Geraldine Bonner

“ She walked up the hall to the sitting-room and there sat down in a low chair before the chimneypiece. The chill of the fog had penetrated the house and a fire had been kindled in the grate. On its quivering fluctuation of flame she fixed her eyes. With her hands pressed between her knees she sat immovable, thinking of what she was going to say, and so nervous that the blood sang in her ears and the palms of her hands, clasped tight together, were damp. She had never in her life shrunk so before an allotted task. ”

“ XIV It’s two weeks to-day since that night when I couldn’t sleep. It’s been a horrible two weeks—a sickening, disintegrating two weeks. My existence has been dislocated, thrown wide of its bearings, as if the world had taken a sudden wild revolution, whirled me through space, and I had come up dizzy and bewildered, still in the old setting, but with everything broken and upside down.
It began with that visit of Roger to Lizzie’s sitting-room. The morning after I felt humiliated, utterly ashamed of myself. It’s no new thing for me to be a fool. I permit myself that luxury. ”

“ She felt like a child who has run away to find adventures and is suddenly stricken with the horror of strangeness and the wild and piercing longing for the familiar things of home.
The evening turmoil of C Street had begun. Looking up its length, roofed by its wooden arcade, was like looking into a lighted tunnel, swaying with heads. The glare from the show-windows, the lights from lamps, and the agitated flaring of lanterns on the street hawkers’ barrows, were concentrated within this echoing tunnel and played on every variety of face, as the crowd came sweeping down on June. ”

“ She ran back to the camp singing and for the first time that day looked at David, whose presence she had shunned, with her old, brilliant smile.
An hour later and the big camp rested, relaxed in the fading twilight that lay a yellow thread of separation between the day's high colors and the dewless darkness of the night. It was like a scene from the migrations of the ancient peoples when man wandered with a woman, a tent, and a herd. The barrier of the wagons, with its girdle of fire sparks, incased a grassy oval green as a lawn. ”

“ Out of the door of a gray-stone house on that part of Fifth Avenue which has been called “The Mile of Millionaires,” a gentleman came forth. At the curb, an open motor, an object of shining perfection, awaited him. But before he made his way to it, he halted on the steps, glancing about him as if to take in the scene and the suave, quiet beauty of the afternoon. He looked up the long perspective, with its rampart of majestic houses, and at the Park’s bosky reaches, dappled by tree shadows and the slanting light on lawns. ”

“ She made no reply, but turned her head sharply away, as if in sudden embarrassment. Then, in answer to his conventionally murmured good-byes, she looked back, and he saw her face radiant, alight, with the most beautiful smile trembling on the lips. The splendor of this look seemed to him a mute expression of her happiness—of love reciprocated, ambition realized—and in it he read his own doom. He turned blindly round to pick up his hat; the door behind him was opened, and there, handsome, debonair, fresh as a May morning, stood Lord Hastings, hat in hand. ”

“ Rose thought it was because young Mrs. Ryan was a delicate subject best left alone; Dominick, because anything that reminded him of Berny was painful. But the truth was that, from the first, the wife had loomed before them as a figure of dread, a specter whose presence congealed the something exquisite and uplifting each felt in the other’s heart. Now, love awakened, forcing itself upon their recognition, her name came up between them, chilling and grim as the image of death intruding suddenly into the joyous presence of the living. ”

“ From its crest, brooded over by cloud, glittering with crusted snows, the traveler can look over crag and precipice, mounting files of pines and ravines swimming in unfathomable shadow, to where, vast, pale, far-flung in its dreamy adolescence, lies California, the garden. On the other side—gaunt, hostile, gray—is Nevada, the desert.
In other lands nature and man have ended their struggle for supremacy. Man has conquered and nature, after long years of service, is glad to work for him, to quicken the seed he sows, to swell the fruit on the branch, and ripen the heads of grain. ”

“ After supper she and David climbed to the top of the bank to see the sunset. The breeze had dropped, the dust devils died with it. The silence of evening lay like a cool hand on the heated earth. Dusk was softening the hard, bright colors, wiping out the sharpness of stretching shadows the baked reflection of sun on clay. The West blazed above the mountains, but the rest of the sky was a thick, pure blue. Against it to the South, a single peak rose, snow-enameled on a turquoise background.
Susan felt at peace with the moment and her own soul. ”

“ Then the men, waiting for the hour of deepest sleep and darkness, continued to sit, occasionally speaking, the light of the leaping flames catching and losing their anxious faces as the firelight in another room was touching the face of the sleeping girl of whom they talked.
It was nearly three when a movement of life stirred the blackness of the Garcia garden. The rushing of the rain beat down all sound; in the moist soddenness of the earth no trace lingered. The pepper-tree bent and cracked to the gusts as it did to the additional weight of the creeping figure in its boughs. ”

“ A roar, muffled and deep seated as if the earth were protesting in anguish, shook the air. They saw the fort, like some monstrous vision in a dream, heave, rock, and split, straight rays of flame shooting above its cloven roof. Black objects hurtled through the red beams; smoke burst, swelling in clouds; a white welter of water seethed up the bank, swept the steps, slid back, oozing in foamy upheaval through the wreckage of walls. A haze of smoke and dust hung, blotting out the place; thinned, broke in rifts, and lifted, showing a ruin of stone amid trees torn and blackened. ”

“ Garland mounted the slope. The sound of the river behind him was drowned by the roar of the Lizzie J's mill. Its rampart-like wall towered above him, cut by the orange squares of windows, the thunder of its stamps, a giant's feet crushing out the gold, pounding tremendous on the nocturnal solitude. As the horse snorted upward, digging its hoofs among the loosened stones, he looked up at it. Millions had been made there; millions were still making. Men in distant cities were being enriched by the golden grains beaten free by those giant feet. ”

“ I asked.
“Coming,” cried a voice from the stairs, and the air was filled with silken rustlings.
It was like an entrance on the stage, up the passage and between the watching people, and I don’t think any actress could have done it with more aplomb. In her evening dress she was truly superb—a goddess of a woman with her black hair in lusterless coils and her neck and shoulders as white as curds. Upon that satiny bosom my mother’s pendant rose and fell to even breathings. Whatever anybody else may have felt, the star of the occasion was calm and confident. ”