And this was what a man's love came to: ardors by night and expedience by day! Or was it merely that Rezanov was the man of affairs always, the lover incidentally? But how could a man who had seemed the very epitome of all the lovers of all the world but a few hours before, contemplate, far less permit, a separation of years? Poor Concha groped toward the great unacceptable fact of life the whole, lit by love its chief incident; and had a fleeting vision of the waste lands in the lives of women oc-cupied only with matrimony. But she dropped her lashes upon this unalluring vision, and as she did so, inevitably she began to excuse the man.
None knew better than she every side of the great question that was shaking not only her life but Cali-fornia itself. Appeal from the dictum of state and clergy would be a mere waste of time. The only alternative was flight. That would mean the wreck of Rezanov's avowed purposes in coming to this quarter of New Spain, and perhaps of others she dimly suspected. It would mean the very acme of misery for his Sitkans, and an indefensible blow to the Company. It might even prove the fatal mistake in his career, for which his enemies were ever on the alert. He was not communicative about himself except when he had an object in view, but he had told her something of his life, and his officers and Langsdorff had told more. He was no silly cabal-lero warbling and thrumming at her grating when she longed for sleep, but a man in his forties whose passions were in the leash of a remarkably acute and ambitious brain. She even thrilled with pride in his strength, for she knew how he loved her; and although his part was action, her stimulated in-stincts taught her that she would rarely be long from his mind. And what was she to seek to roll stumbling blocks into the career of a man like that?
In this very garden, for four long days, she had dreamed exalted dreams of the manifold gifts she should develop for his solace at home and his worldly advancement. She had once felt all a girl's impatience when her mother's tears made her father's departure on some distant mission more difficult than need be, and although she knew now that her capacity for tenderness was as great, she resolved to mould herself in a larger shape than that.
But she sighed and drooped a little. The burden of woman's waiting seemed already to have de-scended upon her. Two years were long--long.
There might be other delays. He might fall ill; he had been ill before in that barbarous Russian north.
And in all that time it was doubtful if she received a line from him, a hint of his welfare. The Boston and British skippers came no more, and it was cer-tain that no Russian ship would visit California again until the treaty was signed and official news of it had made its slow way to these uttermost shores. She had resented, in her young ambition and indocility, the chance that had stranded her, equipped for civilization, on this rim of the world, but never so much as in that moment, when she sat with arrested breath and realized to the full the primitive conditions of a country thousands of miles from the very outposts of Europe, and with never the sight of a letter that did not come from Spain or one of her colonies.
"Would that we lived a generation later," she thought with a heavy sigh. Progress is almost automatic, and to a land as fertile and desirable as this the stream must turn in due course. But not in my time. Not in my time."
She rose and leaned her elbows in the embrasure of the grille, where Santiago had restored the bars, and looked out over the fields of grain planted by the padres, the immense sand dunes beyond that shut the lovely bay from sight; the hills embracing the primitive scene in a frowning arc. With all her imagination it was long before she could picture a great city covering that immense and almost deserted space. A pueblo in time, perhaps, for Rezanov had awakened her mind to the importance of the har-bor as a port of call. Many more adobe homes where the sand was not hot and shifting, a few ships in the bay when Spain had been compelled to relax her jealous vigilance--or--who knew?--per-haps!--a flourishing colony when the Russian bear had devoured the Spanish lion. She knew some-thing and suspected more of the rottenness and in-efficiency of Spain, and, were Russia a nation of Rezanovs, what opposition in California against the tide thundering down from the north? Then, per-haps, the city that had travelled from the brain of the Russian to hers when the fog had rolled over the heights; the towers and palaces and bazaars, the thousand little golden domes with the slender cross atop; the forts on the crags and the villas in the hollows, and on all the island and hills. But when she and her lover were dust. When she and her lover were dust.
But she was too young and too ardent to listen long to the ravens of the spirit. Two years are not eternity, and in happiness the past rolls together like a scroll and is naught. She fell to dreaming. Her lips that had been set with the gravity of stone re-laxed in warm curves. The color came back to her cheek, the light to her eyes. She was a girl at her grating with the roses poignant above her, and the world, radiant, alluring, and all for her, swimming in the violet haze beyond.
