A dozen times that morning, dictating to Blake or indicating answers,
Dick had been on the verge of saying to let the rest of the
correspondence go.
"Call up Hennessy and Mendenhall," he told Blake, when, at ten, the
latter gathered up his notes and rose to go. "You ought to catch them
at the stallion barn. Tell them not to come this morning but to-morrow
morning."
Bonbright entered, prepared to shorthand Dick's conversations with his
managers for the next hour.
"And--oh, Mr. Blake," Dick called. "Ask Hennessy about Alden
Bessie.--The old mare was pretty bad last night," he explained to
Bonbright.
"Mr. Hanley must see you right away, Mr. Forrest," Bonbright said, and
added, at sight of the irritated drawing up of his employer's brows,
"It's the piping from Buckeye Dam. Something's wrong with the plans--a
serious mistake, he says."
Dick surrendered, and for an hour discussed ranch business with his
foremen and managers.
Once, in the middle of a hot discussion over sheep-dips with Wardman,
he left his desk and paced over to the window. The sound of voices and
horses, and of Paula's laugh, had attracted him.
"Take that Montana report--I'll send you a copy to-day," he continued,
as he gazed out. "They found the formula didn't get down to it. It was
more a sedative than a germicide. There wasn't enough kick in it..."
Four horses, bunched, crossed his field of vision. Paula, teasing the
pair of them, was between Martinez and Froelig, old friends of Dick, a
painter and sculptor respectively, who had arrived on an early train.
Graham, on Selim, made the fourth, and was slightly edged toward the
rear. So the party went by, but Dick reflected that quickly enough it
would resolve itself into two and two.
Shortly after eleven, restless and moody, he wandered out with a
cigarette into the big patio, where he smiled grim amusement at the
various tell-tale signs of Paula's neglect of her goldfish. The sight
of them suggested her secret patio in whose fountain pools she kept her
selected and more gorgeous blooms of fish. Thither he went, through
doors without knobs, by ways known only to Paula and the servants.
This had been Dick's one great gift to Paula. It was love-lavish as
only a king of fortune could make it. He had given her a free hand with
it, and insisted on her wildest extravagance; and it had been his
delight to tease his quondam guardians with the stubs of the checkbook
she had used. It bore no relation to the scheme and architecture of the
Big House, and, for that matter, so deeply hidden was it that it played
no part in jar of line or color. A show-place of show-places, it was
not often shown. Outside Paula's sisters and intimates, on rare
occasions some artist was permitted to enter and catch his breath.
Graham had heard of its existence, but not even him had she invited to
see.
It was round, and small enough to escape giving any cold hint of
spaciousness. The Big House was of sturdy concrete, but here was marble
in exquisite delicacy. The arches of the encircling arcade were of
fretted white marble that had taken on just enough tender green to
prevent any glare of reflected light. Palest of pink roses bloomed up
the pillars and over the low flat roof they upheld, where Puck-like,
humorous, and happy faces took the place of grinning gargoyles. Dick
strolled the rosy marble pavement of the arcade and let the beauty of
the place slowly steal in upon him and gentle his mood.
The heart and key of the fairy patio was the fountain, consisting of
three related shallow basins at different levels, of white marble and
delicate as shell. Over these basins rollicked and frolicked life-sized
babies wrought from pink marble by no mean hand. Some peered over the
edges into lower basins, one reached arms covetously toward the
goldfish; one, on his back, laughed at the sky, another stood with
dimpled legs apart stretching himself, others waded, others were on the
ground amongst the roses white and blush, but all were of the fountain
and touched it at some point. So good was the color of the marble, so
true had been the sculptor, that the illusion was of life. No cherubs
these, but live warm human babies.
Dick regarded the rosy fellowship pleasantly and long, finishing his
cigarette and retaining it dead in his hand. That was what she had
needed, he mused--babies, children. It had been her passion. Had she
realized it... He sighed, and, struck by a fresh thought, looked to her
favorite seat with certitude that he would not see the customary sewing
lying on it in a pretty heap. She did not sew these days.
He did not enter the tiny gallery behind the arcade, which contained
her chosen paintings and etchings, and copies in marble and bronze of
her favorites of the European galleries. Instead he went up the
stairway, past the glorious Winged Victory on the landing where the
staircase divided, and on and up into her quarters that occupied the
entire upper wing. But first, pausing by the Victory, he turned and
gazed down into the fairy patio. The thing was a cut jewel in its
perfectness and color, and he acknowledged, although he had made it
possible for her, that it was entirely her own creation--her one
masterpiece. It had long been her dream, and he had realized it for
her. And yet now, he meditated, it meant nothing to her. She was not
mercenary, that he knew; and if he could not hold her, mere baubles
such as that would weigh nothing in the balance against her heart.
He wandered idly through her rooms, scarcely noting at what he gazed,
but gazing with fondness at it all. Like everything else of hers, it
was distinctive, different, eloquent of her. But when he glanced into
the bathroom with its sunken Roman bath, for the life of him he was
unable to avoid seeing a tiny drip and making a mental note for the
ranch plumber.
As a matter of course, he looked to her easel with the expectation of
finding no new work, but was disappointed; for a portrait of himself
confronted him. He knew her trick of copying the pose and lines from a
photograph and filling in from memory. The particular photograph she
was using had been a fortunate snapshop of him on horseback. The
Outlaw, for once and for a moment, had been at peace, and Dick, hat in
hand, hair just nicely rumpled, face in repose, unaware of the
impending snap, had at the instant looked squarely into the camera. No
portrait photographer could have caught a better likeness. The head and
shoulders Paula had had enlarged, and it was from this that she was
working. But the portrait had already gone beyond the photograph, for
Dick could see her own touches.
With a start he looked more closely. Was that expression of the eyes,
of the whole face, his? He glanced at the photograph. It was not there.
He walked over to one of the mirrors, relaxed his face, and led his
thoughts to Paula and Graham. Slowly the expression came into his eyes
and face. Not content, he returned to the easel and verified it. Paula
knew. Paula knew that he knew. She had learned it from him, stolen it
from him some time when it was unwittingly on his face, and carried it
in her memory to the canvas.
Paula's Chinese maid, Oh Dear, entered from the wardrobe room, and Dick
watched her unobserved as she came down the room toward him. Her eyes
were down, and she seemed deep in thought. Dick remarked the sadness of
her face, and that the little, solicitous contraction of the brows that
had led to her naming was gone. She was not solicitous, that was
patent. But cast down, she was, in heavy depression.
It would seem that all our faces are beginning to say things, he
commented to himself.
"Good morning, Oh Dear," he startled her.
And as she returned the greeting, he saw compassion in her eyes as they
dwelt on him. She knew. The first outside themselves. Trust her, a
woman, so much in Paula's company when Paula was alone, to divine
Paula's secret.
Oh Dear's lips trembled, and she wrung her trembling hands, nerving
herself, as he could see, to speech.
"Mister Forrest," she began haltingly, "maybe you think me fool, but I
like say something. You very kind man. You very kind my old mother. You
very kind me long long time..."
She hesitated, moistening her frightened lips with her tongue, then
braved her eyes to his and proceeded.
"Mrs. Forrest, she, I think..."
But so forbidding did Dick's face become that she broke off in
confusion and blushed, as Dick surmised, with shame at the thoughts she
had been about to utter.
"Very nice picture Mrs. Forrest make," he put her at her ease.
The Chinese girl sighed, and the same compassion returned into her eyes
as she looked long at Dick's portrait.
She sighed again, but the coldness in her voice was not lost on Dick as
she answered: "Yes, very nice picture Mrs. Forrest make."
She looked at him with sudden sharp scrutiny, studying his face, then
turned to the canvas and pointed at the eyes.
"No good," she condemned.
Her voice was harsh, touched with anger.
"No good," she flung over her shoulder, more loudly, still more
harshly, as she continued down the room and out of sight on Paula's
sleeping porch.
Dick stiffened his shoulders, unconsciously bracing himself to face
what was now soon to happen. Well, it was the beginning of the end. Oh
Dear knew. Soon more would know, all would know. And in a way he was
glad of it, glad that the torment of suspense would endure but little
longer.
But when he started to leave he whistled a merry jingle to advertise to
Oh Dear that the world wagged very well with him so far as he knew
anything about it.
* * * * *
The same afternoon, while Dick was out and away with Froelig and
Martinez and Graham, Paula stole a pilgrimage to Dick's quarters. Out
on his sleeping porch she looked over his rows of press buttons, his
switchboard that from his bed connected him with every part of the
ranch and most of the rest of California, his phonograph on the hinged
and swinging bracket, the orderly array of books and magazines and
agricultural bulletins waiting to be read, the ash tray, cigarettes,
scribble pads, and thermos bottle.
Her photograph, the only picture on the porch, held her attention. It
hung under his barometers and thermometers, which, she knew, was where
he looked oftenest. A fancy came to her, and she turned the laughing
face to the wall and glanced from the blankness of the back of the
frame to the bed and back again. With a quick panic movement, she
turned the laughing face out. It belonged, was her thought; it did
belong.
The big automatic pistol in the holster on the wall, handy to one's
hand from the bed, caught her eye. She reached to it and lifted gently
at the butt. It was as she had expected--loose--Dick's way. Trust him,
no matter how long unused, never to let a pistol freeze in its holster.
Back in the work room she wandered solemnly about, glancing now at the
prodigious filing system, at the chart and blue-print cabinets, at the
revolving shelves of reference books, and at the long rows of stoutly
bound herd registers. At last she came to his books--a goodly row of
pamphlets, bound magazine articles, and an even dozen ambitious tomes.
She read the titles painstakingly: "Corn in California," "Silage
Practice," "Farm Organization," "Farm Book-keeping," "The Shire in
America," "Humus Destruction," "Soilage," "Alfalfa in California,"
"Cover Crops for California," "The Shorthorn in America"--at this last
she smiled affectionately with memory of the great controversy he had
waged for the beef cow and the milch cow as against the dual purpose
cow.
She caressed, the backs of the books with her palm, pressed her cheek
against them and leaned with closed eyes. Oh, Dick, Dick--a thought
began that faded to a vagueness of sorrow and died because she did not
dare to think it.
The desk was so typically Dick. There was no litter. Clean it was of
all work save the wire tray with typed letters waiting his signature
and an unusual pile of the flat yellow sheets on which his secretaries
typed the telegrams relayed by telephone from Eldorado. Carelessly she
ran her eyes over the opening lines of the uppermost sheet and chanced
upon a reference that puzzled and interested her. She read closely,
with in-drawn brows, then went deeper into the heap till she found
confirmation. Jeremy Braxton was dead--big, genial, kindly Jeremy
Braxton. A Mexican mob of pulque-crazed peons had killed him in the
mountains through which he had been trying to escape from the Harvest
into Arizona. The date of the telegram was two days old. Dick had known
it for two days and never worried her with it. And it meant more. It
meant money. It meant that the affairs of the Harvest Group were going
from bad to worse. And it was Dick's way.
And Jeremy was dead. The room seemed suddenly to have grown cold. She
shivered. It was the way of life--death always at the end of the road.
And her own nameless dread came back upon her. Doom lay ahead. Doom for
whom? She did not attempt to guess. Sufficient that it was doom. Her
mind was heavy with it, and the quiet room was heavy with it as she
passed slowly out.