The Splendid Idle Forties: Stories of Old California

Natalie could not obtain speech alone with Estenega that evening; but the next morning the Princess Hélène commanded her household and guest to accompany her up the hill to the orchard at the foot of the forest; and there, while the others wandered over the knolls of the shadowy enclosure, Natalie managed to tell her story.  Estenega offered his help spontaneously.

“At twelve to-night,” he said, “I will wait for you in the forest with horses, and will guide you myself to Monterey.  I have a house there, and you can leave on the first barque for Boston.”

As soon as the party returned to the Fort, Estenega excused himself and left for his home.  The day passed with maddening slowness to Natalie.  She spent the greater part of it walking up and down the immediate cliffs, idly watching the men capturing the seals and otters, the ship-builders across the gulch.  As she returned at sunset to the enclosure, she saw the miller’s son standing by the gates, gazing at her with hungry admiration.  He inspired her with sudden fury.

“Never presume to look at me again,” she said harshly.  “If you do, I shall report you to the Governor.”

And without waiting to note how he accepted the mandate, she swept by him and entered the Fort, the gates clashing behind her.

The inmates of Fort Ross were always in bed by eleven o’clock.  At that hour not a sound was to be heard but the roar of the ocean, the soft pacing of the sentry on the ramparts, the cry of the panther in the forest.  On the evening in question, after the others had retired, Natalie, trembling with excitement, made a hasty toilet, changing her evening gown for a gray travelling frock.  Her heavy hair came unbound, and her shaking hands refused to adjust the close coils.  As it fell over her gray mantle it looked so lovely, enveloping her with the silver sheen of mist, that she smiled in sad vanity, remembering happier days, and decided to let her lover see her so.  She could braid her hair at the mill.

A moment or two before twelve she raised the window and swung herself to the ground.  The sentry was on the rampart opposite:  she could not make her exit by that gate.  She walked softly around the buildings, keeping in their shadow, and reached the gates facing the forest.  They were not difficult to unbar, and in a moment she stood without, free.  She could not see the mountain; a heavy bank of white fog lay against it, resting, after its long flight over the ocean, before it returned, or swept onward to ingulf the redwoods.

She went with noiseless step up the path, then turned and walked swiftly toward the mill.  She was very nervous; mingling with the low voice of the ocean she imagined she heard the moans with which beheaded convicts were said to haunt the night.  Once she thought she heard a footstep behind her, and paused, her heart beating audibly.  But the sound ceased with her own soft footfalls, and the fog was so dense that she could see nothing.  The ground was soft, and she was beyond the sentry’s earshot; she ran at full speed across the field, down the gorge, and up the steep knoll.  As she reached the top, she was taken in Mikhaïlof’s arms.  For a few moments she was too breathless to speak; then she told him her plans.

“Let me braid my hair,” she said finally, “and we will go.”

He drew her within the mill, then lit a lantern and held it above her head, his eyes dwelling passionately on her beauty, enhanced by the colour of excitement and rapid exercise.

“You look like the moon queen,” he said.  “I missed your hair, apart from yourself.”

She lifted her chin with a movement of coquetry most graceful in spite of long disuse, and the answering fire sprang into her eyes.  She looked very piquant and a trifle diabolical.  He pressed his lips suddenly on hers.  A moment later something tugged at the long locks his hand caressed, and at the same time he became conscious that the silence which had fallen between them was shaken by a loud whir.  He glanced upward.  Natalie was standing with her back to one of the band-wheels.  It had begun to revolve; in the moment it increased its speed; and he saw a glittering web on its surface.  With an exclamation of horror, he pulled her toward him; but he was too late.  The wheel, spinning now with the velocity of midday, caught the whole silver cloud in its spokes, and Natalie was swept suddenly upward.  Her feet hit the low rafters, and she was whirled round and round, screams of torture torn from her rather than uttered, her body describing a circular right angle to the shaft, the bones breaking as they struck the opposite one; then, in swift finality, she was sucked between belt and wheel.  Mikhaïlof managed to get into the next room and reverse the lever.  The machinery stopped as abruptly as it had started; but Natalie was out of her agony.

Her lover flung himself over the cliffs, shattering bones and skull on the stones at their base.  They made her a coffin out of the copper plates used for their ships, and laid her in the straggling unpopulous cemetery on the knoll across the gulch beyond the chapel.

“When we go, we will take her,” said Rotscheff to his distracted wife.

But when they went, a year or two after, in the hurry of departure they forgot her until too late.  They promised to return.  But they never came, and she sleeps there still, on the lonely knoll between the sunless forest and the desolate ocean.