________________________________________________
_ A week of dissatisfaction and restlessness ensued for Graham. Tom
between belief that his business was to leave the Big House on the
first train, and desire to see, and see more of Paula, to be with her,
and to be more with her--he succeeded in neither leaving nor in
seeing as much of her as during the first days of his visit.
At first, and for the five days that he lingered, the young violinist
monopolized nearly her entire time of visibility. Often Graham strayed
into the music room, and, quite neglected by the pair, sat for moody
half-hours listening to their "work." They were oblivious of his
presence, either flushed and absorbed with the passion of their music,
or wiping their foreheads and chatting and laughing companionably in
pauses to rest. That the young musician loved her with an ardency that
was almost painful, was patent to Graham; but what hurt him was the
abandon of devotion with which she sometimes looked at Ware after he
had done something exceptionally fine. In vain Graham tried to tell
himself that all this was mental on her part--purely delighted
appreciation of the other's artistry. Nevertheless, being man, it
hurt, and continued to hurt, until he could no longer suffer himself
to remain.
Once, chancing into the room at the end of a Schumann song and just
after Ware had departed, Graham found Paula still seated at the piano,
an expression of rapt dreaming on her face. She regarded him almost
unrecognizingly, gathered herself mechanically together, uttered an
absent-minded commonplace or so, and left the room. Despite his
vexation and hurt, Graham tried to think it mere artist-dreaming on
her part, a listening to the echo of the just-played music in her
soul. But women were curious creatures, he could not help moralizing,
and were prone to lose their hearts most strangely and
inconsequentially. Might it not be that by his very music this
youngster of a man was charming the woman of her?
With the departure of Ware, Paula Forrest retired almost completely
into her private wing behind the door without a knob. Nor did this
seem unusual, Graham gleaned from the household.
"Paula is a woman who finds herself very good company," Ernestine
explained, "and she often goes in for periods of aloneness, when Dick
is the only person who sees her."
"Which is not flattering to the rest of the company," Graham smiled.
"Which makes her such good company whenever she is in company,"
Ernestine retorted.
The driftage through the Big House was decreasing. A few guests, on
business or friendship, continued to come, but more departed. Under Oh
Joy and his Chinese staff the Big House ran so frictionlessly and so
perfectly, that entertainment of guests seemed little part of the
host's duties. The guests largely entertained themselves and one
another.
Dick rarely appeared, even for a moment, until lunch, and Paula, now
carrying out her seclusion program, never appeared before dinner.
"Rest cure," Dick laughed one noon, and challenged Graham to a
tournament with boxing gloves, single-sticks, and foils.
"And now's the time," he told Graham, as they breathed between bouts,
"for you to tackle your book. I'm only one of the many who are looking
forward to reading it, and I'm looking forward hard. Got a letter from
Havely yesterday--he mentioned it, and wondered how far along you
were."
So Graham, in his tower room, arranged his notes and photographs,
schemed out the work, and plunged into the opening chapters. So
immersed did he become that his nascent interest in Paula might have
languished, had it not been for meeting her each evening at dinner.
Then, too, until Ernestine and Lute left for Santa Barbara, there were
afternoon swims and rides and motor trips to the pastures of the
Miramar Hills and the upland ranges of the Anselmo Mountains. Other
trips they made, sometimes accompanied by Dick, to his great dredgers
working in the Sacramento basin, or his dam-building on the Little
Coyote and Los Cuatos creeks, or to his five-thousand-acre colony of
twenty-acre farmers, where he was trying to enable two hundred and
fifty heads of families, along with their families, to make good on
the soil.
That Paula sometimes went for long solitary rides, Graham knew, and,
once, he caught her dismounting from the Fawn at the hitching rails.
"Don't you think you are spoiling that mare for riding in company?" he
twitted.
Paula laughed and shook her head.
"Well, then," he asserted stoutly, "I'm spoiling for a ride with you."
"There's Lute, and Ernestine, and Bert, and all the rest."
"This is new country," he contended. "And one learns country through
the people who know it. I've seen it through the eyes of Lute, and
Ernestine and all the rest; but there is a lot I haven't seen and
which I can see only through your eyes."
"A pleasant theory," she evaded. "A--a sort of landscape vampirism."
"But without the ill effects of vampirism," he urged quickly.
Her answer was slow in coming. Her look into his eyes was frank and
straight, and he could guess her words were weighed and gauged.
"I don't know about that," was all she said finally; but his fancy
leaped at the several words, ranging and conjecturing their possible
connotations.
"But we have so much we might be saying to each other," he tried
again. "So much we... ought to be saying to each other."
"So I apprehend," she answered quietly; and again that frank, straight
look accompanied her speech.
So she did apprehend--the thought of it was flame to him, but his
tongue was not quick enough to serve him to escape the cool, provoking
laugh as she turned into the house.
Still the company of the Big House thinned. Paula's aunt, Mrs. Tully,
much to Graham's disappointment (for he had expected to learn from her
much that he wanted to know of Paula), had gone after only a several
days' stay. There was vague talk of her return for a longer stay; but,
just back from Europe, she declared herself burdened with a round of
duty visits which must be performed before her pleasure visiting
began.
O'Hay, the critic, had been compelled to linger several days in order
to live down the disastrous culmination of the musical raid made upon
him by the philosophers. The idea and the trick had been Dick's.
Combat had joined early in the evening, when a seeming chance remark
of Ernestine had enabled Aaron Hancock to fling the first bomb into
the thick of O'Hay's deepest convictions. Dar Hyal, a willing and
eager ally, had charged around the flank with his blastic theory of
music and taken O'Hay in reverse. And the battle had raged until the
hot-headed Irishman, beside himself with the grueling the pair of
skilled logomachists were giving him, accepted with huge relief the
kindly invitation of Terrence McFane to retire with him to the
tranquillity and repose of the stag room, where, over a soothing
highball and far from the barbarians, the two of them could have a
heart to heart talk on real music. At two in the morning, wild-eyed
and befuddled, O'Hay had been led to bed by the upright-walking and
unshakably steady Terrence.
"Never mind," Ernestine had told O'Hay later, with a twinkle in her
eye that made him guess the plot. "It was only to be expected. Those
rattle-brained philosophers would drive even a saint to drink."
"I thought you were safe in Terrence's hands," had been Dick's mock
apology. "A pair of Irishmen, you know. I'd forgot Terrence was case-
hardened. Do you know, after he said good night to you, he came up to
me for a yarn. And he was steady as a rock. He mentioned casually of
having had several sips, so I... I... never dreamed ... er... that he
had indisposed you."
When Lute and Ernestine departed for Santa Barbara, Bert Wainwright
and his sister remembered their long-neglected home in Sacramento. A
pair of painters, proteges of Paula, arrived the same day. But they
were little in evidence, spending long days in the hills with a trap
and driver and smoking long pipes in the stag room.
The free and easy life of the Big House went on in its frictionless
way. Dick worked. Graham worked. Paula maintained her seclusion. The
sages from the madrono grove strayed in for wordy dinners--and wordy
evenings, except when Paula played for them. Automobile parties, from
Sacramento, Wickenberg, and other valley towns, continued to drop in
unexpectedly, but never to the confusion of Oh Joy and the house boys,
whom Graham saw, on occasion, with twenty minutes' warning, seat a
score of unexpected guests to a perfect dinner. And there were even
nights--rare ones--when only Dick and Graham and Paula sat at dinner,
and when, afterward, the two men yarned for an hour before an early
bed, while she played soft things to herself or disappeared earlier
than they.
But one moonlight evening, when the Watsons and Masons and Wombolds
arrived in force, Graham found himself out, when every bridge table
was made up. Paula was at the piano. As he approached he caught the
quick expression of pleasure in her eyes at sight of him, which as
quickly vanished. She made a slight movement as if to rise, which did
not escape his notice any more than did her quiet mastery of the
impulse that left her seated.
She was immediately herself as he had always seen her--although it was
little enough he had seen of her, he thought, as he talked whatever
came into his head, and rummaged among her songs with her. Now one and
now another song he tried with her, subduing his high baritone to her
light soprano with such success as to win cries of more from the
bridge players.
"Yes, I am positively aching to be out again over the world with
Dick," she told him in a pause. "If we could only start to-morrow! But
Dick can't start yet. He's in too deep with too many experiments and
adventures on the ranch here. Why, what do you think he's up to now?
As if he did not have enough on his hands, he's going to revolutionize
the sales end, or, at least, the California and Pacific Coast portion
of it, by making the buyers come to the ranch."
"But they do do that," Graham said. "The first man I met here was a
buyer from Idaho."
"Oh, but Dick means as an institution, you know--to make them come en
masse at a stated time. Not simple auction sales, either, though he
says he will bait them with a bit of that to excite interest.
It will be an annual fair, to last three days, in which he will be the
only exhibitor. He's spending half his mornings now in conference with
Mr. Agar and Mr. Pitts. Mr. Agar is his sales manager, and Mr. Pitts
his showman."
She sighed and rippled her fingers along the keyboard.
"But, oh, if only we could get away--Timbuctoo, Mokpo, or Jericho."
"Don't tell me you've ever been to Mokpo," Graham laughed.
She nodded. "Cross my heart, solemnly, hope to die. It was with Dick
in the _All Away_ and in the long ago. It might almost be said we
honeymooned in Mokpo."
And while Graham exchanged reminiscences of Mokpo with her, he
cudgeled his brain to try and decide whether her continual reference
to her husband was deliberate.
"I should imagine you found it such a paradise here," he was saying.
"I do, I do," she assured him with what seemed unnecessary vehemence.
"But I don't know what's come over me lately. I feel it imperative to
be up and away. The spring fret, I suppose; the Red Gods and their
medicine. And if only Dick didn't insist on working his head off and
getting tied down with projects! Do you know, in all the years of our
marriage, the only really serious rival I have ever had has been this
ranch. He's pretty faithful, and the ranch _is_ his first love.
He had it all planned and started before he ever met me or knew I
existed."
"Here, let us try this together," Graham said abruptly, placing the
song on the rack before her.
"Oh, but it's the 'Gypsy Trail,'" she protested. "It will only make my
mood worse." And she hummed:
"'Follow the Romany patteran
West to the sinking sun,
Till the junk sails lift through the homeless drift,
And the East and the West are one.'
"What is the Romany patteran?" she broke off to ask. "I've always
thought of it as patter, or patois, the Gypsy patois, and somehow it
strikes me as absurd to follow a language over the world--a sort of
philological excursion."
"In a way the patteran is speech," he answered. "But it always says
one thing: 'This way I have passed.' Two sprigs, crossed in certain
ways and left upon the trail, compose the patteran. But they must
always be of different trees or shrubs. Thus, on the ranch here, a
patteran could be made of manzanita and madrono, of oak and spruce, of
buckeye and alder, of redwood and laurel, of huckleberry and lilac. It
is a sign of Gypsy comrade to Gypsy comrade, of Gypsy lover to Gypsy
lover." And he hummed:
"'Back to the road again, again,
Out of a clear sea track;
Follow the cross of the Gypsy trail,
Over the world and back.'"
She nodded comprehension, looked for a moment with troubled eyes down
the long room to the card-players, caught herself in her momentary
absentness, and said quickly:
"Heaven knows there's a lot of Gypsy in some of us. I have more than
full share. In spite of his bucolic proclivities, Dick is a born
Gypsy. And from what he has told of you, you are hopelessly one."
"After all, the white man is the real Gypsy, the king Gypsy," Graham
propounded. "He has wandered wider, wilder, and with less equipment,
than any Gypsy. The Gypsy has followed in his trails, but never made
trail for him.--Come; let us try it."
And as they sang the reckless words to their merry, careless lilt, he
looked down at her and wondered--wondered at her--at himself. This
was no place for him by this woman's side, under her husband's roof-
tree. Yet here he was, and he should have gone days before. After the
years he was just getting acquainted with himself. This was
enchantment, madness. He should tear himself away at once. He had
known enchantments and madnesses before, and had torn himself away.
Had he softened with the years? he questioned himself. Or was this a
profounder madness than he had experienced? This meant the violation
of dear things--things so dear, so jealously cherished and guarded in
his secret life, that never yet had they suffered violation.
And still he did not tear himself away. He stood there beside her,
looking down on her brown crown of hair glinting gold and bronze and
bewitchingly curling into tendrils above her ears, singing a song that
was fire to him--that must be fire to her, she being what she was and
feeling what she had already, in flashes, half-unwittingly, hinted to
him.
She is a witch, and her voice is not the least of her witchery, he
thought, as _her_ voice, so richly a woman's voice, so
essentially her voice in contradistinction to all women's voices in
the world, sang and throbbed in his ear. And he knew, beyond shade of
doubt, that she felt some touch of this madness that afflicted him;
that she sensed, as he sensed, that the man and the woman were met.
They thrilled together as they sang, and the thought and the sure
knowledge of it added fuel to his own madness till his voice warmed
unconsciously to the daring of the last lines, as, voices and thrills
blending, they sang:
"'The wild hawk to the wind-swept sky,
The deer to the wholesome wold,
And the heart of a man to the heart of a maid
As it was in the days of old--
The heart of a man to the heart of a maid,
Light of my tents be fleet,
Morning waits at the end of the world,
And the world is all at our feet.'"
He looked for her to look up as the last notes died away, but she
remained quiet a moment, her eyes bent on the keys. And then the face
that was turned to his was the face of the Little Lady of the Big
House, the mouth smiling mischievously, the eyes filled with roguery,
as she said:
"Let us go and devil Dick--he's losing. I've never seen him lose his
temper at cards, but he gets ridiculously blue after a long siege of
losing.
"And he does love gambling," she continued, as she led the way to the
tables. "It's one of his modes of relaxing. It does him good. About
once or twice a year, if it's a good poker game, he'll sit in all
night to it and play to the blue sky if they take off the limit." _
Read next: CHAPTER 18
Read previous: CHAPTER 16
Table of content of Little Lady of the Big House
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
