Douglas Amanda M.
A Little Girl in Old San Francisco
CHAPTER XII
NEW EXPERIENCES
Mr. Savedra came home early to have a share in the guests. It was pleasant now for riding and driving, for the wind was coming from the ocean, and wafting with it the inspiration that started the pulses afresh. There were ponies and saddle horses. Laverne must ride.
"I will go if she can sit by me in the carriage," said Isola.
Laverne gave a quick breath. She would rather have had the mount, but the almost melancholy eyes decided her. She held out her hand with a smile, and she saw that it pleased Mr. Savedra also.
Victor had a little of his mother, but he had taken most of his good looks from his father.
"Aunt Grace, won't you go with them?" he said persuasively. "I want Miss Holmes. Both of us will be needed to keep watch of this monkey."
"As if I didn't go alone often and often!" Elena retorted, wrinkling up her face in a funny fashion.
They took their way to the eastward, and were soon in the open country, with the great Sierra Range towering in the distance. Summer had not scorched up the fields or the woods. Hill and valley were spread out before them, here glowing with flowers, there still green with herbage, where Mexican shepherds were letting their flocks browse. Some pastures had been eaten off to the roots and glinted in golden bronze. Tangles of wild grapes, with their pungent fragrance, reaching up and climbing over clumps of trees. The far-off points seemed to touch the very sky that was like a great sea with drifts one could imagine were an array of ships bound to some wondrous port. Laverne thought of the weird experiences of the "Ancient Mariner."
Yellow wings, blues of every shade, black and gold and iridescent, dashed here and there or floated lazily as if the butterfly had no body.
Isola held the child's hand, but did not say anything, she hated exclamations. Mrs. Savedra smiled to herself, she knew her daughter was enjoying her companion. Laverne felt half mesmerized by the hand that had been cold at first, and was now gently throbbing with some human warmth. She seemed to have gone into a strange country.
The sun set gorgeously as they were returning. There was a tempting supper spread for them, and some lanterns were lighted at the edge of the porch. Then Mr. Savedra insisted upon sending the party home in the carriage.
"I hope you have had a nice time, Laverne," Mrs. Personette said, in a most cordial tone. "I don't know what the Savedras will do with that daughter. I'd like to shake her up out of that dreaminess. She'll be in a consumption next. As for you two girls, I think you have had your fill of attention to-day," and she laughed. "You have a stepmother out of a thousand, and I hope you will never do her any discredit."
They certainly had enjoyed their day wonderfully, never imagining Victor had planned it so that he could be left at liberty.
The little girl sat out under the rose vine that trailed over their little porch, thinking of the beautiful house, the garden, the grounds, the birds, and, oh, the organ with its bewildering music.
"An organ must cost a good deal," she said, in a grave tone, but there was no longing in it. "And then if you couldn't play – I like the things that are not tunes, that just go on when you don't know what is coming next, and the voices of the birds and the sound of the waves and all sweet things. It was like fairyland, only I don't believe fairyland could be quite so satisfying, and this is all real and won't vanish when you wake up." She laughed tenderly in her joy. "Mr. Savedra must be very rich," she continued.
"Yes, he is," said Uncle Jason.
She leaned her head down on the broad breast where the heart beat for her alone.
"And you had a happy day?"
"Oh, so happy. If you had been there!"
She should have all these things some day. He was working and saving for her. And times had changed very much. He and her mother could have been happy in a little cottage where the sharp north winds rushed down, and the drifts of snow hedged one in half the winter. She busy about household work, he wresting scanty crops from the grudging earth. Yet if she could have seen a world like this! Well, the little one should have it all, and see strange lands and no end of beautiful things, for the world kept improving all the time.
He began to feel a good deal more secure about her. At first, when he saw men from every State in the Union, men who had committed various crimes, tramps, and scamps, he had a vague fear that somewhere among them David Westbury would come to light. He would not know him, only the name. And he wished now he had changed his in this new western world. But he would know nothing about the child unless he went to the old home, and that was hardly likely. But if some day, stepping off a vessel or wandering around the docks, a man should clap him on the shoulder and say, "Hello, Chadsey, old man, I never thought to find you here!" he would shake him off, or pay his way somewhere else.
It had never happened, and was not likely to now. He could go on planning this delightful life for the little girl. Presently they would make another move, have a better house and finer furniture. He had lost nothing through this snap of hard times, neither had he made, but business looked brighter. Occasionally he had a longing to go to the mines. Several times he had dreamed of finding a great nugget, and once he dreamed that in stumbling over rocks and wilds, he had lost her. Night came on and all through the darkness he called and called, and woke with great drops of cold perspiration streaming down his brow. No, he could not go to the gold fields and leave her behind.
The weeks and months passed on. There was vacation when she went over to Oaklands, and had splendid times again, and was fascinated by Isola and her music, and they took up a peculiar friendship that seemed to rouse the dreamy girl and delight Mrs. Savedra. Then Mrs. Personette was going down to Monterey with her two girls for a fortnight, and nothing would do but Miss Holmes and Laverne should accompany them. It was not the Monterey of forty years later, but a queer old Spanish town with its convent, where they found Carmencita Estenega, who did not look like a joyous, happy girl, though next year she was to be married.
"Dear me!" exclaimed Mrs. Personette; "it seems the same thing everywhere, just lovers and marriage. There is really no career for girls here but that, and the convent people are as anxious to marry them off as any one else. To be sure, they can become sisters, which covers the obloquy of old maidism. And so many of the husbands are not worth having, and desert their wives on the slightest pretext. I'd counted on taking some comfort with my girls, but here is Isabel considering every young man as a matrimonial subject, wanting to leave school and go into society, and her father saying, 'Why not?'"
Miss Holmes smiled a little.
"We used to think a girl ought to look at marriage in a serious light, and get ready for the important step; now it is fine clothes, an engagement ring, and a wedding gown. But I suppose in this wonderful land where your fruit buds, and blossoms, and ripens in a night, girls do mature sooner."
Some weeks later she saw her friend again and announced that she had been compelled to yield.
"Isabel would not go to school," she said. "If there had been a good boarding school anywhere near, I should have pleaded hard for that. But her father would not listen to her being sent East. She has a smattering of several branches. She can converse quite fluently in French and Spanish, she dances with grace and elegance, she has correct ideas of the fitness of things that are certainly attractive, and is quick at repartee. She reads the fashion magazines when they arrive, and the newspaper bits of arranging a table, cooking odd dishes, giving luncheons and dinners. She is really a fashionable young lady. And we are to give a ball for her, and after that I must see that she is properly chaperoned. My dear Marian, we do belong to the past generation, there is no denying it. And I half envy you that you can live out of the hurly-burly."
"I am glad myself," Miss Holmes returned. "So far as most things go, we could be living in some quaint old Puritan town. I don't know whether it is really best for the child, but it suits her uncle to have it so. Now she is going over to the Savedras two afternoons a week to study piano music. They think Isola improves by the companionship. And those French children, the Verriers, are very nice and trusty. They are up here quite often. She likes some of her schoolmates very well, and she and Olive have friendly spells," laughing.
"Olive blows hot and cold. She takes up a girl with a certain vehement preference and for a while can think of no one else. Then she finds her friend has some faults, or fails in two or three points, and she is on with a new admiration. Girls are crude, funny creatures! Do you suppose we were like them?" she questioned with laughing, disavowing eyes.
"No, we were not," returned Marian. "Times have changed. Life and its demands have changed. We were taught to sew, to darn, to do fine needlework; here a Mexican or a Spanish woman will do the most exquisite work for a trifle. Every country lays its treasures at our feet; it would be folly to spin and to weave. And there is money to buy everything with. How careful we were of a bit of lace that our grandmother had! The women of the street flaunt in yards and yards of it, handsomer than we could ever have achieved. We are on the other side of the country, and are topsy-turvy. We have begun at the big end of everything. Whether we are to come out at the little end – " and she paused, her eyes indecisive in their expression.
"Would you like to go back?"
"I'd like to see dear old, proper Boston, and really feel how much we had changed. But the breadth and freedom here are fascinating. It has not the hardships of new settlers. Even the men who sleep out on the foothills with the blue sky for covering may be rich six months hence, and putting up fine buildings. And when you come to that there is no lack of intelligence. Haven't we some of the best brain and blood of the East, as well as some of the worst? Our papers are teeming with news, with plans, with business schemes, that would craze an Eastern man. No, I do not believe I should be satisfied to take up the old life there again."
"And now I must consider my daughter's entrée into society. Think of the mothers in the old novels, who took their daughters to Bath or to London, and looked over the list of eligibles and made two or three selections. Our young women will select for themselves in a half-mercenary fashion, and one can't altogether blame them. Poverty is not an attractive subject."
Miss Holmes was out for a little shopping expedition, and went in her friend's carriage. Every year saw great changes. Fire destroyed only to have something grander rise from the ashes. There was already an imposing line of stores, and a display of fabrics that roused envy and heart-burning. Where there had been one-story shanties filled with the miscellany of a country store, only a few years ago, now all things were systematized and compared well with some Eastern towns, not as much, but certainly as great a variety. It had taken San Francisco only a few years to grow up. She sprang from childhood to full stature.
Then one drove round the Plaza to Russ's, mingling in the gay cavalcade until a stranger might have considered it a gala day of some sort. Then to Winn's for luncheon, tickets, perhaps, to the theatre where Laura Keene was drawing full houses of better-class people.
The little girl was not in much of this. She went to school regularly; she found some very congenial friends. She never could tell how much she liked Olive, and she was accustomed to be taken up with fervor and then dropped with a suddenness that might have dislocated most regards, and would if she had set her heart on Olive. She had a serene sort of temperament not easily ruffled; she had brought that from Maine with her. She talked over her lessons with Uncle Jason, who seemed to know so many things, more she thought than Miss Holmes, though she had taught school in Boston.
She had a host of squirrel friends now, though Snippy was amusingly jealous, and at times drove the others off. There were flocks of birds, too, who would hop up close or circle round her and occasionally light on her shoulder, and sing deafeningly in her ear, trills and roulades, such as Mam'selle played on the piano – she was not so fond of the organ, it was fit only for church and convents in the Frenchwoman's estimation.
It was funny to see Balder follow her about. During the rainy season he found so many puddles in which to stop and rest and disport himself, but in the dry times they filled a tub for him, and he was content. Pablo caught fish for him, and it was his opinion that Balder lived like some grand Señor. She never tired of the flowers, and was always finding stray nooks where they bloomed. She and Miss Holmes often went over to the ocean and sat on the rocks, looking, wondering.
"Sometime Uncle Jason is going to take me way over yonder," nodding her head. "We shall go to the Sandwich Islands, which he says are still more beautiful than California. And then to China. Perhaps then all the gates of Japan will be open and they will let us in. I'd like to see the little girls in Japan; they don't drown them there, they never have too many. And then there will be India, and all those queer islands. You wouldn't think there would be room for Australia, which is almost a continent by itself, would you? The world is very wonderful, isn't it?"
Sometimes they watched magnificent sunsets when the whole Pacific seemed aflame with gorgeous tints, for which there could be no name, for they changed as quick as thought. Then they noted a faint pearl-gray tint just edging the horizon line, it seemed, and then spreading out in filmy layers, growing more distinct and yet darker, marching on like an army. Gulls circled and screamed, great loons and murres gave their mournful cry, cormorants swept on, hardly stirring a wing until, with one swift lurch, they went down and came up triumphant. Then the sky and sea faded, though you knew the sea was there because it dashed upon the rocks, though its tone was curiously muffled.
"Come," Miss Holmes would say, "we shall be caught in the fog."
"I'd just like to be damp and cold. It has been so dry that one wants to be wet through and through."
"We shall have to pick our way."
It would sometimes come up very fast, woolly, soft to the skin, at others like a fine cutting mist, when the west wind drove it in. And now it was all gray like a peculiar twilight that made ghosts out of the rocks, piled about and shut out the Golden Gate and the peaks beyond, but they drew long breaths of the sea fragrance that were reviving. The ponies stepped carefully down this way, and across that level, and then on the road Pablo was making for his mistress. The ponies shook their heads and whinnied for very gladness. Bruno gave his cheerful bark. Balder made a funny grumbling noise as if he were scolding.
"Oh, you know you like the fog. You are dripping wet," with a hug of tenderness.
They were dripping wet, too, but they soon found dry clothes. Miss Holmes kindled up the fire, for Pablo kept them well supplied, though sometimes he went long distances and came home with a great bundle on his back that almost bent him double.
"Now you look just like a German peasant," Laverne would declare; and Pablo would shake his head mysteriously. The young Missy had seen so many wonderful things.
Wood was a rather scarce article in this vicinity, and was expensive. Coal likewise, though now some had been discovered nearer home. The charcoal venders were familiar figures in the streets. Wild indeed would he have been who had ventured to predict a gas range, even the useful kerosene stove.
The fog storms were all they would have for a time in the summer, and it was wonderful how in a night vegetation would start up.
Then Uncle Jason would come in puffing and blowing, fling off his long, wet coat, and stand before the fire and declare that Maine people said:
"An August fog would freeze a dog,"
which always made Laverne laugh.
Miss Holmes did not go to the ball given in honor of Miss Isabel Personette, but Miss Gaines was among the grown people. It was at one of the fine halls used for such purposes, and was beautifully decorated with vines and flowers and American flags. The greatest curiosity was the really splendid chandelier with its branching burners and glittering prisms. Few of the real boy friends were invited – there were enough young men very glad to come and dance their best. No one had to entreat them in those days. Indeed, dancing parties were the great entertainment for young people. True, women played cards and lost and won real money, but it was done rather privately and not considered the thing for any but the seniors.
It was very gay and delightful, quite an ovation to Miss Personette, and the banquet part eminently satisfactory to the elders. Of course, Victor Savedra was included, being a cousin, and went, and it brought freshly to his mind the party when he had danced with the sweet, fair-haired, little girl, who had no knowledge, but infinite grace, and how happy she had been.
Even with politics, city improvements, vigilance committees, quarrels, and crimes, there was found space in the papers of the day for the social aspects of life, and though "sweet girl graduates" had not come in fashion, débutantes were graciously welcomed. Miss Isabel felt much elated. She had shot up into a tall girl and was very well looking. Miss Gaines had transformed her into beauty.
Olive considered it very hard and cruel that she could not go, but she was quite a heroine at school for several days. It was truly the next thing to a wedding.
"And to think of all the splendid things that come to real young ladies!" she complained, yet there was a kind of pride in her tone as well. "Two theatre parties, and she goes to Sausalito to a birthday ball, and stays three days with some very stylish English people, friends of father's. I just hate being thought a little schoolgirl! And I want to go to the Seminary."
And then she said to Laverne:
"I don't see what you find in Isola to be so devoted to her. I wouldn't go over there twice a week and bother with her for all the music in the world. And those cold hands of hers make you shiver. They're like a frog."
"They have grown warmer. She goes to ride every day now. And we read French and English, and – verses. I like the music so much."
Olive was still secretly jealous of Victor. But presently he was going away to finish his education. And she knew several boys who went to the Academy that she thought much more fun. Victor was growing too sober, too intellectual.
They had all become very fond of the little girl at the Savedras. Even wild Elena, in a half-bashful way, copied her. She could run races and climb and ride the pony with the utmost fearlessness, she did not squeal over bugs and mice and the little lizards that came out to sun themselves. Lena had thrown one on her, and she had never told of it. She was not a bit like Isola, although she could sit hours over the music and reading of verses. And she knew so much of those queer countries where tigers and lions and elephants lived.
"But you have never been there," the child said with severe disbelief.
"You study it in books and at school."
"I hate to study!"
"You will love it when you are older. Some day your father may take you to France, and then you will want to know the language."
"I know a little of it, enough to talk."
"Mam'selle will be glad to teach you the rest."
"And Spanish – I knew that first."
"And I had to learn it, and French, with a good deal of trouble."
"But you knew English," rather jealously.
"Just as you knew Spanish – in my babyhood."
That seemed very funny, and Lena laughed over it.
"Then you really were a baby, just like Andrea, only whiter. Will your hair always be goldy like that?"
"I think so. Uncle Jason likes it."
She asked dozens of inconsequent questions.
"You must not let her trouble you so much," Mrs. Savedra said. "She will have more sense as she grows older."
Laverne only smiled a little.
Isola found her such a companion, such a listener as she had never known before. Isabel did not care for music; Olive teased her, and she put her stolid side out. She would not get angry and satisfy them. And then it seemed as if Victor suddenly cared more for her, and she half unconsciously did some of the things he suggested. She did not know that Laverne had said to him, "Oh, you ought to do the things that please her, and then she will love you. I wish I had a sister."
She wondered a little whom she would want her like? It was a serious matter to have a sister who would be with one continually. She was used to Miss Holmes, and that was more like – well, like an aunt. Sometimes she tried to think of her mother, but the remembrance was vague. She could seem to see her old grandmother much easier, fretting and scolding.
Victor was glad and proud that she had found a way to all their hearts.
There were Christmas and New Year's with all their gayety. And in a month spring, that had run away from the tropics.
"It goes on too fast," she said to Uncle Jason. "And do you see how I am growing? Miss Holmes says something has to be done to my frocks all the time. I don't want to be big and grown up."
He studied her in amazement. He did not want her to be big and grown up either. These years were so satisfying.
