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“All right,” said Rushbrook, quietly, as he entered his own apartment. It was decorated as garishly as the hall, as staring and vivid in color, but wholesomely new and clean for all its paint, veneering, and plaster. It was filled with heterogeneous splendor—all new and well kept, yet with so much of the attitude of the show-room still lingering about it that one almost expected to see the various articles of furniture ticketed with their prices. A luxurious bed, with satin hangings and Indian carved posts, standing ostentatiously in a corner, kept up this resemblance, for in a curtained recess stood a worn camp bedstead, Rushbrook’s real couch, Spartan in its simplicity.
Mr. Rushbrook drew his watch from his pocket, and deliberately divested himself of his boots, coat, waistcoat, and cravat. Then rolling himself in a fleecy, blanket-like rug with something of the habitual dexterity of a frontiersman, he threw himself on his couch, closed his eyes, and went instantly to sleep. Lying there, he appeared to be a man comfortably middle-aged, with thick iron-gray hair that might have curled had he encouraged such inclination; a skin roughened and darkened by external hardships and exposure, but free from taint of inner vice or excess, and indistinctive features redeemed by a singularly handsome mouth. As the lower part of the face was partly hidden by a dense but closely-cropped beard, it is probable that the delicate outlines of his lips had gained something from their framing.
He slept, through what seemed to be the unnatural stillness of the large house,—a quiet that might have come from the lingering influence of the still virgin solitude around it, as if Nature had forgotten the intrusion, or were stealthily retaking her own; and later, through the rattle of returning wheels or the sound of voices, which were, however, promptly absorbed in that deep and masterful silence which was the unabdicating genius of the canyon. For it was remarkable that even the various artists, musicians, orators, and poets whom Maecenas had gathered in his cool business fashion under that roof, all seemed to become, by contrast with surrounding Nature, as new and artificial as the house, and as powerless to assert themselves against its influence.
He was still sleeping when James re-entered the room, but awoke promptly at the sound of his voice. In a few moments he had rearranged his scarcely disordered toilette, and stepped out refreshed and observant into the hall. The guests were still absent from that part of the building, and he walked leisurely past the carelessly opened doors of the rooms they had left. Everywhere he met the same glaring ornamentation and color, the same garishness of treatment, the same inharmonious extravagance of furniture, and everywhere the same troubled acceptance of it by the inmates, or the same sense of temporary and restricted tenancy. Dresses were hung over cheval glasses; clothes piled up on chairs to avoid the use of doubtful and over ornamented wardrobes, and in some cases more practical guests had apparently encamped in a corner of their apartment. A gentleman from Siskyou—sole proprietor of a mill patent now being considered by Maecenas—had confined himself to a rocking-chair and clothes-horse as being trustworthy and familiar; a bolder spirit from Yreka—in treaty for capital to start an independent journal devoted to Maecenas’s interests—had got a good deal out of, and indeed all he had INTO, a Louis XVI. armoire; while a young painter from Sacramento had simply retired into his adjoining bath-room, leaving the glories of his bedroom untarnished. Suddenly he paused.
He had turned into a smaller passage in order to make a shorter cut through one of the deserted suites of apartments that should bring him to that part of the building where he designed to make his projected improvement, when his feet were arrested on the threshold of a sitting-room. Although it contained the same decoration and furniture as the other rooms, it looked totally different! It was tasteful, luxurious, comfortable, and habitable. The furniture seemed to have fallen into harmonious position; even the staring decorations of the walls and ceiling were toned down by sprays of laurel and red-stained manzanito boughs with their berries, apparently fresh plucked from the near canyon. But he was more unexpectedly impressed to see that the room was at that moment occupied by a tall, handsome girl, who had paused to take breath, with her hand still on the heavy centre-table she was moving. Standing there, graceful, glowing, and animated, she looked the living genius of the recreated apartment.
CHAPTER II
Mr. Rushbrook glanced rapidly at his unknown guest. “Excuse me,” he said, with respectful business brevity, “but I thought every one was out,” and he stepped backward quickly.
“I’ve only just come,” she said without embarrassment, “and would you mind, as you ARE here, giving me a lift with this table?”
“Certainly,” replied Rushbrook, and under the young girl’s direction the millionaire moved the table to one side.
During the operation he was trying to determine which of his unrecognized guests the fair occupant was. Possibly one of the Leyton party, that James had spoken of as impending.
“Then you have changed all the furniture, and put up these things?” he asked, pointing to the laurel.
“Yes, the room was really something TOO awful. It looks better now, don’t you think?”
“A hundred per cent.,” said Rushbrook, promptly. “Look here, I’ll tell you what you’ve done. You’ve set the furniture TO WORK! It was simply lying still—with no return to anybody on the investment.”
The young girl opened her gray eyes at this, and then smiled. The intruder seemed to be characteristic of California. As for Rushbrook, he regretted that he did not know her better, he would at once have asked her to rearrange all the rooms, and have managed in some way liberally to reward her for it. A girl like that had no nonsense about her.
“Yes,” she said, “I wonder Mr. Rushbrook don’t look at it in that way. It is a shame that all these pretty things—and you know they are really good and valuable—shouldn’t show what they are. But I suppose everybody here accepts the fact that this man simply buys them because they are valuable, and nobody interferes, and is content to humor him, laugh at him, and feel superior. It don’t strike me as quite fair, does it you?”
Rushbrook was pleased. Without the vanity that would be either annoyed at this revelation of his reputation, or gratified at her defense of it, he was simply glad to discover that she had not recognized him as her host, and could continue the conversation unreservedly. “Have you seen the ladies’ boudoir?” he asked. “You know, the room fitted with knick-knacks and pretty things—some of ‘em bought from old collections in Europe, by fellows who knew what they were but perhaps,” he added, looking into her eyes for the first time, “didn’t know exactly what ladies cared for.”
“I merely glanced in there when I first came, for there was such a queer lot of women—I’m told he isn’t very particular in that way—that I didn’t stay.”
“And you didn’t think THEY might be just as valuable and good as some of the furniture, if they could have been pulled around and put into shape, or set in a corner, eh?”
The young girl smiled; she thought her fellow-guest rather amusing, none the less so, perhaps, for catching up her own ideas, but nevertheless she slightly shrugged her shoulders with that hopeless skepticism which women reserve for their own sex. “Some of them looked as if they had been pulled around, as you say, and hadn’t been improved by it.”
“There’s no one there now,” said Rushbrook, with practical directness; “come and take a look at it.” She complied without hesitation, walking by his side, tall, easy, and self-possessed, apparently accepting without self-consciousness his half paternal, half comrade-like informality. The boudoir was a large room, repeating on a bigger scale the incongruousness and ill fitting splendor of the others. When she had of her own accord recognized and pointed out the more admirable articles, he said, gravely looking at his watch, “We’ve just about seven minutes yet; if you’d like to pull and haul these things around, I’ll help you.”
The young girl smiled. “I’m quite content with what I’ve done in my own room, where I have no one’s taste to consult but my own. I hardly know how Mr. Rushbrook, or his lady friends, might like my operating here.” Then recognizing with feminine tact the snub that might seem implied in her refusal, she said quickly, “Tell me something about our host—but first look! isn’t that pretty?”
She had stopped before the window that looked upon the dim blue abyss of the canyon, and was leaning out to gaze upon it. Rushbrook joined her.
“There isn’t much to be changed down THERE, is there?” he said, half interrogatively.
“No, not unless Mr. Rushbrook took it into his head to roof it in, and somebody was ready with a contract to do it. But what do you know of him? Remember, I’m quite a stranger here.”
“You came with Charley Leyton?”
“With MRS. Leyton’s party,” said the young girl, with a half-smiling emphasis. “But it seems that we don’t know whether Mr. Rushbrook wants us here or not till he comes. And the drollest thing about it is that they’re all so perfectly frank in saying so.”
“Charley and he are old friends, and you’ll do well to trust to their judgment.”
This was hardly the kind of response that the handsome and clever society girl before him had been in the habit of receiving, but it amused her. Her fellow-guest was decidedly original. But he hadn’t told her about Rushbrook, and it struck her that his opinion would be independent, at least. She reminded him of it.
“Look here,” said Rushbrook, “you’ll meet a man here to-night—or he’ll be sure to meet YOU—who’ll tell you all about Rushbrook. He’s a smart chap, knows everybody and talks well. His name is Jack Somers; he is a great ladies’ man. He can talk to you about these sort of things, too,”—indicating the furniture with a half tolerant, half contemptuous gesture, that struck her as inconsistent with what seemed to be his previous interest,—“just as well as he can talk of people. Been in Europe, too.”
The young girl’s eye brightened with a quick vivacity at the name, but a moment after became reflective and slightly embarrassed. “I know him—I met him at Mr. Leyton’s. He has already talked of Mr. Rushbrook, but,” she added, avoiding any conclusion, with a pretty pout, “I’d like to have the opinion of others. Yours, now, I fancy would be quite independent.”
“You stick to what Jack Somers has said, good or bad, and you won’t be far wrong,” he said assuringly. He stopped; his quick ear had heard approaching voices; he returned to her and held out his hand. As it seemed to her that in California everybody shook hands with everybody else on the slightest occasions, sometimes to save further conversation, she gave him her own. He shook it, less forcibly than she had feared, and abruptly left her. For a moment she was piqued at this superior and somewhat brusque way of ignoring her request, but reflecting that it might be the awkwardness of an untrained man, she dismissed it from her mind. The voices of her friends in the already resounding passages also recalled her to the fact that she had been wandering about the house with a stranger, and she rejoined them a little self-consciously.
“Well, my dear,” said Mrs. Leyton, gayly, “it seems we are to stay. Leyton says Rushbrook won’t hear of our going.”
“Does that mean that your husband takes the whole opera troupe over to your house in exchange?”
“Don’t be satirical, but congratulate yourself on your opportunity of seeing an awfully funny gathering. I wouldn’t have you miss it for the world. It’s the most characteristic thing out.”
“Characteristic of what?”
“Of Rushbrook, of course. Nobody else would conceive of getting together such a lot of queer people.”
“But don’t it strike you that we’re a part of the lot?”
“Perhaps,” returned the lively Mrs. Leyton. “No doubt that’s the reason why Jack Somers is coming over, and is so anxious that YOU should stay. I can’t imagine why else he should rave about Miss Grace Nevil as he does. Come, Grace, no New York or Philadelphia airs, here! Consider your uncle’s interests with this capitalist, to say nothing of ours. Because you’re a millionaire and have been accustomed to riches from your birth, don’t turn up your nose at our unpampered appetites. Besides, Jack Somers is Rushbrook’s particular friend, and he may think your criticisms unkind.”
“But IS Mr. Somers such a great friend of Mr. Rushbrook’s?” asked Grace Nevil.
“Why, of course. Rushbrook consults him about all these things; gives him carte blanche to invite whom he likes and order what he likes, and trusts his taste and judgment implicitly.”
“Then this gathering is Mr. Somers’s selection?”
“How preposterous you are, Grace. Of course not. Only Somers’s IDEA of what is pleasing to Rushbrook, gotten up with a taste and discretion all his own. You know Somers is a gentleman, educated at West Point—traveled all over Europe—you might have met him there; and Rushbrook—well, you have only to see him to know what HE is. Don’t you understand?”
A slight seriousness; the same shadow that once before darkened the girl’s charming face gave way to a mischievous knitting of her brows as she said naively, “No.”
CHAPTER III
Grace Nevil had quite recovered her equanimity when the indispensable Mr. Somers, handsome, well-bred, and self-restrained, approached her later in the crowded drawing-room. Blended with his subdued personal admiration was a certain ostentation of respect—as of a tribute to a distinguished guest—that struck her. “I am to have the pleasure of taking you in, Miss Nevil,” he said. “It’s my one compensation for the dreadful responsibility just thrust upon me. Our host has been suddenly called away, and I am left to take his place.”
Miss Nevil was slightly startled. Nevertheless, she smiled graciously. “From what I hear this is no new function of yours; that is, if there really IS a Mr. Rushbrook. I am inclined to think him a myth.”
“You make me wish he were,” retorted Somers, gallantly; “but as I couldn’t reign at all, except in his stead, I shall look to you to lend your rightful grace to my borrowed dignity.”
The more general announcement to the company was received with a few perfidious regrets from the more polite, but with only amused surprise by the majority. Indeed, many considered it “characteristic”—“so like Bob Rushbrook,” and a few enthusiastic friends looked upon it as a crowning and intentional stroke of humor. It remained, however, for the gentleman from Siskyou to give the incident a subtlety that struck Miss Nevil’s fancy. “It reminds me,” he said in her hearing, “of ole Kernel Frisbee, of Robertson County, one of the purlitest men I ever struck. When he knew a feller was very dry, he’d jest set the decanter afore him, and managed to be called outer the room on bus’ness. Now, Bob Rushbrook’s about as white a man as that. He’s jest the feller, who, knowing you and me might feel kinder restrained about indulging our appetites afore him, kinder drops out easy, and leaves us alone.” And she was impressed by an instinct that the speaker really felt the delicacy he spoke of, and that it left no sense of inferiority behind.
The dinner, served in a large, brilliantly-lit saloon, that in floral decoration and gilded columns suggested an ingenious blending of a steamboat table d’hote and “harvest home,” was perfect in its cuisine, even if somewhat extravagant in its proportions.
“I should be glad to receive the salary that Rushbrook pays his chef, and still happier to know how to earn it as fairly,” said Somers to his fair companion.
“But is his skill entirely appreciated here?” she asked.
“Perfectly,” responded Somers. “Our friend from Siskyou over there appreciates that ‘pate’ which he cannot name as well as I do. Rushbrook himself is the only exception, yet I fancy that even HIS simplicity and regularity in feeding is as much a matter of business with him as any defect in his earlier education. In his eyes, his chef’s greatest qualification is his promptness and fertility. Have you noticed that ornament before you?” pointing to an elaborate confection. “It bears your initials, you see. It was conceived and executed since you arrived—rather, I should say, since it was known that you would honor us with your company. The greatest difficulty encountered was to find out what your initials were.”
“And I suppose,” mischievously added the young girl to her acknowledgments, “that the same fertile mind which conceived the design eventually provided the initials?”
“That is our secret,” responded Somers, with affected gravity.
The wines were of characteristic expensiveness, and provoked the same general comment. Rushbrook seldom drank wine; Somers had selected it. But the barbaric opulence of the entertainment culminated in the Californian fruits, piled in pyramids on silver dishes, gorgeous and unreal in their size and painted beauty, and the two Divas smiled over a basket of grapes and peaches as outrageous in dimensions and glaring color as any pasteboard banquet at which they had professionally assisted. As the courses succeeded each other, under the exaltation of wine, conversation became more general as regarded participation, but more local and private as regarded the subject, until Miss Nevil could no longer follow it. The interests of that one, the hopes of another, the claims of a third, in affairs that were otherwise uninteresting, were all discussed with singular youthfulness of trust that to her alone seemed remarkable. Not that she lacked entertainment from the conversation of her clever companion, whose confidences and criticisms were very pleasant to her; but she had a gentlewoman’s instinct that he talked to her too much, and more than was consistent with his duties as the general host. She looked around the table for her singular acquaintance of an hour before, but she had not seen him since. She would have spoken about him to Somers, but she had an instinctive idea that the latter would be antipathetic, in spite of the stranger’s flattering commendation. So she found herself again following Somers’s cynical but good-humored description of the various guests, and, I fear, seeing with his eyes, listening with his ears, and occasionally participating in his superior attitude. The “fearful joy” she had found in the novelty of the situation and the originality of the actors seemed now quite right from this critical point of view. So she learned how the guest with the long hair was an unknown painter, to whom Rushbrook had given a commission for three hundred yards of painted canvas, to be cut up and framed as occasion and space required, in Rushbrook’s new hotel in San Francisco; how the gray-bearded foreigner near him was an accomplished bibliophile who was furnishing Mr. Rushbrook’s library from spoils of foreign collections, and had suffered unheard-of agonies from the millionaire’s insisting upon a handsome uniform binding that should deprive certain precious but musty tomes of their crumbling, worm-eaten coverings; how the very gentle, clerical-looking stranger, mildest of a noisy, disputing crowd at the other table, was a notorious duelist and dead shot; how the only gentleman at the table who retained a flannel shirt and high boots was not a late-coming mountaineer, but a well-known English baronet on his travels; how the man who told a somewhat florid and emphatic anecdote was a popular Eastern clergyman; how the one querulous, discontented face in a laughing group was the famous humorist who had just convulsed it; and how a pale, handsome young fellow, who ate and drank sparingly and disregarded the coquettish advances of the prettiest Diva with the cold abstraction of a student, was a notorious roue and gambler. But there was a sudden and unlooked-for change of criticism and critic.
The festivity had reached that stage when the guests were more or less accessible to emotion, and more or less touched by the astounding fact that every one was enjoying himself. This phenomenon, which is apt to burst into song or dance among other races, is constrained to voice itself in an Anglo-Saxon gathering by some explanation, apology, or moral—known as an after-dinner speech. Thus it was that the gentleman from Siskyou, who had been from time to time casting glances at Somers and his fair companion at the head of the table, now rose to his feet, albeit unsteadily, pushed back his chair, and began:—
“‘Pears to me, ladies and gentlemen, and feller pardners, that on an occasion like this, suthin’ oughter be said of the man who got it up—whose money paid for it, and who ain’t here to speak for himself, except by deputy. Yet you all know that’s Bob Rushbrook’s style—he ain’t here, because he’s full of some other plan or improvements—and it’s like him to start suthin’ of this kind, give it its aim and purpose, and then stand aside to let somebody else run it for him. There ain’t no man livin’ ez hez, so to speak, more fast horses ready saddled for riding, and more fast men ready spurred to ride ‘em,—whether to win his races or run his errands. There ain’t no man livin’ ez knows better how to make other men’s games his, or his game seem to be other men’s. And from Jack Somers smilin’ over there, ez knows where to get the best wine that Bob pays for, and knows how to run this yer show for Bob, at Bob’s expense—we’re all contented. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re all contented. We stand, so to speak, on the cards he’s dealt us. What may be his little game, it ain’t for us to say; but whatever it is, WE’RE IN IT. Gentlemen and ladies, we’ll drink Bob’s health!”
There was a somewhat sensational pause, followed by good-natured laughter and applause, in which Somers joined; yet not without a certain constraint that did not escape the quick sympathy of the shocked and unsmiling Miss Nevil. It was with a feeling of relief that she caught the chaperoning eye of Mrs. Leyton, who was entreating her in the usual mysterious signal to the other ladies to rise and follow her. When she reached the drawing-room, a little behind the others, she was somewhat surprised to observe that the stranger whom she had missed during the evening was approaching her with Mrs. Leyton.
“Mr. Rushbrook returned sooner than he expected, but unfortunately, as he always retires early, he has only time to say ‘goodnight’ to you before he goes.”
For an instant Grace Nevil was more angry than disconcerted. Then came the conviction that she was stupid not to have suspected the truth before. Who else would that brusque stranger develop into but this rude host? She bowed formally.
Mr. Rushbrook looked at her with the faintest smile on his handsome mouth. “Well, Miss Nevil, I hope Jack Somers satisfied your curiosity?”
With a sudden recollection of the Siskyou gentleman’s speech, and a swift suspicion that in some way she had been made use of with the others by this forceful-looking man before her, she answered pertly:—
“Yes; but there was a speech by a gentleman from Siskyou that struck me as being nearer to the purpose.”
“That’s so,—I heard it as I came in,” said Mr. Rushbrook, calmly. “I don’t know but you’re right.”
CHAPTER IV
Six months had passed. The Villa of Maecenas was closed at Los Osos Canyon, and the southwest trade-winds were slanting the rains of the wet season against its shut windows and barred doors. Within that hollow, deserted shell, its aspect—save for a single exception—was unchanged; the furniture and decorations preserved their eternal youth undimmed by time; the rigidly-arranged rooms, now closed to life and light, developed more than ever their resemblance to a furniture warehouse. The single exception was the room which Grace Nevil had rearranged for herself; and that, oddly enough, was stripped and bare—even to its paper and mouldings.
In other respects, the sealed treasures of Rushbrook’s villa, far from provoking any sentimentality, seemed only to give truth to the current rumor that it was merely waiting to be transformed into a gorgeous watering-place hotel under Rushbrook’s direction; that, with its new ball-room changed into an elaborate dining-hall, it would undergo still further improvement, the inevitable end and object of all Rushbrook’s enterprise; and that its former proprietor had already begun another villa whose magnificence should eclipse the last. There certainly appeared to be no limit to the millionaire’s success in all that he personally undertook, or in his fortunate complicity with the enterprise and invention of others. His name was associated with the oldest and safest schemes, as well as the newest and boldest—with an equal guarantee of security. A few, it was true, looked doubtingly upon this “one man power,” but could not refute the fact that others had largely benefited by association with him, and that he shared his profits with a royal hand. Some objected on higher grounds to his brutalizing the influence of wealth by his material and extravagantly practical processes, instead of the gentler suggestions of education and personal example, and were impelled to point out the fact that he and his patronage were vulgar. It was felt, however, by those who received his benefits, that a proper sense of this inferiority was all that ethics demanded of them. One could still accept Rushbrook’s barbaric gifts by humorously recognizing the fact that he didn’t know any better, and that it pleased him, as long as they resented any higher pretensions.