The Californians

Chapter 2

Don Roberto Yorba had escaped the pecuniary extinction that had overtaken his race. Of all the old grandees who, not forty years before, had called the Californias their own: living a life of Arcadian magnificence, troubled by few cares, a life of riding over vast estates clad in silk and lace, botas and sombrero, mounted upon steeds as gorgeously caparisoned as themselves, eating, drinking, serenading at the gratings of beautiful women, gambling, horse-racing, taking part in splendid religious festivals, with only the languid excitement of an occasional war between rival governors to disturb the placid surface of their lives,--of them all Don Roberto was a man of wealth and consequence to-day. But through no original virtue of his. He had been as princely in his hospitality, as reckless with his gold, as meagrely equipped to cope with the enterprising United Statesian who first conquered the Californian, then, nefariously, or righteously, appropriated his acres. When Commodore Sloat ran up the American flag on the Custom House of Monterey on July seventh, 1846, one of the midshipmen who went on shore to seal the victory with the strength of his lungs was a clever and restless youth named Polk. As his sharpness and fund of dry New England anecdote had made him a distinctive position on board ship, he was permitted to go to the ball given on the following night by Thomas O. Larkin, United States Consul, in honour of the Commodore and officers of the three warships then in the bay. Having little liking for girls, he quickly fraternised with Don Roberto Yorba, a young hidalgo who had recently lost his wife and had no heart for festivities, although curiosity had brought him to this ball which celebrated the downfall of his country. The two men left the ball-room,--where the handsome and resentful se駉ritas were preparing to avenge California with a battery of glance, a melody of tongue, and a witchery of grace that was to wreak havoc among these gallant officers,--and after exchanging amenities over a bowl of punch, went out into the high-walled garden to smoke the cigarito. The perfume of the sweet Castilian roses was about them, the old walls were a riot of pink and green; but the youths had no mind for either. The don was fascinated by the quick terse common-sense and the harsh nasal voice of the American, and the American's mind was full of a scheme which he was not long confiding to his friend. A shrewd Yankee, gifted with insight, and of no small experience, young as he was, Polk felt that the idle pleasure-loving young don was a man to be trusted and magnetic with potentialities of usefulness. He therefore confided his consuming desire to be a rich man, his hatred of the navy, and, finally, his determination to resign and make his way in the world.

"I haven't a red cent to bless myself with," he concluded. "But I've got what's more important as a starter,--brains. What's more, I feel the power in me to make money. It's the only thing on earth I care for; and when you put all your brains and energies to one thing you get it, unless you get paralysis or an ounce of cold lead first."

The Californian, who had a true grandee's contempt for gold, was nevertheless charmed with the engaging frankness and the unmistakable sincerity of the American.

"My house is yours," he exclaimed ardently. "You will living with me, no? until you find the moneys? I am--how you say it?--delighted. Always I like the Americanos--we having a few. All I have is yours, se駉r."

"Look here," exclaimed Polk. "I won't eat any man's bread for nothing, but I'll strike a bargain with you. If you'll stand by me, I'll stand by you. I mean to make money, and I don't much care how I do make it; this is a new place, anyhow. But there's one thing I never do, and that is to go back on a friend. You'll need me, and my Yankee sharpness may be the greatest godsend that ever came your way. I've seen more or less of this country. It's simply magnificent. Americans will be swarming over the place in less than no time. They've begun already. Then you'll be just nowhere. Is it a bargain?"

"It is!" exclaimed Don Roberto, with enthusiasm; and when Polk had explained his ominations more fully, he wrung the American's hand again.

Polk, after much difficulty, but through personal influence which he was fortunate enough to possess, obtained his discharge. He immediately became the guest of Don Roberto, who lived with his younger sister on a ranch covering three hundred thousand acres, and, his first intention being to take up land, was initiated into the mysteries of horse-raising, tanning hides, and making tallow; the two last-named industries being pursued for purposes of barter with the Boston skippers. But farming was not to Polk's taste; he hated waiting on the slow processes of Nature. He married Magdal閚a Yorba, and borrowed from Don Roberto enough money to open a store in Monterey stocked with such necessities and luxuries as could be imported from Boston. When the facile Californians had no ready money to pay for their wholesale purchases, he took a mortgage on the next hide yield, or on a small ranch. His rate of interest was twelve per cent; and as the Californians were never prepared to pay when the day of reckoning came, he foreclosed with a promptitude which both horrified Don Roberto and made imperious demands upon his admiration.

"My dear Don," Polk would say, "if it isn't I, it will be some one else. I'm not the only one--and look at the squatters. I'm becoming a rich man, and if I were not, I'd be a fool. You had your day, but you were never made to last. Your boots are a comfortable fit, and I propose to wear them. I don't mean yours, by the way. I'm going to look after you. Better think it over and come into partnership."

To this Don Roberto would not hearken; but when the rush to the gold mines began he was persuaded by Polk to take a trip into the San Joaquin valley to "see the circus," as the Yankee phrased it. There, in community with his brother-in-law, he staked off a claim, and there the lust for gold entered his veins and never left it. He returned to Monterey a rich man in something besides land. After that there was little conversation between himself and Polk on any subject but money and the manner of its multiplication; and, as the years passed, and Polk's prophecy was fulfilled, he gave the devotion of a fanatic to the retention of his vast inheritance and to the development of his grafted financial faculty.

Between the mines, his store, and his various enterprises in San Francisco, Polk rapidly became a wealthy man. Even in those days he was accounted an unscrupulous one, but he was powerful enough to hold the opinion of men in contempt and too shrewd to elbow such law as there was. And his gratitude and friendship for Don Roberto never flickered. He advised him to invest his gold in city lots, and as himself bought adjoining ones, Don Roberto invested without hesitation. Polk had acquired a taste for Spanish cooking, cigaritos, and life on horseback; his influences on the Californian were far more subtle and revolutionising. Don Roberto was still hospitable, because it became a grandee so to be; but he had a Yankee major-domo who kept an account of every cent that was expended. He had no miserly love of gold in the concrete, but he had an abiding sense of its illimitable power, all of his brother-in-law's determination to become one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the country, and a ferocious hatred of poverty. He saw his old friends fall about him: advice did them no good, and any permanent alliance with their interests would have meant his own ruin; so he shrugged his shoulders and forgot them. The American flag always floated above his rooms. In time he and Polk opened a bank, and he sat in its parlour for five hours of the day; it was the passion of his maturity and decline. When Polk's sister, some eleven years after the Occupation of California by the United States, came out to visit the brother who had left her teaching a small school in Boston, he married her promptly, feeling himself blessed in another New England relative. She was thirty-two at the time, and her complexion was dark and sallow: but she carried her tall angular figure with impressive dignity, and her chill manners gave her a certain distinction. Don Roberto was delighted with her, and as she was by nature as economical as his familiar could desire, he dismissed the major-domo and gave her carte blanche at the largest shops in the city; even if he had wished it, she could not have been induced to buy more than four gowns a year. But she was a very ambitious woman. As the wife of a great Californian grandee, she had seen herself the future leader of San Francisco society. Her ambitions were realised in a degree only. Don Roberto built her a huge wooden palace on Nob Hill,--on which was the highest flagstaff and the biggest flag in San Francisco,--placed a suitable number of servants at her command, and gave her a carriage. But he only permitted her to give two large dinners and one ball during the season, and would go to other people's entertainments but seldom. As their ideas of duty were equally rigid, she would not go without him; but they had a circle of intimate and aristocratic friends with whom they lunched and dined informally,--the Polks, the Belmonts, the Montgomerys, the Tarltons, the Brannans, the Gearys, and the Folsoms.

They had been married ten years when Magdal閚a, their only child, was born.