came to pass that she decided to go, and that she pressed his hand, with
the grateful look that she had bestowed upon him when she had tried to
thank him for holding on to her father in the Joplin mine; and that
afterwards she stole away through the garden, and a negro man-servant
brought his horse around to the rear grounds and showed him a
bridle-path to the river; but these things were hazy. The vivid thing
was an imprecation that by and by took awful form, like a monster of the
mist, hissingly, from between his clenched teeth:
"_Damn Miss--Europe!_"
_Chapter Eight_
WHEN A GIRL FINDS HERSELF
Sally Madeira went to her own room early that Sunday night. It was a
large room, sheer and white, with its wall space broken here and there
by cool, calm etchings, cows knee-deep in clover, sunsets on small
rivers, old windmills, wheat fields in harvest, hills where the snow lay
thick. When she had lit her lamp a rosy light suffused the room through
the tinted globe. The pictures on the walls looked so tonefully tender,
intimate, in the soft glow, that the girl, noticing them for the
thousandth time, moved from one to another, admiring and loving them.
They were, in a way, sign-posts of her development. She had begun to buy
them when she had stopped working in colour with a man who had a famous
studio in New York. One day she had gone with the man to an exhibition
of oil paintings which were infused with a matchless poetry of colour.
"If I paint all my life am I ever going to be able to paint like that?"
she had asked of the man earnestly.
"No, my child, you are not," he had answered, quite as earnestly.
"I wonder why I should try to do something poorly that someone else can
do so well?" she had mused.
And then, because she had talent, and, finest of all, an exquisite
temperament in whose pulses the sense of colour beat in veritable tides
of joy, the man from the studio had encouraged her with warm words of
praise. "You will some day paint well enough to win a high place," he
had reminded her.
But she had stayed thoughtful, and a day or two later had talked to him
again.
"I don't believe, since I have thought it all out, that I can get what's
in life for me out of it in a high place," she had said, shy but eager.
Then, on that line, she had forged on to a swift and comprehensive
conclusion. "You have told me," she had continued to the studio man,
"that what I have in me for painting is not the real thing, and since I
have seen the real thing I know for myself that colour is too rich and
assertive, too apt to run away with one, for any but master hands to
use it. I feel that I don't want even to see poor colouring on canvas
any more. I shan't ever even have poor colour pictures around me. I can
get my colour stories outside. Inside, the stories shall all be told in
light and shadow. And I am not going to paint bad pictures myself any
more."
"Ah, but the work, the beautiful work!" cried the painter.
"Well, as for me, do you know, I've come to believe that my work is just
living--for a time anyhow."
"Well, then, the fame!" cried the painter.
"I don't seem to care for the fame."
It had gone much like that with her music. She had a fine voice, and her
New York teacher had told her over and over that she "must go on." She
had been pleased with his praise and had worked hard for a time. Then
she had gone to him, too, one day, open-eyed and inquiring.
"Go on to what?" she had asked.
"Why, to glory," the singer had said.
She had shaken her head, unconvinced. "I don't seem to care for the
glory," she had said. And beyond learning to use her voice well she
would not work with it. "It is not that I am lazy," she had protested to
the singer, "but I couldn't get what's in life for me out of it by
singing."
"What's in life for you?" queried the singer, interested, for the girl
was beautiful and rich and aspirant.
"Ah, I don't quite know yet," said the girl, the pretty pathos of youth
and waiting upon her, "but some day I shall find myself; then I shall
know."
All through her college days she had been looking for herself. When the
time had come that she had gone to Elsie Gossamer's house to visit, and
there had met men--college boys at first and later on men of a larger
world--she had still been looking for herself. But though in the
meantime she had learned how to meet men and how to treat them--capably,
Elsie Gossamer said--she had not found herself. During the past summer,
since her return from college, she had idled on here through a little
interim with her father, comfortable, dreamy, waiting, seeking. But she
had not found herself.
As she began to make ready for bed that Sunday night she had, suddenly
and subtly, a quiver of consciousness that the waiting and the seeking
were nearly over. Just how she knew it she could not have told, or just
what she meant by knowing it, or just what would happen because of
knowing it. Moving about the large room softly, her harmonious strength
and grace were revealed in the swing of her long lithe limbs, the reach
of her satiny brown arms, the breadth of her sweet smooth breast, the
straightness and firmness of her tall frame. Only a self-reliant girl
could have moved as she moved, a girl made self-reliant by exuberant
health and ideals and hope. When she stopped moving about and stood
before her mirror, her hand on the great rope of shining hair that hung
over her shoulder, her body assumed a rare natural poise, classically,
ancestrally beautiful, Grecian. By and by she roused from the little
reverie before the mirror, put out the light, and came over to the
window.
"Oh," she cried at once, "that was what was the matter with me, that was
why I felt that something was about to happen! It was the storm!"
Beyond the window a Missouri tempest was rising. The girl, responsive
as a reed to the wind, sat down in a low chair, the subtle quiver of
consciousness intensified within her, and watched the lightning that
began to play over the hills, and the rain that began to beat through
the trees. Strangely enough, as she sat there, in the flashes she could
see little, but in the dark--a warm, wind-blown, sweet-smelling
dark--she saw several things. For one thing, she saw that, most
probably, she would never again in her life spend an evening with a
sixteen-to-one congressman. It had been a very tiresome evening. For
another thing, she saw that she was not going to Europe. Her father
needed her; or if he didn't he ought to. For a third thing, she saw
that, in some way, she was going to have to make her father like Bruce
Steering again. Then she saw the fourth thing. There had not been a
flash for some minutes. Seeing that fourth thing, in the intense dark,
she gave a trembling sigh, put one of her hands on top of the other on
her breast and pushed, as though she were pushing her heart down. Then
presently the pressure of her hands relaxed, her head dropped down until
her chin touched her fingers, and a great flush that was like a charge
from something electric surged through her.
"Oh," she cried, "oh, is it you! Have you come!" It was a triumphant,
shy, thrilling greeting to something, something that she had been
waiting for, born for. The dark grew intenser, sweeter, warmer. She
lifted her arms and held them out yearningly toward the Tigmore hills,
half-leaning out the window, catching the rain on her eager young face,
in her shining hair, on her broad low breast. "I am so glad of it!" she
panted, in a singing whisper, "I am so glad----" A great sheet of
lightning unrolled across the Tigmore hills and held steadily
magnificent for a moment, revealing everything to everybody, so it
seemed to Sally Madeira. She crept into bed shaking, ecstatic, afraid.
Next morning she made her toilet away from the mirror as much as was
possible, not being quite ready to face her whole found self as yet. But
before she went downstairs she crossed to the window and looked out at
the tumbling Tigmore line, a kissing sigh on her lips.
When she reached the dining room she found that Madeira had not yet
come down, so she walked out into the garden, where she stood for a
little while by the vine-covered stump, her eyes closed, her little
straight nose in the air, the broad daylight beating down on her. Then
presently she opened her eyes determinedly. "Yes, I can stand it," she
said, as though she had been afraid that she couldn't, and looked
straight up into the rain of light over-head. "I can stand it, in the
daytime as in the dark, from now on forever."
In the air was an autumn mellowness that had not been there the day
before. It nipped, with a strong, winey flavour, as it went down. All
around her lay drifts of petals, rain-beaten roses, ragged lilies. The
storm had stolen the garden's glory. "To put it into my heart!" cried
the girl, in her all-conquering joy. "Oh, you Garden of Dreams, you!
See, my eyes are wide open, and this, _this_ is better than dreams!"
She went back to the house with her arms full of the very last roses.
"For now, I must go bring my father around," she said.
Madeira had had a bad night. He had not slept at all as far as he could
tell. For hours he had had to lie on his bed and face the dark, with
Bruce Grierson's letter under his pillow, licking out at his temples
like a tongue of flame. But he had not taken the letter away all night
long. "Let it burn," he had said. "Let it find out who's stronger, me or
it. That's my way." All night long he had made plans, with his face set
toward the dark. When he got to the dining room that morning he went to
the window and stood there waiting for Sally, revolving one of the
night's plans in his head, deciding with how much force to project it,
how to hit the mark patly with it. "For I won't have him here at my
house again," Madeira was telling himself there at the window. "God! I
_can't_ have him here." He caught at the vest pocket above his heart.
His teeth were chattering. His daughter, with the roses in her arms,
entered the room just then.
As long as she lived Sally Madeira never forgot the way the dining room
looked that morning, as she came into it from the Garden of Dreams: the
dull green wall spaces, broken by some of her beloved cool etchings, and
by great walnut panels that deepened and toned and strengthened the
room beautifully; the old walnut side-board that had been her mother's
mother's; in the centre of the room the heavy round table, unlaid,
snowy, waiting for her effective interference; Madeira, her big handsome
father, idling by the window, his fine physical maturity cut out
strongly against the light, his deep chest, his great height, his wide,
well-featured face, his good clothes, the adaptability with which he
wore them; and on beyond Madeira, outside the window, the satin green
foliage of the pet magnolia tree. It was all finely satisfying. She had
tried her hardest to kiss the foolish gladness out of her eyes and voice
into the roses in her hands, but things grew so increasingly pleasant
that all her endeavour went for nothing. As soon as her father saw her
and heard her, he said:
"Well, Honey-love, are you as happy as _that_?"
She put her roses into an old blue bowl and went over to him, and he sat
down in one of the big chairs by the window and drew her to his knee.
Then they fell into a caressing habit of theirs, he with both arms about
her body, she with both arms about his neck, half-choking him with
tenderness, rumpling his thick hair with the tip of her chin. She
looked as much mother as child like that.
"What a big girl you are, Pet!"
"I have a big excuse for it, Dad."
"But your mother, now, was little, Sally. My, yes, reckon that was why I
loved her so. Such a little, little thing!"
"And I'm so big--'reckon' that's why you love me so, huh?"
"Reckon," he said. They sat on for a moment silent, looking out of the
window. There was a lost cardinal whisking among the satin leaves of the
pet magnolia, gazing wistfully at an old nest that swung in the branches
like the ragged ghost of a summer's completeness and happiness. The nest
seemed to arouse memories and hopes in the cardinal's breast. He had to
flirt about it nervously for some minutes before he could satisfy
himself that his housekeeping notions were unseasonable. Finally he
perched himself on an humble syringa bush and stared at the nest, quiet,
depressed.
"Are you betting on the magnolia tree with anybody this winter?" she
asked, her eyes, too, on the high nest.
"No one left to bet with, Pet. Everybody knows now that it can live
through the worst that can come to it. Let's see, it's twenty years
since I planted it there, and I've won twenty jack-knives betting that
it would live, twenty different winters. Twenty years! Sally, that's a
good while, my honey. Why, twenty years ago you didn't come knee-high to
a puddle-duck. We had just moved down here from St. Louis, your mother
and I, twenty years ago."
As he talked, the moment shaped itself for Madeira as a little
negligible interim, wedged in between the restless night, with its
defined purposes, and the next hour, when he should have consummated at
least one of the night's purposes.
"That mother of yours was a lovely little thing, Sally."
The girl was sure of it. She had felt the loveliness of her mother all
her life. Once she had gone to her mother's old Kentucky home, and
though her mother's people were all dead long ago, the great Kentucky
house was still there, and, standing before it, she had been almost able
to see the aura of influence that it had been in the moulding of the
loveliness of her mother, the southern girl, lifting from it to ensphere
her, the western girl.
"I know she was lovely," said Sally.
"Oh my, yes,--just about at her loveliest twenty years ago. But as for
twenty years, Sally, why, I can go a lot farther back than that. I can
go back forty years, close to my beginning. This is all sort of
different from my beginning, Sally." Out beyond the window, into the
September sunshine, rolled the fat corn lands, hundreds upon hundreds of
acres, the wheat flats, the miles of cattle range of Madeira Place.
Around them shut the strong walls of the old Peele house, a memorable
house in its way, massive and wide-porched and staunch.
"You can hardly imagine anything more different from this than was my
beginning," went on Madeira. "This is pretty luxurious, isn't it? In its
way, though it is down here on the Di, it's just about as good for a
country house as the places you saw on the Hudson, aint it?"
"Oh, it has a lot more soul and story than the Hudson places," she
acquiesced at once. Sometimes she could feel that desire of his to give
her as good as the best palpitate like a pulse through his words.
"Well, anyhow, Lord knows it's mighty different from what I began with,
Sally. Why, Honey, in my boy-days living on a farm in Missouri was
mighty much like living on the fringes of hellen-blazes. Br-r-rt!" He
clamped and unclamped his big hand, watching the strong muscle-play in
it. "I can feel my fingers burn to this day where the frozen fodder
sawed and rasped 'em in winter and the hot plough-handles bit and
blistered 'em in summer. And then, afterwards, those old St. Louis days
meant hard pulling, too, of another kind. From grocery clerk, to
dry-goods clerk, to old Peele's real estate office, it was pull, pull,
if not over one thing, over another. Takes a thundering lot of pulling
to pull out in this world, Sally." All in a minute his voice sounded
perplexed and resentful.
"Well, you did it, didn't you? You pulled out. I'm proud of you. I like
the way you did it."
"Do you, Pet? Do you like me?" he queried with a peculiar anxiety.
"Yes, sir, I do."
Black Chloe, who had been making slow trips between kitchen and
dining-room for some minutes, stopped now to say, in a sort of Arabian
Nights measure, "Ef you raddy fuh yo' brekfus, yo' brekfus raddy fuh
you."
"Better than anybody?" pursued Madeira, but his daughter was drawing him
to the table, and he did not notice that her only answer was a quivering
laugh.
They sat down to a breakfast-table whose delightful appearance was due
to that sense of colour in Sally Madeira's temperament. Both ate some
fruit, because it was juicy and went down easily, and both looked at
their coffee-cups.
"Why don't you eat your breakfast, Daddy?"
"Why don't you?" Perhaps if he had waited for her to tell him, her
gladness would have sent her story bubbling to her lips, but he did not
wait. "I'm bothered, Honey, that's why I can't eat."
"What's the bother, Dad?"
Madeira, considering that this was his opportunity, closed in
determinedly, with that iron grip of his. "It's that man Steering,
Honey."
"Taken a foolish old dislike to him, haven't you, Dad?" She was ready
for him, eager to get her case before him, to make her points quickly
and surely.
"Foolish," Madeira gasped and put his hand to his vest pocket. "Sally,
girl, it's a matter of life and death, I take it." He rose from his
chair, his face grey. Staggering a little to the left, he moved to the
window, where he stood with his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the
Garden of Dreams. Behind him the girl sat on quietly. She had put one
hand to her chin, so that her face was up-tilted. The light from the
window was strong on it.
"Sally," began Madeira again, "I've never asked very much of you, have
I? Always let you do as you please, haven't I? And it's too late now to
try to force you to do anything, isn't it? Besides, I wouldn't do it
anyway. I wouldn't like it that way. But I'm going to ask you to do
something for me. Then I'm going to leave the doing wholly to you. I'm
going to ask you to drop that man Steering. I thought it all out last
night, Sally. I know that he and I are going to mix up if he doesn't
keep well out of my sight. I'm going to ask you to drop him, for my
sake, Pet."
He came back toward her, and again he half reeled as he started. With
one hand on her shoulder, he looked down at her. By now she was staring
unseeingly at the bird that stared at the nest in the magnolia tree.
"Are you going to do what I want, Honey?" His hand shook on her shoulder
and when she turned to look up at him the ashen hue of his face
frightened her. She nestled her cheek into his hand. "It's the God's
truth I'm telling you, Sally," went on Madeira, "it's life or death, I
think. I've got to get rid of Steering--I--I--oh, I hate him so."
"And you won't tell me why, Daddy?"
"And I won't--I can't--there's reason enough, Sally, that's all I can
say. Can't you let it go at that, and help me out?"
"Yes, Dad, yes," she said. "You've done such a lot for me, you've helped
me out--it--be--a pity,"--her voice went astray in her throat, and in
the strong light Madeira saw a wild pain on her upturned face--"pity if
I couldn't do anything you ask me to--wouldn't it?" She got up suddenly
and ran to the door.
"Sally!" he called, "Sally, you don't mean--you don't--it isn't
that"--but she was gone.
_Chapter Nine_
GOOD-BYE!
Madeira went off in the buckboard late that morning, and, having left
word with black Chloe that he might have dinner at the Canaan Hotel, did
not come home at all at noon.
His daughter stayed in her room all morning, and far past her lunch
hour. About the middle of the afternoon she got up from the bed where
she had been lying and sat by the window that looked out across the
Tigmores. Her father's face, in its frame of entreaty, trouble, unrest,
hung between her and the hills, so that, for a time, she saw nothing but
Madeira. Little by little, however, the hills themselves became
insistent. They were very beautiful, a long, massed glory of colour, red
and gold and green, all looped about by the silver cord of the Di. As
the girl watched, a lone horseman came out of one of the wooded knobs
and galloped down the ridge road toward Canaan. She could see him
plainly, his breadth of shoulders, his high-headedness, his good
horsemanship. She got up quickly, swaying toward the window, her hands
over her heart, with the strange little pushing gesture, as though she
must push her heart down. The horseman went on down the road toward
Canaan.
"Oh!" cried the girl presently, pleadingly, "if I may see him just once
again! If I just don't have to lose him all at once!" She ran then
across the room to another window, through which she whistled shrilly at
the negro man dozing in the succulent grass in front of the stable.
"Samson!" she shouted, "saddle Ribbon the quickest you ever did in your
life!" And when she saw that the negro had roused sufficiently to
execute her commands, she turned from the window hurriedly, went to her
clothes-closet hurriedly, changed her house gown for a riding-habit
hurriedly, and was out in the yard at the mounting block as the saddle
mare was led up from the stable. Taking the bridle from the negro's
hand, she leaped into the saddle and was off across the yard like a
flash, while the lip of the astonished Samson sagged with impotent
inquiry.
Out on the ridge road, she urged the mare to a gallop. All the way she
was talking to Madeira, almost praying to him. His face with its trouble
and pain still moved before her. "Ah, but you will forgive me!" she was
saying to it. "You wait. Wait and see how this ride turns out. I'm going
to give myself just one chance, Dad. I'm going to find him, and I'm
going riding with him. And I'm not going to say anything. But I look
nice, don't I, when I'm riding--and loving--and hoping--and maybe he
can't stand it, and if he can't stand it, and rides up close, and stops
his horse and tells me--oh, what I hope he will tell me--why, Daddy,
dear, I _must_ lean over into his arms for just one minute, mustn't I?
You see that, don't you? And maybe after that, everything will be all
right, and we can all be happy ever after. I don't see how we could help
being happy ever after that, Dad!"
And, praying so, on the galloping mare, Sally Madeira came into the main
street of Canaan, and drew rein at last in front of her father's bank.
Madeira saw her at once and hurried out to her.
"I'm going to take a little last ride with Mr. Steering, Dad," she said,
her head as high as a queen's and her voice strong and sweet. "I didn't
want you to think that I was deceiving you. I wanted you to know about
it before I did it." Often there was a good deal of the child in Sally's
straight gaze, and Madeira saw it there now and loved it.
"You do just exactly whatever you want to, Honeyful," he said. "I don't
know--I----" He could not go on at all for a minute, and when he could
go on he said abruptly, "I'm going to see Steering, too, before I quite
bust up with him, Sally." Then he went quickly back to the bank, and the
girl passed on down the street to the post-office, in front of which she
saw Steering's horse at the hitching-rail. She sent a bare-footed boy
inside to post a letter to Elsie Gossamer and to ask Mr. Steering to
come out to her.
While she waited, she could see Steering at the pen-and-ink desk,
loitering there, one arm on the desk, watching the thin stream of
people that went by him to the convex glass-and-pine booth where the
post-office boxes were. The men from the Canaan stores, a lonely drummer
from the hotel, some belated farmers and several Canaan young ladies
passed Steering, the young ladies seeming not to see him, but, in some
subtly feminine way, making it impossible for Steering not to see
them--their glowing young faces, their enormous hats, the way their
gowns didn't fit, the slip-shod carriage of their bodies, all the
differences between them and the only other real western girl he knew.
None of the people went out of the post-office at once, all idling at
the door for a few minutes. From time to time there was quite a little
crush at the door, so that Steering did not see Miss Madeira until her
messenger reached him. Then he ran out to her quickly.
"I shan't get down," she told him, speaking in a lower tone than the
listening Canaanites approved of. "I was hoping that I might find you
here. Get on your horse and let's go to the woods. Wouldn't you like to?
The hills are one long glory to-day." It was not the note of her
prayer, it was well-ordered and calm. Still, Steering's heart leaped
like a boy's at her friendliness, and he began to speak his gratitude in
a lyric tune:
"Ah, what fortune! Just to be young and alive and off on the hills with
you!" he said, and vaulted to his horse's back from the curb, so easily
that even the Missourians who were candidly watching and listening,
remarked, "Oh, well, it's because he's got some Missouri in him, that's
why-for."