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