.