A PORTRAIT
Though she had made him tingle with an impulse to flee from her, he was
at the edge of the east bench early the next afternoon. He might see her
from a distance. If she came close upon him--well, it was worth risking;
he had a good horse. Her eyes were the best of her he thought, big gray
things under black brows, with a dark ring, well defined, about the
iris. He had seen no such eyes before. And how they lighted her face
when she spoke. Her face needed lighting, he thought. It was pale under
the dark hair--her hair stopped short of being black, and was
lusterless--with only a bit of scared pink in her cheeks, after that
ride of the day before. He thought of her hands, too. They were the
right hands for her, long, slender, and strong, he did not doubt, under
a tricky look of being delicate. It was not possible that they could
ever talk together again so easily. He could not make that seem true,
but he could look at her. He had hoped she would promise to come again,
but they had parted abruptly the afternoon before. Riding back with her,
as they breasted the last slope leading to the ranch, he had rejoiced
boldly at the chance that had led her up the lake trail that morning.
Then Beulah Pierce had hailed them from his station at the bars, hailed
them in a voice built to admirable carrying power by many cattle
drives. His speech began, "Didn't I _tell_ you where that upper trail
would----"
Whereupon the lady turned to dismiss her escort rather curtly.
"Thank you for riding back with me. I shall not trouble you any
further." And he, staring suddenly at her with the wild deer's eyes
again, had fled over the back trail.
He thought if there had been more time she might have said, "I will come
again soon--perhaps to-morrow." He liked to think she might have said
that, but he could not give it much reality.
He sprawled easily in the saddle, leaning his crossed arms on the pommel
and gazing out over the sun-shot valley to the group of buildings and
corrals at Bar-7. At least she rode somewhere every afternoon, and he
would see her leave. If she turned down the valley road or up the
canyon--well, that emergency could be met. He thought of speeches to make
it plain that he had not followed her, daring to approach her in his
mind, but knowing well that he would probably hide at sight of her.
A half hour he waited so, beholding visions of their accidental meeting.
Then his pulses raced. He saw the stocky-barreled Cooney led from the
corral to the front of the house by Red Phinney. He could almost discern
the Sabbath finery of Red across that crystal mile--for this was the
breathing day of the week, when faces were rasped cruelly by indifferent
razors, and fine raiment was donned, black trousers and gay, clean
shirts and neckerchiefs of flaming silk.
He could not see her mount. The ranch house hid that spectacle. But she
rode into view presently, putting Cooney first to his little fox trot
and then to a lope, as the road wound among the willows.
He straightened in the saddle as she reached the creek. He was eager to
retreat, yet feared to have his cowardice detected. And when Cooney
halted midway of the stream, pawing its rocky bed and making a pretense
of thirst, the woman looked up and saw her watcher on the trail. She
waved the gauntleted hand that held her quirt, and he found himself
holding his hat in his hand with an affectation of ease. Then each
laughed, and, though neither could hear the other, it was as if they had
laughed together in some little flurry of understanding. He could still
pretend to have happened there at that moment, he reflected. And this
brought him courage as he saw her give Cooney his way where the trail
branched. When the little horse had carried her to the summit and stood
in panting gratitude, the waiting youth evolved a splendid plan for
hiding his fright. He dismounted and forced himself to go coolly and
take her hand. Perhaps it was as well that he had not trusted himself to
remain in the saddle at that first moment. But when the thing was really
over he no longer made a secret of his delight at her coming. His first
anxious look at her face had shown him the cordial friendliness of the
preceding day. She was amused by him, he could see that, and did not
resent it; but she was kind, and in his joy at this he babbled, at
first, with little coherence.
"I rode right over here to make sure I would see you," he began, "and
then if you rode down the valley, or up, I was going to loaf along and
find you by accident, and pretend I was hunting a colt. I was going to
be afraid the mountain lions had got it." He laughed immoderately at
this joke. "And while I waited for you I kept trying to think how fine
it would have sounded last night if you had said, 'I think I shall go
over and look at your place again to-morrow.' I couldn't make your voice
sound true, though. It's a good thing we needn't try to paint voices."
They were riding together over the first stretch of meadow. It seemed to
have been agreed without words that they should ride to the lake cabin.
"To paint voices?" she queried.
"Voices, yes; how could yours be painted? It couldn't. You'll see that.
I thought of a jumble of things--wine and velvet, for instance; some
kind of rich, golden wine and purple velvet, and then, warm flickers of
light in a darkened room, and a big bronze bell struck with something
soft that would muffle it and yet make everything about it tremble. You
see, don't you?" he concluded with a questioning look of deep
seriousness.
His own voice was low and eager, with its undernote of wistfulness.
Already he had renewed upon her that companionable charm which she had
felt the day before, a charm compounded of half-shy directness, of
flashes of self-forgetfulness, of quick-trusting comradeship. She
rejected a cant phrase of humorous disclaimer that habit brought to her
lips. It would puzzle or affront his forthrightness.
"Very well, we'll agree that my voice can't be painted," she said at
last. "So let us talk of you."
"I guess I should like that pretty well," he answered after a moment's
pondering. "I don't believe I've ever talked much; but now I feel as if
I could tire you out, talking as we did yesterday. Queer, wasn't it?"
He fell silent, however, when the trail narrowed to climb the long
ridge, as if the acknowledgment of his desire to speak had somehow
quenched it. She fell in ahead, half turning in her saddle to address
him from time to time, but he would talk only about things of the
moment. In a marshy spot at the edge of the meadow he pointed out a bear
wallow, and farther on a deer lick. "It's a sulphur spring," he
exclaimed, "and deer come from miles around to drink there."
"Do you shoot them?" she asked.
"We always have fresh meat when we need. Ben Crider says he won't let a
deer come up and bite him without trying to defend himself."
"It's like murder, isn't it?"
"Well, I never murdered anyone myself, but I hit the first deer I ever
shot at, and I felt as if I'd lain in wait at a street corner and killed
a schoolboy on his way home. But I missed the next three or four, and
that made me blood-thirsty. I guess if you carried that feeling back far
enough a man could go out and shoot his little sister if he'd had to
still-hunt her over rough ground all day, and especially if he'd missed
two or three cousins or an uncle in the meantime. I think that would
raise the savage in him enough."
They were skirting the lake now, a glinting oval of sapphire in its
setting of granite. Beyond this they rode through the thinned
timber--where Cooney was dissuaded, not without effort, from pursuing
his ancient charge, and emerged into the glare of the clearing.
As they dismounted at the door of the cabin a melancholy of minor chords
from a guitar came to their ears, and a voice, nasal, but vibrant with
emotion, sang the final couplet of what had too plainly been a ballad of
pathos:
"While they were honeymooning in a mansion on the hill,
Kind friends were laying Nellie out behind the mill."
"That's one of Ben's best songs," said Ewing, with so genuine a gravity
that he stifled quite another emotion in the lady as she caught his
look.
"Indeed! I must hear him sing more," she managed with some difficulty.
The sorrowful one arose as they entered, hastily thrusting aside his
guitar as might an assassin have cast away his weapon. His face was
shaven to a bitter degree; in spots it was scarified. But the drooping
lines of woe unutterable were still there in opposition to his Sabbath
finery--a spreading blue-satin cravat, lighted by a stone of impressive
bulk, elegant black trousers, and suspenders of red silk embroidered
with pansies and a running vine of green. He greeted the visitor as one
who would say, "Yes, it's a sad affair--wholly unexpected," and, cocking
an eye of long-suffering negation on Ewing, he went out to the horses.
As they entered the studio Mrs. Laithe saw that the easel had been
wheeled into the light from the big window and that a woman's portrait
had been placed upon it. Had Ewing looked at her on the instant he might
have detected that her face seemed to ripple under some wind of emotion.
But his own eyes had been on the portrait.
"That's my mother," he said, unconsciously hushing his voice.
"I should have known it," she answered, with a kind of spurious
animation. "The face is so much like yours. It is a face one seems to
have known before, one of those elusive resemblances that haunt the
mind. It is well done." She ended the speech glibly enough.
"She was beautiful. My father did it. He had that trick of color, as you
call it, or he could never have painted her. She was so slight, but she
had color. And she was quick and fiery. I used to see her rage when I
was very small. I believed there were coals in her eyes, and that
something blew on them inside to make them blaze. I wouldn't know what
it was about, only that it wasn't us she raged at--not my father or me.
I could go up and catch her hand even when she frightened me. And
sometimes, after a while, my father would get excited, too. He was
slower to take fire, but he burned longer. And at last she would become
afraid and grow quiet herself and try to soothe him. I never could tell
what they were at war with."
They looked in silence at the vivid young face on the canvas, a thin,
daring, eager face, a face of delicate features, but strong in a perfect
balance. The eyes were darkly alive.
"You were young when she died?" the woman asked at last.
"Too young to understand. I was eight, I think. There was a lot I shall
never understand. Sometimes my father would tell me about their life
here in the West, but never of the time before they came here. It always
seemed to me that either he or she had quarreled with their people. They
were poor when they came here. We lived in Leadville when I first
remember. My mother sang in a church choir and made a little money and
nights--you'll think this queer--my father played a piano in a dance
hall. They had to live. Days, he painted. He had studied abroad in Paris
and Munich, but he wasn't selling his pictures then. It took him years
to do much of that. Sometimes they were hungry, though I didn't know
it." He paused, overwhelmed by a sudden realization that he was talking
much.
"Tell me more," she said very quietly. "I wish to hear the rest."
"Well, at the last my mother was in bed a long time, and my father
worked hard to get things for her, things she must have. But one night
she died--it was a cold night in winter. He and I were alone with her.
I'll not soon forget that. I sat up on the cot where I slept and saw my
father sitting on the bed looking down at my mother. They were both
still, and he wouldn't answer or turn his head when I spoke. Then I
cried, for it was cold in the little cabin and my father's stillness
scared me. But I don't think he heard me crying. He kept looking down at
my mother's face, even when I called to him as loud as I could. Then I
was afraid to see him that way any longer, so I pulled the blankets over
my head and I must have cried myself to sleep.
"He was sitting the same way when I woke in the morning, still looking
at my mother's face. Even when the people came to take her away he kept
silent--and while they put her in the ground in a great, snowy field
with little short waves all over it. And when we were back in the cabin
not a word could I get from him, nor a look. He just sat on the bed
again, looking at her pillow.
"In the evening some one brought a letter. I lighted a candle and took
this letter to him, crowding it into his hand. I wanted him to notice
me. I saw him study the envelope, then tear it open and look at a little
slip of green paper that fell out. It was money, you understand, for
pictures he had sent to New York. I knew this at once. I'd heard them
talk of its coming and of wonderful things they'd do with it when it
did come. I was glad in an instant, for I thought that now we could get
my mother back out of the ground. I was sure we could when he held the
green slip close to the candle and began to laugh. It wasn't the way he
usually laughed, it was louder and longer, but it was the first sound
I'd heard from him, and it made me happy. I began to laugh myself as
loud as I could, and danced before him, and his laugh went still higher
at that. I ran for my jacket and mittens and cap. I wanted him to stop
laughing and hurry along. I pulled his arm and he stopped laughing and
looked down at me. I shouted 'Hurry--let's hurry and bring her back--let
me carry the money!' He caught my shoulder and looked so astonished,
then he burst into that loud laugh again, after he'd made me say it
over. I ran for his overcoat, too, but when I came with it I saw he
wasn't laughing at all. He was crying, and it was so much like his laugh
that I hadn't noticed the change."
He had kept his eyes on the portrait while he spoke. He stopped abruptly
now, turning to the listening woman, searching her face with new signs
of confusion.
"I--I didn't know I was telling you all that."
She did not answer at once.
"And you came here after that?" she said at last.
"Yes; my father found this place. He wanted to be alone. I think he
began to die when my mother went. He couldn't live without her. He
taught me what he could, about books and pictures, but I couldn't have
been much to him. I think it hurt him that I looked like her--he said I
looked like her. He worked on that portrait to the very last, even on
the morning of the day he died."
"What was your father's name?"
"Gilbert Denham Ewing. I was named for him."
"And your mother's name before marriage was----"
"I'm ashamed that I never knew. It must have been spoken often, but I
was so young; it never stayed in my mind. And a little while before he
died my father burned all his letters and papers. I've wondered about
their life long ago before I came, but I think my father meant me not to
know. He had some reason."
"I am glad you have told me all you did know," she said.
"But you have made _me_ glad," he assured her, returning to his livelier
manner.
"Your mother's first name"--she asked--"what did your father call her?"
"Oh, that--Katharine. He called her Kitty."
"Kitty!" She repeated it after him, softly, as if she spoke it in
compassion to the portrait.
"But see," he continued, "it's late. Stay and eat with us and I'll take
you back by moonlight. I've ordered a fine, big, silver moon to be set
up in the sky at seven, and Ben is already getting supper."
He pulled aside the blanket portiere, and through the doorway she could
see the saturnine one--a man fashioned for tragedies, for deeds of
desperate hazard--incongruously busied with a pan of soda biscuits and a
hissing broiler.
When they rode back to Bar-7 the hills were struck to silver by the
moon. They were companionably silent for most of the ride, though the
youth from time to time, when the trail narrowed to put him in the rear,
crooned stray bits of a song with which Ben Crider had favored them
while he prepared the evening meal. The lines Mrs Laithe remembered
were:
"Take back your gold, for gold it cannot buy me;
Make me your wife, 'tis all I ask of you."
When they parted she said, "You must think about leaving here. It's time
you rode out into the world. I think my brother will be back from his
cattle-driving trip to-morrow, and I mean to bring him to see your
pictures very soon. Perhaps he will suggest something for you."
"This moonlight does such wonderful things to your face," he remarked.
"Good night! I'm sorry you have so far to go."
"It isn't far enough," he answered, still searching her face. "Not half
far enough--I have so much thinking--so much thinking to do."