THOSE GIRLS OF GEORGE'S
The Alstons were finishing dinner. From over the table, set with the
glass and silver that George Alston had bought when he came down from
Virginia City, the high, hard light of the chandelier fell on the three
females who made up the family. It was devastating to Aunt Ellen
Tisdale's gnarled old visage--she was over seventy and for several years
now had given up all tiresome thought processes--but the girls were so
smoothly skinned and firmly modeled that it only served to bring out the
rounded freshness of their youthful faces.
The Alstons were conservative, clung to the ways of their parents. This
was partly due to inheritance--mother and father were New Englanders--and
partly to a reserved quality, a timid shyness, that marked Lorry who, as
Aunt Ellen ceased to exert her thought processes and relapsed into a
peaceful torpor, had assumed the reins of government. They conformed to
none of those innovations which had come from a freer intercourse with
the sophisticated East. The house remained as it had been in their
mother's lifetime, the furniture was the same and stood in the same
places, the table knew no modern enhancement of its solidly handsome
fittings. Fong, the Chinese cook--he had been with George Alston before
he married--ruled the kitchen and the two "second boys." No women
servants were employed; women servants had not been a feature of domestic
life in Bonanza days.
That was why the house was lit by chandeliers instead of lamps, that was
why dinner was at half past six instead of seven, that was why George
Alston's daughters had rather "dropped out." They would not move with the
times, they would not be brought up to date. Friends of their mother's
had tried to do it, rustled into the long drawing-room and masterfully
attempted to assist and direct. But they had found Lorry unresponsive,
listening but showing no desire to profit by the chance. They asked her
to their houses--replenished, modern, object lessons to rich young
girls--and hinted at a return of hospitalities. It had not been a
success. She was disappointing, no snap, no go to her; the young men who
sat beside her at dinner were bored, and the house on Pine Street had not
opened its doors in reciprocal welcome. By the time she was twenty they
shrugged their shoulders and gave her up--exactly like Minnie, only
Minnie had always had George to push her along.
As the women friends of Minnie did their duty, the men friends of
George--guardians of the estate--did theirs. They saw to it that the
investments were gilt-edged, and the great ranch in Mexico that George
had bought a few years before his death was run on a paying basis. At
intervals they asked their wives with sudden fierceness if they had
called on "those girls of George's," and the wives, who had forgotten all
about it, looked pained and wanted to know the reason for such an
unnecessary question. Within the week, impelled by a secret sense of
guilt, the ladies called and in due course Lorry returned the visits. She
suffered acutely in doing so, could think of nothing to say, was
painfully conscious of her own dullness and the critical glances that
wandered over her best clothes.
But she did not give much thought to herself. That she lacked charm, was
the kind to be overlooked and left in corners, did not trouble her.
Since her earliest memories--since the day Chrystie was born and her
mother had died--she had had other people and other claims on her mind.
Her first vivid recollection--terrible and ineffaceable--was of her
father that day, catching her to him and sobbing with his face pressed
against her baby shoulder. It seemed as if the impression made then had
extended all through her life, turned her into a creature of poignant
sympathies and an unassuagable longing to console and compensate. She had
not been able to do that for him, but she had been able to love--break
her box of ointment at his feet.
From that day the little child became the companion of the elderly man,
her soft youth was molded to suit his saddened age, her deepest desire
was a meeting of his wishes. Chrystie, whose birth had killed her
mother, became their mutual joy, their shared passion. Chrystie-worship
was inaugurated by the side of the blue and white bassinet, the nursery
was a shrine, the blooming baby an idol installed for their devotion.
When George Alston died, Lorry, thirteen years old, had dedicated
herself to the service, held herself committed to a continuance of the
rites. He had left her Chrystie and she would fulfill the trust even as
he would have wished.
Probably it was this enveloping idolatry that had made Christie so unlike
parents and sister. She was neither retiring nor serious, but social and
pleasure-loving, ready to dance through life as irresponsibly enjoying as
a mote in a sunbeam. And now Lorry had wakened to the perplexed
realization that it was her affair to provide the sunbeam and she did not
know how to do it. They were rich, they had a fine house, but nothing
ever happened there and it was evident that Chrystie wanted things to
happen. It was a situation which Lorry had not foreseen and before which
she quailed, feeling herself inadequate. That was why, at twenty-three, a
little line had formed between her eyebrows and her glance dwelt
anxiously on Chrystie as an obligation--her great obligation--that she
was not discharging worthily.
The glare of the chandelier revealed the girls as singularly
unlike--Lorry--her full name was Loretta--was slender and small with
nut-brown hair and a pale, pure skin. The richest note of color in her
face was the rose of her lips, clearly outlined and smoothly pink. She
had "thrown back" to her New England forbears. On the elm-shaded
streets of Vermont villages one often sees such girls, fragile, finely
feminine, with no noticeable points except a delicate grace and
serenely honest eyes.
Chrystie was all California's--tall, broad-shouldered, promising future
opulence, her skin a warm cream deepening to shades of coral, her hair a
blonde cloud, hanging misty round her brows. She was as unsubtle as a
chromo, as fragrantly fresh as a newly wakened baby. Her hands, large,
plump, with flexible broad-tipped fingers, were ivory-colored and
satin-textured, and her teeth, narrow and slightly overlapping, would go
down to the grave with her if she lived to be eighty. Two months before
she had passed her eighteenth birthday and was now of age and in
possession of more money than she knew how to spend. She was easily
amused, overflowing with good nature and good spirits as a healthy puppy,
but owing to her sheltered environment and slight contact with the world
was, like her sister, shy with strangers.
The meal was drawing to its end when the doorbell rang.
"A visitor," said Chrystie, lifting her head like a young stag. Then she
addressed the waiting Chinaman, "Lee, let Fong open the door, I want
more coffee."
Lee went to fetch the coffee and direct Fong. Everybody in the house
always did what Chrystie said.
Aunt Ellen laid her old, full-veined hand on the table and pushed her
chair back.
"Maybe it isn't a visitor," she said, looking tentatively at Lorry--she
hated visitors, for she had to sit up. "Do you expect someone?"
Lorry shook her head. She rarely expected anyone; evening callers were
generally school friends of Chrystie's.
Fong, muttering, was heard to pass from the kitchen.
"I do hope," said Christie, "if it's some horrible bore Fong'll have
sense enough to shut them in the reception room and give us a chance
to escape."
Chrystie, like Aunt Ellen, was fond of going to bed early. She had tried
to instruct Fong in an understanding of this, but Fong, having been
trained in the hospitable ways of the past, could not be deflected into
more modern channels.
In his spotless white, his pigtail wound round his head, his feet in
thick-soled Chinese slippers, he passed up the hall to the front door.
Another chandelier hung there but in this only one burner was lit. At
five in winter and at six in summer Fong lit this as he had done for the
last twenty-four years. No one, no matter what the argument, could make
him light it any earlier, any later, or turn the cock at a lesser or
greater angle.
The visitor was Mark Burrage, and seeing this Fong broke into smiles and
friendly greeting:
"Good evening, Mist Bullage--Glad see you, Mist Bullage. Fine night,
Mist Bullage."
Fong was an old man--just how old nobody knew. For thirty-five years he
had served the Alstons, had been George Alston's China boy in Virginia
City, and then followed him, faithful, silent, unquestioning to San
Francisco. There he had been the factotum of his "boss's" bachelor
establishment, and seen him through his brief period of married
happiness. On the day when Minnie Alston's coffin had passed through the
front door, he had carefully swept up the flower petals from the parlor
carpet, his brown face inscrutable, his heart bleeding for his boss.
Now his devotion was centered on the girls; "Miss Lolly and Miss Clist,"
he called them. He ruled them and looked out for their welfare--refused
to buy canvasbacks till they fell to the price he thought proper,
economized on the kitchen gas, gave them costly presents on the New Year,
and inquired into the character of every full-grown male who crossed
their threshold.
Mark Burrage he liked, found out about him through the secret channels of
information that make Chinatown one of the finest detective bureaus in
the land, and set the seal of his approval on the young man's visits. He
would no more have shown him into the reception room and gone to see if
"Miss Lolly and Miss Clist" were receiving, than he would have permitted
them to change the dinner hour.
"You bin away, Mist Bullage," he said, placing the card the young man
gave him on the hall table--cards were only presented in the case of
strangers.
"How did you know that?" Mark asked, surprised.
Fong's face suggested intense, almost childish amusement.
"I dunno--I hear some place--I forget."
"I've been up in Sacramento County with my people--maybe Crowder
told you."
"Maybe--I not good memly, I get heap old man." He made a move for the
parlor door, his face wrinkled with his innocent grin. "Miss Lolly and
Miss Clist here; awful glad see you," and he threw the door open.
Mark took a deep breath and strode forward, pulling his cuffs over his
hands, which at that moment seemed to him to emerge from his sleeves
large and unlovely as two hams. The place always abashed him, its sober
air of wealth, its effortless refinement, its dainty feminine atmosphere.
No brutal male presence--one never thought of Chinese servants as
men--seemed ever to have disturbed with a recurring, habitual foot its
almost cloistral quietude. Now with memories of his own home fresh in his
mind, dinner in the kitchen, the soiled tablecloth, the sizzling pans on
the stove, he felt he had no place there and was an impostor. Their
greeting increased his discomfort. They were so kind, so hospitable,
making him come into the dining room and take a cup of coffee. It was an
uprush of that angry loyalty, that determination to hold close to his
own, which made him say as soon as he was seated,
"I've been home for two weeks."
"Home?" said Lorry gently.
And, "Where _is_ your home?" came from Aunt Ellen, as if she had just
recognized the fact that he must have one somewhere but had never thought
about it before.
The sound of his voice, gruff as a day laborer's after these flute-sweet
tones, increased his embarrassment. Nevertheless he determined that he
would tell them about his home.
"Up in Sacramento County not far from the tules. My father's a rancher,
has a little bit of land there."
"Yes, Charlie Crowder told us," said Lorry. She didn't seem to notice
the "little bit of land," it was just as if he'd said four or five
thousand acres and described a balconied house with striped awnings and
cushioned chairs.
He cast a glance of gratitude toward her, met her eyes and dropped his
own to his cup. There they encountered his hand, holding the coffee
spoon, the little finger standing out from the others in a tricksy curve.
With an inward curse he straightened it, sudden red dyeing his face to
the temples. He began to hate himself and didn't know how to go on.
Chrystie unexpectedly came to the rescue.
"Sacramento County," she exclaimed with sudden animation, "not far from
the tules! There was a holdup round there two or three weeks ago. I read
it in the papers."
Aunt Ellen moved restlessly. She wanted to get to her chair in the
drawing-room.
"Holdup?" she murmured. "They're always having holdups somewhere."
"Not like this," said Chrystie. "It was a good one--Knapp and
Garland--and they shot Wells Fargo's messenger."
"It was while I was there," said Mark, "up toward the foothills above
our ranch."
The young ladies were immensely interested. They wanted to hear all about
it and moved into the parlor to be settled and comfortable. They tried to
make Mark sit in a massive, gold-trimmed armchair, but he had his wits
about him by this time and took a humbler seat beside Lorry. Aunt Ellen
sank into her rocker with a sigh of achievement and Chrystie perched on
the piano stool. Then he told them the story, forgetting his bashfulness
under the spell of their attentive eyes.
"Why can't they catch them," said Chrystie, "if they know their names?"
He couldn't help laughing at that.
"Why, of course they have other names," Lorry explained. "They don't go
about as Knapp and Garland."
"But people must see them," Chrystie insisted, "somebody must know what
they look like."
Mark had to straighten it out for her.
"Their friends do--ranchers up in the hills, and their pals in the
towns. But the sheriffs and the general public don't. When they're out
for business they cover their faces, tie handkerchiefs or gunny sacks
round them."
Chrystie shuddered delightedly.
"How awful they must be! I'd love to be held up just to see them."
Mark and Lorry looked at one another and smiled, as age and experience
smile at the artlessness of youth. It was an interchange of mutual
understanding, a flash of closer intimacy, and as such lifted the young
man to sudden heights.
"Where do they put the money?" said Aunt Ellen, her thought
processes, under the unusual stimulus of a conversation on bandits,
stirred to energy.
"That's what we'd like to know, Mrs. Tisdale. They have a cache somewhere
but nobody's been able to find it. I saw the sheriff before I left and
_he_ thinks it's up in the hills among the chaparral."
"Is the messenger dead?" asked Lorry.
"Oh, no--he's getting on all right. They don't shoot to kill, just put
him out of business for the time being."
"That's merciful," Aunt Ellen announced in a sleepy voice.
Chrystie, finding no more delicious shudders in the subject, twirled
round on the stool and began softly picking out notes on the piano. For a
space Mark and Lorry talked--it was about the ranch near the
tules--rather dull as it came to Chrystie through her picking. The young
man kept looking at Lorry's face, then dropping his glance to the floor,
abashed before the gentle attention of her eyes, fearful his own might
say too much. He thought it was just her sweetness that made her ask
about his people, but everything about Mark Burrage interested her. Had
he guessed it he would have been as much surprised as she had she known
that he thought her beautiful.
Presently Chrystie's notes took form and became a tinkling tune. She
tried it over once then whirled round on the stool.
"There--I've got it! Listen. Isn't it just like it, Lorry?"
Lorry immediately ceased talking and listened while the tune ran a
halting course through several bars.
"Like what?" she said. "I don't know what it's meant to be."
"Oh!" Chrystie groaned, then shook her head at Mark. "Trust your
relations to take down your pride. Why, it's the Castanet song from 'The
Zingara!' Tum-tum-tum, tum-tum-tum," and she began swaying her body in
time, humming an air and banging out the accompaniment, "'With my
castanets, with my castanets.' That's exactly the way it goes only I
don't know the words." She whirled again to Mark. "It's the most
_delicious_ thing! Have you seen it?"
He hadn't, and Chrystie sank together on the stool in reproachful
surprise.
"Oh, Mr. Burrage, you _must_ go. Don't lose a minute, this very night."
Lorry breathed an embarrassed "Chrystie!"
"I didn't mean _that_ and he knows it. I mean the soonest night _after_
tonight. We went yesterday and even Aunt Ellen loved it. Didn't you,
Aunt Ellen?"
Aunt Ellen, startled from surreptitious slumber, gave an unnaturally
loud assent to which Chrystie paid no attention.
"It's the new opera at the Albion and Pancha Lopez is--" She threw out
her hands and looked at the ceiling, words inadequate.
"She's never done anything so good before," Lorry said.
"All in red and orange, and coins everywhere. Orange stockings and cute
little red slippers, and two long braids of black hair. Oh, down to
there," Chrystie thrust out her foot, her skirt drawn close over a
stalwart leg, on which, just above the knee, she laid her finger tips.
Her eyes on Mark were as unconscious as a baby's. "I don't think it's all
her own, it's too long--I'll ask Charlie Crowder."
Aunt Ellen had not gone off again and to prove it said,
"How would he know?"
"Well he'd see it, wouldn't he? He'd see it when she took off her hat,
all wound round her head, yards and yards of it. No, it's false, it was
pinned on under that little cap thing. And after the second act when she
came on to bow she carried a bunch of flowers--oh, that big," her arms
outlined a wide ellipse, "the same colors as her dress, red carnations
and some sort of yellowish flower I couldn't see plainly."
Mark, seeing some comment was expected of him, hazarded a safe,
"You don't say!"
"And just as she was going off"--Lorry took it up now--"she looked at
someone in a box and smiled and--"
But Chrystie couldn't bear it. She leaned toward her sister imploringly.
"Now, Lorry, let me tell that--you _know_ I noticed it first." Then to
Mark, "She was close to the side where they go off and I was looking at
her through the glasses, and I saw her just as plain give a sort of quick
look into the box and then smile and point to the flowers. It was as if
she said to the person in there, 'You see, I've got them.'"
"Who was in the box?"
Chrystie bounced exuberantly on the stool.
"That's the joke. None of us could see. Whoever he was he was far back,
out of sight. It was awfully exciting to me for I simply adore Pancha
Lopez and Charlie Crowder, who knows her so well, says she hasn't an
admirer of any kind."
Aunt Ellen came to the surface with,
"Perhaps she's going to get one now."
And Lorry added,
"I hope, if she is, he'll be somebody nice. Mr. Crowder says she's had
such a hard life and been so fine and brave all along."
Soon after that Mark left. There had been a time when the first move for
departure was as trying as the ordeal of entrance, but he had got beyond
that. Tonight he felt that he did it in quite an easy nonchalant way, the
ladies, true to a gracious tradition, trailing after him into the hall.
It was there that an unexpected blow fell; Chrystie, the _enfant
terrible, _delivered it. Gliding about to the hummed refrain of the
Castanet song her eye fell on his card. She picked it up and read
it:
"Mark D.L. Burrage. What does D.L. stand for?"
It was Mark's habit, when this was asked, to square his shoulders, look
the questioner in the eye, and say calmly, "Daniel Lawrence."
But now that fierce loyalty to his own, that chafed pride, that angry
rebellion which this house and these girls roused in him, made him
savagely truthful. A dark mahogany-red stained his face to the forehead
and he looked at Chrystie with a lowering challenge.
"It stands for de Lafayette."
"De Lafayette!" she stared, amazed.
"Yes. My given name is Marquis de Lafayette."
There was a moment's pause. He saw Chrystie's face, blank, taking it in,
then terrible rising questions began to show in her eyes. He went on,
glaringly hostile, projecting his words at her as if she was a target and
they were missiles:
"My mother liked the name. She thought it was unusual. It was she who
gave it to me."
Chrystie's lips opened on a comment, also on laughter. He could see both
coming and he braced himself, then Lorry's voice suddenly rose, quiet,
unastonished, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to have
such a name:
"What a fine thing for her to do! She admired Lafayette and called you
after him. I think it was splendid of her."
Outside, in the darkness of the street, he could almost have wept, in
rage with himself, in the smart of her kindness.
He wished his mother had been there, in that hall, in her old clothes. He
would have hugged her to him, protested that his name was the crowning
glory of his life. He would have liked to face them down, show them his
pride in her, let them hear him tell her that whatever she had done was
in his opinion right.
The place where he lived was not far, a lodging house on one of the steep
streets that sloped to the city's hollow. As he swung down the hills he
thought of the hour of work he had promised himself, looked forward to
with relish. Now his enthusiasm was gone, extinguished like a spark
trodden out by a haughty foot. All he had done looked suddenly trivial,
his rise from a farm hand a petty achievement, he himself a rough,
uncultured boor. What right had he at the house of Lorry Alston, breaking
himself against unsurmountable barriers? In the beginning he had only
thought to enthrone her as an ideal, lovely, remote, unaspired to. She
would be a star fixed in his sky, object of his undesiring worship. But
it had not been that way. The star had not changed but he had ceased to
bow in contemplation--looked up, loved and longed.
The back wall of his dwelling rose above the trees and he saw the
darkling panes of his own windows. Soon his lamplight would glow through
them, and he would be in the armchair with his book and his pipe. The
picture brought back a surge of his conquering spirit. Nothing he had set
his hand to had beaten him yet. If he fought as he had fought for his
education, was fighting now for his place, he could fight up to her side.
There was no rival in sight; Crowder, who knew them well, had told him
so. He could put out all his energies, do more than man had ever done
before, climb, if not to her proud place, at least where he did not come
as a beggar to a queen. Then, on his feet, the future clearing before
him, he could go to her and try and win. He drew a deep breath and looked
up at the stars, remote as she had seemed that evening. The lift of his
passion swept him aloft on a wave of will and he murmured, "If she were
there among you, I'd try and get to her and carry her away in my arms."
Meantime he would not go to her house any more--at least not for a long
time. There was no good; he was not the man to sit round in parlors
looking and acting like a fool. He could only work, blaze the trail,
make the clearing, raise the homestead, and when it was ready go and
tell her so.