After breakfast Trennahan lay in a long chair on the verandah and smoked
undisturbed. Mrs. Yorba was busy, and Magdaléna sat up in her room,
longing to go down, but fearing to weary him. She recalled the early
hours with vivid pleasure. For the first time in her life she was almost
pleased with herself. She took out her writing materials; but her
beloved art would not hold her. She went to the window and unfastened
the shutter softly. Trennahan was not talking to himself nor even
walking up and down the hard boards below, but the aroma of his cigar
gave evidence that he was there. It mingled with the perfume of the pink
and white roses swarming over the roof of the verandah almost to her
window.
She experienced her first impulse to decorate herself, to gather a
handful of those roses and place them in her hair. Her aunt had never
been without that national adornment, worn with the grace of her slender
girlhood.
She stepped over the sill, catching her breath as the tin roof cracked
beneath her feet, but gathered the roses and returned to her mirror.
With the nimble fingers of her race she arranged the roses at one side
of her head, above and behind the ear. Certainly they were becoming. She
also discovered that she had her aunt's turn of the head, her graceful
way of raising her hand to her ear.
But it is so little, she thought with a sigh; if I could only have the
rest!
Her mind wandered back to the heroines of her aunt's tales. If she but
had the beauty of those wondrous girls, Trennahan would have taken fire
in the hour that he met her, as their caballeros had done. The thought
made her sigh again, not with a woman's bitterness,--she had lived too
little for that,--but with a girl's romantic sadness. Why had she been
defrauded of her birthright? She recalled something Colonel Belmont had
once said about "cross-breeding being death on beauty in nine cases out
of ten." Why could not her father have married another woman of his
race? She dismissed these reflections as unfilial and wicked, and
returned to her work; but it was only to bite the end of her pen-holder
and dream.
Meanwhile Trennahan fell asleep and dreamed that his Menlo house caught
fire one night and that all the maidens of his new acquaintance came in
a body to extinguish the flames. Miss Montgomery played a hose
considerably larger round than her neck, with indomitable energy and
persistence. Miss Brannan, in a dashing red cap and jacket, danced like
a bacchante on the roof, albeit manipulating large buckets of water.
Mrs. Washington was also there, and, swinging in a hammock, encouraged
the workers with her characteristic optimism expressed in picturesque
American. Magdaléna, in a suit of her father's old clothes, was handing
his books through the library window to Miss Folsom. Miss Geary was
scrambling up the ladder, a hose coiled about her like a python. The
leader of the company stood on the roof directly above the front door,
giving orders with imperious voice and gesture. But although the flames
leaped high about her, starting the leaves of a neighbouring tree into
sharp relief, he could not see her face.