The Little Lady of the Big House
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It was the first time the sages of the madrono grove had heard Dick’s song, and they were loud in applause. Hancock took it for a fresh start in the discussion, and was beginning to elaborate a biologic Bergsonian definition of love, when he was stopped by Terrence, who had noticed the pain that swept across Leo’s face.
“Go on, please, dear lady,” Terrence begged. “And sing of love, only of love; for it is my experience that I meditate best upon the stars to the accompaniment of a woman’s voice.”
A little later, Oh Joy, entering the room, waited till Paula finished a song, then moved noiselessly to Graham and handed him a telegram. Dick scowled at the interruption.
“Very important – I think,” the Chinese explained to him.
“Who took it?” Dick demanded.
“Me – I took it,” was the answer. “Night clerk at Eldorado call on telephone. He say important. I take it.”
“It is, fairly so,” Graham spoke up, having finished reading the message. “Can I get a train out to-night for San Francisco, Dick?”
“Oh Joy, come back a moment,” Dick called, looking at his watch. “What train for San Francisco stops at Eldorado?”
“Eleven-ten,” came the instant information. “Plenty time. Not too much. I call chauffeur?”
Dick nodded.
“You really must jump out to-night?” he asked Graham.
“Really. It is quite important. Will I have time to pack?”
Dick gave a confirmatory nod to Oh Joy, and said to Graham:
“Just time to throw the needful into a grip.” He turned to Oh Joy. “Is Oh My up yet?”
“Yessr.”
“Send him to Mr. Graham’s room to help, and let me know as soon as the machine is ready. No limousine. Tell Saunders to take the racer.”
“One fine big strapping man, that,” Terrence commented, after Graham had left the room.
They had gathered about Dick, with the exception of Paula, who remained at the piano, listening.
“One of the few men I’d care to go along with, hell for leather, on a forlorn hope or anything of that sort,” Dick said. “He was on the Nethermere when she went ashore at Pango in the ’97 hurricane. Pango is just a strip of sand, twelve feet above high water mark, a lot of cocoanuts, and uninhabited. Forty women among the passengers, English officers’ wives and such. Graham had a bad arm, big as a leg – snake bite.
“It was a thundering sea. Boats couldn’t live. They smashed two and lost both crews. Four sailors volunteered in succession to carry a light line ashore. And each man, in turn, dead at the end of it, was hauled back on board. While they were untying the last one, Graham, with an arm like a leg, stripped for it and went to it. And he did it, although the pounding he got on the sand broke his bad arm and staved in three ribs. But he made the line fast before he quit. In order to haul the hawser ashore, six more volunteered to go in on Evan’s line to the beach. Four of them arrived. And only one woman of the forty was lost – she died of heart disease and fright.
“I asked him about it once. He was as bad as an Englishman. All I could get out of the beggar was that the recovery was uneventful. Thought that the salt water, the exercise, and the breaking of the bone had served as counter-irritants and done the arm good.”
Oh Joy and Graham entered the room from opposite ends. Dick saw that Graham’s first questing glance was for Paula.
“All ready, sir,” Oh Joy announced.
Dick prepared to accompany his guest outside to the car; but Paula evidenced her intention of remaining in the house. Graham started over to her to murmur perfunctory regrets and good-by.
And she, warm with what Dick had just told of him, pleasured at the goodly sight of him, dwelling with her eyes on the light, high poise of head, the careless, sun-sanded hair, and the lightness, almost debonaireness, of his carriage despite his weight of body and breadth of shoulders. As he drew near to her, she centered her gaze on the long gray eyes whose hint of drooping lids hinted of boyish sullenness. She waited for the expression of sullenness to vanish as the eyes lighted with the smile she had come to know so well.
What he said was ordinary enough, as were her regrets; but in his eyes, as he held her hand a moment, was the significance which she had unconsciously expected and to which she replied with her own eyes. The same significance was in the pressure of the momentary handclasp. All unpremeditated, she responded to that quick pressure. As he had said, there was little need for speech between them.
As their hands fell apart, she glanced swiftly at Dick; for she had learned much, in their dozen years together, of his flashes of observance, and had come to stand in awe of his almost uncanny powers of guessing facts from nuances, and of linking nuances into conclusions often startling in their thoroughness and correctness. But Dick, his shoulder toward her, laughing over some quip of Hancock, was just turning his laughter-crinkled eyes toward her as he started to accompany Graham.
No, was her thought; surely Dick had seen nothing of the secret little that had been exchanged between them. It had been very little, very quick – a light in the eyes, a muscular quiver of the fingers, and no lingering. How could Dick have seen or sensed? Their eyes had certainly been hidden from Dick, likewise their clasped hands, for Graham’s back had been toward him.
Just the same, she wished she had not made that swift glance at Dick. She was conscious of a feeling of guilt, and the thought of it hurt her as she watched the two big men, of a size and blondness, go down the room side by side. Of what had she been guilty? she asked herself. Why should she have anything to hide? Yet she was honest enough to face the fact and accept, without quibble, that she had something to hide. And her cheeks burned at the thought that she was being drifted into deception.
“I won’t be but a couple of days,” Graham was saying as he shook hands with Dick at the car.
Dick saw the square, straight look of his eyes, and recognized the firmness and heartiness of his gripping hand. Graham half began to say something, then did not; and Dick knew he had changed his mind when he said:
“I think, when I get back, that I’ll have to pack.”
“But the book,” Dick protested, inwardly cursing himself for the leap of joy which had been his at the other’s words.
“That’s just why,” Graham answered. “I’ve got to get it finished. It doesn’t seem I can work like you do. The ranch is too alluring. I can’t get down to the book. I sit over it, and sit over it, but the confounded meadowlarks keep echoing in my ears, and I begin to see the fields, and the redwood canyons, and Selim. And after I waste an hour, I give up and ring for Selim. And if it isn’t that, it’s any one of a thousand other enchantments.”
He put his foot on the running-board of the pulsing car and said, “Well, so long, old man.”
“Come back and make a stab at it,” urged Dick. “If necessary, we’ll frame up a respectable daily grind, and I’ll lock you in every morning until you’ve done it. And if you don’t do your work all day, all day you’ll stay locked in. I’ll make you work. – Got cigarettes? – matches?”
“Right O.”
“Let her go, Saunders,” Dick ordered the chauffeur; and the car seemed to leap out into the darkness from the brilliantly lighted porte cochére.
Back in the house, Dick found Paula playing to the madrono sages, and ensconced himself on the couch to wait and wonder if she would kiss him good night when bedtime came. It was not, he recognized, as if they made a regular schedule of kissing. It had never been like that. Often and often he did not see her until midday, and then in the presence of guests. And often and often, she slipped away to bed early, disturbing no one with a good night kiss to her husband which might well hint to them that their bedtime had come.
No, Dick concluded, whether or not she kissed him on this particular night it would be equally without significance. But still he wondered.
She played on and sang on interminably, until at last he fell asleep. When he awoke he was alone in the room. Paula and the sages had gone out quietly. He looked at his watch. It marked one o’clock. She had played unusually late, he knew; for he knew she had just gone. It was the cessation of music and movement that had awakened him.
And still he wondered. Often he napped there to her playing, and always, when she had finished, she kissed him awake and sent him to bed. But this night she had not. Perhaps, after all, she was coming back. He lay and drowsed and waited. The next time he looked at his watch, it was two o’clock. She had not come back.
He turned off the lights, and as he crossed the house, pressed off the hall lights as he went, while the many unimportant little nothings, almost of themselves, ranged themselves into an ordered text of doubt and conjecture that he could not refrain from reading.
On his sleeping porch, glancing at his barometers and thermometers, her laughing face in the round frame caught his eyes, and, standing before it, even bending closer to it, he studied her long.
“Oh, well,” he muttered, as he drew up the bedcovers, propped the pillows behind him and reached for a stack of proofsheets, “whatever it is I’ll have to play it.”
He looked sidewise at her picture.
“But, oh, Little Woman, I wish you wouldn’t,” was the sighed good night.
Chapter XXIV
As luck would have it, beyond chance guests for lunch or dinner, the Big House was empty. In vain, on the first and second days, did Dick lay out his work, or defer it, so as to be ready for any suggestion from Paula to go for an afternoon swim or drive.
He noted that she managed always to avoid the possibility of being kissed. From her sleeping porch she called good night to him across the wide patio. In the morning he prepared himself for her eleven o’clock greeting. Mr. Agar and Mr. Pitts, with important matters concerning the forthcoming ranch sale of stock still unsettled, Dick promptly cleared out at the stroke of eleven. Up she was, he knew, for he had heard her singing. As he waited, seated at his desk, for once he was idle. A tray of letters before him continued to need his signature. He remembered this morning pilgrimage of hers had been originated by her, and by her, somewhat persistently, had been kept up. And an adorable thing it was, he decided – that soft call of “Good morning, merry gentleman,” and the folding of her kimono-clad figure in his arms.
He remembered, further, that he had often cut that little visit short, conveying the impression to her, even while he clasped her, of how busy he was. And he remembered, more than once, the certain little wistful shadow on her face as she slipped away.
Quarter past eleven, and she had not come. He took down the receiver to telephone the dairy, and in the swift rush of women’s conversation, ere he hung up, he caught Paula’s voice:
“ – Bother Mr. Wade. Bring all the little Wades and come, if only for a couple of days – ”
Which was very strange of Paula. She had invariably welcomed the intervals of no guests, when she and he were left alone with each other for a day or for several days. And now she was trying to persuade Mrs. Wade to come down from Sacramento. It would seem that Paula did not wish to be alone with him, and was seeking to protect herself with company.
He smiled as he realized that that morning embrace, now that it was not tendered him, had become suddenly desirable. The thought came to him of taking her away with him on one of their travel-jaunts. That would solve the problem, perhaps. And he would hold her very close to him and draw her closer. Why not an Alaskan hunting trip? She had always wanted to go. Or back to their old sailing grounds in the days of the All Away– the South Seas. Steamers ran direct between San Francisco and Tahiti. In twelve days they could be ashore in Papeete. He wondered if Lavaina still ran her boarding house, and his quick vision caught a picture of Paula and himself at breakfast on Lavaina’s porch in the shade of the mango trees.
He brought his fist down on the desk. No, by God, he was no coward to run away with his wife for fear of any man. And would it be fair to her to take her away possibly from where her desire lay? True, he did not know where her desire lay, nor how far it had gone between her and Graham. Might it not be a spring madness with her that would vanish with the spring? Unfortunately, he decided, in the dozen years of their marriage she had never evidenced any predisposition toward spring madness. She had never given his heart a moment’s doubt. Herself tremendously attractive to men, seeing much of them, receiving their admiration and even court, she had remained always her equable and serene self, Dick Forrest’s wife —
“Good morning, merry gentleman.”
She was peeping in on him, quite naturally from the hall, her eyes and lips smiling to him, blowing him a kiss from her finger tips.
“And good morning, my little haughty moon,” he called back, himself equally his natural self.
And now she would come in, he thought; and he would fold her in his arms, and put her to the test of the kiss.
He opened his arms in invitation. But she did not enter. Instead, she startled, with one hand gathered her kimono at her breast, with the other picked up the trailing skirt as if for flight, at the same time looking apprehensively down the hall. Yet his keen ears had caught no sound. She smiled back at him, blew him another kiss, and was gone.
Ten minutes later he had no ears for Bonbright, who, telegrams in hand, startled him as he sat motionless at his desk, as he had sat, without movement, for ten minutes.
And yet she was happy. Dick knew her too long in all the expressions of her moods not to realize the significance of her singing over the house, in the arcades, and out in the patio. He did not leave his workroom till the stroke of lunch; nor did she, as she sometimes did, come to gather him up on the way. At the lunch gong, from across the patio, he heard her trilling die away into the house in the direction of the dining room.
A Colonel Harrison Stoddard – colonel from younger service in the National Guard, himself a retired merchant prince whose hobby was industrial relations and social unrest – held the table most of the meal upon the extension of the Employers’ Liability Act so as to include agricultural laborers. But Paula found a space in which casually to give the news to Dick that she was running away for the afternoon on a jaunt up to Wickenberg to the Masons.
“Of course I don’t know when I’ll be back – you know what the Masons are. And I don’t dare ask you to come, though I’d like you along.”
Dick shook his head.
“And so,” she continued, “if you’re not using Saunders – ”
Dick nodded acquiescence.
“I’m using Callahan this afternoon,” he explained, on the instant planning his own time now that Paula was out of the question. “I never can make out, Paul, why you prefer Saunders. Callahan is the better driver, and of course the safest.”
“Perhaps that’s why,” she said with a smile. “Safety first means slowest most.”
“Just the same I’d back Callahan against Saunders on a speed-track,” Dick championed.
“Where are you bound?” she asked.
“Oh, to show Colonel Stoddard my one-man and no-horse farm – you know, the automatically cultivated ten-acre stunt I’ve been frivoling with. A lot of changes have been made that have been waiting a week for me to see tried out. I’ve been too busy. And after that, I’m going to take him over the colony – what do you think? – five additions the last week.”
“I thought the membership was full,” Paula said.
“It was, and still is,” Dick beamed. “But these are babies. And the least hopeful of the families had the rashness to have twins.”
“A lot of wiseacres are shaking their heads over that experiment of yours, and I make free to say that I am merely holding my judgment – you’ve got to show me by bookkeeping,” Colonel Stoddard was saying, immensely pleased at the invitation to be shown over in person.
Dick scarcely heard him, such was the rush of other thoughts. Paula had not mentioned whether Mrs. Wade and the little Wades were coming, much less mentioned that she had invited them. Yet this Dick tried to consider no lapse on her part, for often and often, like himself, she had guests whose arrival was the first he knew of their coming.
It was, however, evident that Mrs. Wade was not coming that day, else Paula would not be running away thirty miles up the valley. That was it, and there was no blinking it. She was running away, and from him. She could not face being alone with him with the consequent perils of intimacy – and perilous, in such circumstances, could have but the significance he feared. And further, she was making the evening sure. She would not be back for dinner, or till long after dinner, it was a safe wager, unless she brought the whole Wickenberg crowd with her. She would be back late enough to expect him to be in bed. Well, he would not disappoint her, he decided grimly, as he replied to Colonel Stoddard:
“The experiment works out splendidly on paper, with decently wide margins for human nature. And there I admit is the doubt and the danger – the human nature. But the only way to test it is to test it, which is what I am doing.”
“It won’t be the first Dick has charged to profit and loss,” Paula said.
“But five thousand acres, all the working capital for two hundred and fifty farmers, and a cash salary of a thousand dollars each a year!” Colonel Stoddard protested. “A few such failures – if it fails – would put a heavy drain on the Harvest.”
“That’s what the Harvest needs,” Dick answered lightly.
Colonel Stoddard looked blank.
“Precisely,” Dick confirmed. “Drainage, you know. The mines are flooded – the Mexican situation.”
It was during the morning of the second day – the day of Graham’s expected return – that Dick, who, by being on horseback at eleven, had avoided a repetition of the hurt of the previous day’s “Good morning, merry gentleman” across the distance of his workroom, encountered Ah Ha in a hall with an armful of fresh-cut lilacs. The house-boy’s way led toward the tower room, but Dick made sure.
“Where are you taking them, Ah Ha?” he asked.
“Mr. Graham’s room – he come to-day.”
Now whose thought was that? Dick pondered. Ah Ha’s? – Oh Joy’s – or Paula’s? He remembered having heard Graham more than once express his fancy for their lilacs.
He deflected his course from the library and strolled out through the flowers near the tower room. Through the open windows of it came Paula’s happy humming. Dick pressed his lower lip with tight quickness between his teeth and strolled on.
Some great, as well as many admirable, men and women had occupied that room, and for them Paula had never supervised the flower arrangement, Dick meditated. Oh Joy, himself a master of flowers, usually attended to that, or had his house-staff ably drilled to do it.
Among the telegrams Bonbright handed him, was one from Graham, which Dick read twice, although it was simple and unmomentous, being merely a postponement of his return.
Contrary to custom, Dick did not wait for the second lunch-gong. At the sound of the first he started, for he felt the desire for one of Oh Joy’s cocktails – the need of a prod of courage, after the lilacs, to meet Paula. But she was ahead of him. He found her – who rarely drank, and never alone – just placing an empty cocktail glass back on the tray.
So she, too, had needed courage for the meal, was his deduction, as he nodded to Oh Joy and held up one finger.
“Caught you at it!” he reproved gaily. “Secret tippling. The gravest of symptoms. Little I thought, the day I stood up with you, that the wife I was marrying was doomed to fill an alcoholic’s grave.”
Before she could retort, a young man strolled in whom she and Dick greeted as Mr. Winters, and who also must have a cocktail. Dick tried to believe that it was not relief he sensed in Paula’s manner as she greeted the newcomer. He had never seen her quite so cordial to him before, although often enough she had met him. At any rate, there would be three at lunch.
Mr. Winters, an agricultural college graduate and special writer for the Pacific Rural Press, as well as a sort of protégé of Dick, had come for data for an article on California fish-ponds, and Dick mentally arranged his afternoon’s program for him.
“Got a telegram from Evan,” he told Paula. “Won’t be back till the four o’clock day after to-morrow.”
“And after all my trouble!” she exclaimed. “Now the lilacs will be wilted and spoiled.”
Dick felt a warm glow of pleasure. There spoke his frank, straightforward Paula. No matter what the game was, or its outcome, at least she would play it without the petty deceptions. She had always been that way – too transparent to make a success of deceit.
Nevertheless, he played his own part by a glance of scarcely interested interrogation.
“Why, in Graham’s room,” she explained. “I had the boys bring a big armful and I arranged them all myself. He’s so fond of them, you know.”
Up to the end of lunch, she had made no mention of Mrs. Wade’s coming, and Dick knew definitely she was not coming when Paula queried casually:
“Expecting anybody?”
He shook his head, and asked, “Are you doing anything this afternoon?”
“Haven’t thought about anything,” she answered. “And now I suppose I can’t plan upon you with Mr. Winters to be told all about fish.”
“But you can,” Dick assured her. “I’m turning him over to Mr. Hanley, who’s got the trout counted down to the last egg hatched and who knows all the grandfather bass by name. I’ll tell you what – ” He paused and considered. Then his face lighted as with a sudden idea. “It’s a loafing afternoon. Let’s take the rifles and go potting squirrels. I noticed the other day they’ve become populous on that hill above the Little Meadow.”
But he had not failed to observe the flutter of alarm that shadowed her eyes so swiftly, and that so swiftly was gone as she clapped her hands and was herself.
“But don’t take a rifle for me,” she said.
“If you’d rather not – ” he began gently.
“Oh, I want to go, but I don’t feel up to shooting. I’ll take Le Gallienne’s last book along – it just came in – and read to you in betweenwhiles. Remember, the last time I did that when we went squirreling it was his ‘Quest of the Golden Girl’ I read to you.”
Chapter XXV
Paula on the Fawn, and Dick on the Outlaw, rode out from the Big House as nearly side by side as the Outlaw’s wicked perversity permitted. The conversation she permitted was fragmentary. With tiny ears laid back and teeth exposed, she would attempt to evade Dick’s restraint of rein and spur and win to a bite of Paula’s leg or the Fawn’s sleek flank, and with every defeat the pink flushed and faded in the whites of her eyes. Her restless head-tossing and pitching attempts to rear (thwarted by the martingale) never ceased, save when she pranced and sidled and tried to whirl.
“This is the last year of her,” Dick announced. “She’s indomitable. I’ve worked two years on her without the slightest improvement. She knows me, knows my ways, knows I am her master, knows when she has to give in, but is never satisfied. She nourishes the perennial hope that some time she’ll catch me napping, and for fear she’ll miss that time she never lets any time go by.”
“And some time she may catch you,” Paula said.
“That’s why I’m giving her up. It isn’t exactly a strain on me, but soon or late she’s bound to get me if there’s anything in the law of probability. It may be a million-to-one shot, but heaven alone knows where in the series of the million that fatal one is going to pop up.”
“You’re a wonder, Red Cloud,” Paula smiled.
“Why?”
“You think in statistics and percentages, averages and exceptions. I wonder, when we first met, what particular formula you measured me up by.”
“I’ll be darned if I did,” he laughed back. “There was where all signs failed. I didn’t have a statistic that applied to you. I merely acknowledged to myself that here was the most wonderful female woman ever born with two good legs, and I knew that I wanted her more than I had ever wanted anything. I just had to have her – ”
“And got her,” Paula completed for him. “But since, Red Cloud, since. Surely you’ve accumulated enough statistics on me.”