CHAPTER III. CINDERELLA.The bundle which resulted was bulky, but Carrigan sang as he raced back. He drew his horse to a walk as he approached the During hotel, for a light showed dimly from the dining-room; there might be some new arrival in the place.It was only Jac, however. She sat by the table with her face buried in her arms. He saw one hand lying palm up beside her head. It was small and the fingers tapered.“I never noticed she was so small,” said Carrigan to himself in a hushed voice.He stepped closer, softly.“Jest a kid,” he added.There was the sound of a controlled sob; her body quivered; and Carrigan knew that she was struggling with some great grief.“Cinderella!” he called gently and touched her shoulder.Her head turned. Two marvelously deep-blue eyes shone up to him. Her lower lip was trembling; but when she saw him she stiffened with astonishment.“What do you want?” she asked.“A beautiful girl, five feet five and a half, one hundred and twenty pounds.”“Carrigan!” she stammered. “Is it really you?”He dropped the bundle to the floor and turned slowly.“Look me over.”“Wonderful!”She had dropped into a chair and sat pigeon-toed, her hands clasped tightly in her lap and her mouth slightly agape.“Carrigan, how did you do it?”“Look in that bundle and you’ll see.” He left the room hastily, but before he had gone far he heard a thin, short cry. Happiness and pain are closely akin.“If she only—” began Carrigan.He choked.“If this was only a masked ball,” he said at last, “she might get by. But even then that hair—”He swore softly again.“If Maurie turns her down after this—I’ll bust his face wide open.”He thought of Gordon’s wide shoulders and sighed.After a time a voice called from the house:“Carrigan!”It was a marvelous voice. It was changed as the tone of a violin changes when it passes from the hands of an amateur to those of an artist.“Is that my name?” said Carrigan, and he walked slowly toward the house.She stood in the center of the room, with a piece of the wrapping-paper in which the bundle had been done up held before her face.Carrigan started back until his shoulders touched the wall.“My God!” he murmured with indescribable awe. “They fit!”“But—” she said behind the paper.“Well?”She lowered the paper. The freckles looked out at him—and the eyes with plaintive brows raised by the hard knot of the hair. At the base of her throat was a line of sharp division. All above was a healthy brown. All below was a dazzling white.He could not meet the despair of her eyes.“Well?” she said.“Well?” said Carrigan.“I didn’t choose this face,” she explained sadly. “It was wished on me!”Carrigan sank into a chair and looked upon her as a general looks over a field of battle and calculates the chances of his outnumbered army. His eyes fell to the slender feet in the shining bronze slippers, with the small, round ankles incased in pleasant green.His heart leaped. His eyes raised and met the freckles. He clenched his hand.“If it wasn’t for them freckles—”“Yes?”“I could see your face.”Crimson went up her throat with delicate tints, blending the clear white of the breast with the brown of the round neck. He jumped to his feet: he pointed a commanding arm.“That hair!”“I know it’s—”“I don’t care what you know. Untie that knot!”She obeyed. A red gold flood rippled suddenly almost to her knees.Carrigan blinked.“Sit down!”She dropped to a chair, and Carrigan commenced to work. When a man has to do anything from roping a steer to jerking out a six-gun with the speed of light, he acquires a marvelous dexterity with his hands. Carrigan could almost think with his fingers. They seemed, in fact, to have a separate intelligence.He gathered up the silken mass. The soft touch thrilled him as if every one of the delicate threads carried a tiny charge of electricity. It was marvelous that such a shining torrent could have been reduced the moment before to that compacted, bright red knot.Carrigan closed his eyes and summoned up a vision of hair as he had seen it dressed, not on the heads of any of the mountain-desert belles, but in magazine pictures.With that vision before him he commenced to work, rapidly, surely. It seemed as if the hair, glad to escape from the bondage of that hard knot, fell of its own accord into graceful, waving lines. It curved low across the broad forehead: it gathered at the nape of the neck in a soft knot in the Grecian mode.“Now!” said Carrigan.She rose and faced him.“What’s happened?” she cried, for his lower jaw had fallen.He swallowed twice before he could answer.“I’m beginning to see your face!”For the face, after all, is like any picture. The hair is the frame, and an ugly frame will spoil the most lovely painting. The eye does not stop at a boundary. It includes it.“Once more!” said Carrigan, and seized the vanishing cream.As he worked now he felt like the artist who draws the human face from the block of marble. He felt as Michelangelo when the grim old Florentine said: “I do not create; I take off the outer layers of the stone and free the form which is hidden within.” Or perhaps he was more like Pygmalion and the inevitable statue when the artist saw the first hues of life faintly flushing in the cold marble.When he stepped back and looked at her, she seemed strangely aloof. She had drawn away a thousand miles and a thousand years. He discovered the most ancient of truths, that a beautiful woman is a world in herself upon which all men must look from the outside. She escapes from experience. It cannot stain her. She escapes from herself. Her beauty is greater than her soul.“It’s done,” said Carrigan sadly.“Isn’t it any use?” she queried.He thought of Maurie and hated the handsome face which rose in his memory.“You look sick,” said Jac. “What’s the matter? Is it all in my face? Let me take a slant at the landscape after the snow has fallen.”She ran to the cracked glass. She was a tomboy when she whirled to a stop in front of it. He watched her eyes widen; saw her straighten slightly, wonderfully. She was inches taller when she turned; she was years older.“Are you ready, Mr. Carrigan?”She moved to him with a subtle rustling like the fall of a misting rain on orchard blossoms. He could not answer for a moment. He had seen a miracle.“Yes, Miss During,” he said at last.The light which came somewhere from the depths to shine in her eyes altered swiftly to a sparkle which he could understand.She ran to him and caught both his hands.“Carrigan,” said Jac, “you’re a trump!”“And you,” said he, “are the ace of the suit. Let’s go!”“One thing first,” she said, and ran into another room.She came back almost at once with a chain of amber beads about her throat—a loop of golden fire, trembling and changing with every breath she drew. She slipped the orchid-colored scarf over her shoulders. It was like a mist tinged by the dainty light of dawn. Three times the rich color was repeated; first in the red gold glory of her hair, then in the flash of fire that looped her throat, and last it splashed across the bronze slippers. But with the orchid-colored scarf the charm was complete; the spell was cast.“How are we to go?” she asked as they stood beside his horse.He looked on her with some doubt. The dim light caught at the amber beads.“Perhaps we’ll have to ride double,” he ventured.Her laughter reassured him. She caught the pommel of the saddle as if to vault up, man-fashion. Then she remembered, with a murmur of dismay.“How—” she began.He caught her beneath the arms and lifted her lightly to the saddle, then sprang up behind. The horse started at a slow trot.“Carrigan?”“Well?”“Harry is at the dance. If he should recognize me?”“He won’t.”She chuckled. There was a brooding mischief in the tone that set him tingling.“Are you sure?”“Did the people recognize Cinderella at the ball?”“And if there should be trouble because I’m recognized?”“This fairy godmother wears a six-gun.”They were silent a moment.“How far is it to Bridewell?” he asked at last.“Eight miles—by the road.”“We’re late already. Is there any short cut?”“Across the river it’s between two and three.”“The river?”“It ain’t very deep—sometimes. I’ve done it, but never in duds like these.”“Are you game to try the short cut across the river?”Her head tilted back as she laughed. That was her answer. It was not laughter. It was music. It was the singing of one whose dreams are coming true, and where it left off on her lips the sound was continued like a silent echo in Carrigan.As she swung the horse to the left toward the ford of the river, a puff of warm wind floated the scarf against Carrigan’s face. He could scarcely feel its gossamer web, but a faint fragrance came from it, and his heart beat fast. The moon rolled like a yellow wheel over the tops of the black hills, and its light touched the throat and the turned face of Jacqueline, so that Carrigan could barely guess at her smile. When he spoke to her she did not turn. She stared straight before, crooning a hushed, joyous melody deep in her throat.She would not turn her head, for then the vision with which she rode would have vanished. While she looked straight before her past the tossing head of the horse, it was not Carrigan who sat at her shoulder; it was not his voice which spoke to her; it was not his breath which touched her throat now and again. No! For though the horse had not journeyed far, Jacqueline had ridden a fabulous distance into the regions of romance. The amber beads were now a chain of gold, and where they touched cold against her breast, that was where the jeweled cross lay, the priceless relic before which she said her prayers at dawn and evening. The hair was no longer red. It was yellower, richer than that golden moon. The slight clinking of the bridle-rein, where the little chain chimed against the bit, that was the rattle of the armor of her knight. He had ridden far for her that evening. He had stolen into the castle of her father. He had reached her chamber, where the tapestries made a hushing along the wall like warning whispers. And he had lowered her from the casement on a rope made of twisted clothes. And he had helped her across the moat. Then, with a rusted key, they turned the harsh lock of a secret portal and were free—free—free!Jacqueline tossed up her arms. The air was like a cool caress upon them. Yes, she was free! They topped a hill. Below it ran the river, glimmering silver through the night, and jeweled by the shining of the stars. Suddenly she shook the reins and urged the horse to a frantic gallop down the slope.“What’s the matter?” cried Carrigan.Yes, how could he know that even at that moment her father, with a band of hard-riding liegemen, had thundered into view behind them and that death raced closely on their heels? She drew rein, panting on the edge of the river.Then Carrigan proved himself a knight indeed. They dared not imperil that gown of green, so he sat in the saddle with his legs crossed in front of the horn and lifted her in his arms. Then he gave the horse its way, and the cunning old cattle-pony picked a safe way along a sand-bank. The water rose higher. They slipped, floundering into little hollows, and clambered back into shallower places. Once the water rose so high that Carrigan could have put down his hand and touched it.“Steady!” he said encouragingly to the girl.The voice was deep and vibrant. It blended with her dream of romance. Her tyrant father with his villain knights sat their horses on the bank of the river, not daring to attempt the passage, and now that her hero was about to bear her safe to the other shore— She drew a long breath and relaxed in his arms, her strong, young body now soft and yielding. The horse pawed for a footing and then lurched up the bank with a snort. Her arms tightened around Carrigan’s neck; her lips pressed eagerly to his.“Jac!”How could he know that that word carried her dream away like dead leaves on a wind? She covered her face from him.“We are late already,” she said.
The bundle which resulted was bulky, but Carrigan sang as he raced back. He drew his horse to a walk as he approached the During hotel, for a light showed dimly from the dining-room; there might be some new arrival in the place.
It was only Jac, however. She sat by the table with her face buried in her arms. He saw one hand lying palm up beside her head. It was small and the fingers tapered.
“I never noticed she was so small,” said Carrigan to himself in a hushed voice.
He stepped closer, softly.
“Jest a kid,” he added.
There was the sound of a controlled sob; her body quivered; and Carrigan knew that she was struggling with some great grief.
“Cinderella!” he called gently and touched her shoulder.
Her head turned. Two marvelously deep-blue eyes shone up to him. Her lower lip was trembling; but when she saw him she stiffened with astonishment.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“A beautiful girl, five feet five and a half, one hundred and twenty pounds.”
“Carrigan!” she stammered. “Is it really you?”
He dropped the bundle to the floor and turned slowly.
“Look me over.”
“Wonderful!”
She had dropped into a chair and sat pigeon-toed, her hands clasped tightly in her lap and her mouth slightly agape.
“Carrigan, how did you do it?”
“Look in that bundle and you’ll see.” He left the room hastily, but before he had gone far he heard a thin, short cry. Happiness and pain are closely akin.
“If she only—” began Carrigan.
He choked.
“If this was only a masked ball,” he said at last, “she might get by. But even then that hair—”
He swore softly again.
“If Maurie turns her down after this—I’ll bust his face wide open.”
He thought of Gordon’s wide shoulders and sighed.
After a time a voice called from the house:
“Carrigan!”
It was a marvelous voice. It was changed as the tone of a violin changes when it passes from the hands of an amateur to those of an artist.
“Is that my name?” said Carrigan, and he walked slowly toward the house.
She stood in the center of the room, with a piece of the wrapping-paper in which the bundle had been done up held before her face.
Carrigan started back until his shoulders touched the wall.
“My God!” he murmured with indescribable awe. “They fit!”
“But—” she said behind the paper.
“Well?”
She lowered the paper. The freckles looked out at him—and the eyes with plaintive brows raised by the hard knot of the hair. At the base of her throat was a line of sharp division. All above was a healthy brown. All below was a dazzling white.
He could not meet the despair of her eyes.
“Well?” she said.
“Well?” said Carrigan.
“I didn’t choose this face,” she explained sadly. “It was wished on me!”
Carrigan sank into a chair and looked upon her as a general looks over a field of battle and calculates the chances of his outnumbered army. His eyes fell to the slender feet in the shining bronze slippers, with the small, round ankles incased in pleasant green.
His heart leaped. His eyes raised and met the freckles. He clenched his hand.
“If it wasn’t for them freckles—”
“Yes?”
“I could see your face.”
Crimson went up her throat with delicate tints, blending the clear white of the breast with the brown of the round neck. He jumped to his feet: he pointed a commanding arm.
“That hair!”
“I know it’s—”
“I don’t care what you know. Untie that knot!”
She obeyed. A red gold flood rippled suddenly almost to her knees.
Carrigan blinked.
“Sit down!”
She dropped to a chair, and Carrigan commenced to work. When a man has to do anything from roping a steer to jerking out a six-gun with the speed of light, he acquires a marvelous dexterity with his hands. Carrigan could almost think with his fingers. They seemed, in fact, to have a separate intelligence.
He gathered up the silken mass. The soft touch thrilled him as if every one of the delicate threads carried a tiny charge of electricity. It was marvelous that such a shining torrent could have been reduced the moment before to that compacted, bright red knot.
Carrigan closed his eyes and summoned up a vision of hair as he had seen it dressed, not on the heads of any of the mountain-desert belles, but in magazine pictures.
With that vision before him he commenced to work, rapidly, surely. It seemed as if the hair, glad to escape from the bondage of that hard knot, fell of its own accord into graceful, waving lines. It curved low across the broad forehead: it gathered at the nape of the neck in a soft knot in the Grecian mode.
“Now!” said Carrigan.
She rose and faced him.
“What’s happened?” she cried, for his lower jaw had fallen.
He swallowed twice before he could answer.
“I’m beginning to see your face!”
For the face, after all, is like any picture. The hair is the frame, and an ugly frame will spoil the most lovely painting. The eye does not stop at a boundary. It includes it.
“Once more!” said Carrigan, and seized the vanishing cream.
As he worked now he felt like the artist who draws the human face from the block of marble. He felt as Michelangelo when the grim old Florentine said: “I do not create; I take off the outer layers of the stone and free the form which is hidden within.” Or perhaps he was more like Pygmalion and the inevitable statue when the artist saw the first hues of life faintly flushing in the cold marble.
When he stepped back and looked at her, she seemed strangely aloof. She had drawn away a thousand miles and a thousand years. He discovered the most ancient of truths, that a beautiful woman is a world in herself upon which all men must look from the outside. She escapes from experience. It cannot stain her. She escapes from herself. Her beauty is greater than her soul.
“It’s done,” said Carrigan sadly.
“Isn’t it any use?” she queried.
He thought of Maurie and hated the handsome face which rose in his memory.
“You look sick,” said Jac. “What’s the matter? Is it all in my face? Let me take a slant at the landscape after the snow has fallen.”
She ran to the cracked glass. She was a tomboy when she whirled to a stop in front of it. He watched her eyes widen; saw her straighten slightly, wonderfully. She was inches taller when she turned; she was years older.
“Are you ready, Mr. Carrigan?”
She moved to him with a subtle rustling like the fall of a misting rain on orchard blossoms. He could not answer for a moment. He had seen a miracle.
“Yes, Miss During,” he said at last.
The light which came somewhere from the depths to shine in her eyes altered swiftly to a sparkle which he could understand.
She ran to him and caught both his hands.
“Carrigan,” said Jac, “you’re a trump!”
“And you,” said he, “are the ace of the suit. Let’s go!”
“One thing first,” she said, and ran into another room.
She came back almost at once with a chain of amber beads about her throat—a loop of golden fire, trembling and changing with every breath she drew. She slipped the orchid-colored scarf over her shoulders. It was like a mist tinged by the dainty light of dawn. Three times the rich color was repeated; first in the red gold glory of her hair, then in the flash of fire that looped her throat, and last it splashed across the bronze slippers. But with the orchid-colored scarf the charm was complete; the spell was cast.
“How are we to go?” she asked as they stood beside his horse.
He looked on her with some doubt. The dim light caught at the amber beads.
“Perhaps we’ll have to ride double,” he ventured.
Her laughter reassured him. She caught the pommel of the saddle as if to vault up, man-fashion. Then she remembered, with a murmur of dismay.
“How—” she began.
He caught her beneath the arms and lifted her lightly to the saddle, then sprang up behind. The horse started at a slow trot.
“Carrigan?”
“Well?”
“Harry is at the dance. If he should recognize me?”
“He won’t.”
She chuckled. There was a brooding mischief in the tone that set him tingling.
“Are you sure?”
“Did the people recognize Cinderella at the ball?”
“And if there should be trouble because I’m recognized?”
“This fairy godmother wears a six-gun.”
They were silent a moment.
“How far is it to Bridewell?” he asked at last.
“Eight miles—by the road.”
“We’re late already. Is there any short cut?”
“Across the river it’s between two and three.”
“The river?”
“It ain’t very deep—sometimes. I’ve done it, but never in duds like these.”
“Are you game to try the short cut across the river?”
Her head tilted back as she laughed. That was her answer. It was not laughter. It was music. It was the singing of one whose dreams are coming true, and where it left off on her lips the sound was continued like a silent echo in Carrigan.
As she swung the horse to the left toward the ford of the river, a puff of warm wind floated the scarf against Carrigan’s face. He could scarcely feel its gossamer web, but a faint fragrance came from it, and his heart beat fast. The moon rolled like a yellow wheel over the tops of the black hills, and its light touched the throat and the turned face of Jacqueline, so that Carrigan could barely guess at her smile. When he spoke to her she did not turn. She stared straight before, crooning a hushed, joyous melody deep in her throat.
She would not turn her head, for then the vision with which she rode would have vanished. While she looked straight before her past the tossing head of the horse, it was not Carrigan who sat at her shoulder; it was not his voice which spoke to her; it was not his breath which touched her throat now and again. No! For though the horse had not journeyed far, Jacqueline had ridden a fabulous distance into the regions of romance. The amber beads were now a chain of gold, and where they touched cold against her breast, that was where the jeweled cross lay, the priceless relic before which she said her prayers at dawn and evening. The hair was no longer red. It was yellower, richer than that golden moon. The slight clinking of the bridle-rein, where the little chain chimed against the bit, that was the rattle of the armor of her knight. He had ridden far for her that evening. He had stolen into the castle of her father. He had reached her chamber, where the tapestries made a hushing along the wall like warning whispers. And he had lowered her from the casement on a rope made of twisted clothes. And he had helped her across the moat. Then, with a rusted key, they turned the harsh lock of a secret portal and were free—free—free!
Jacqueline tossed up her arms. The air was like a cool caress upon them. Yes, she was free! They topped a hill. Below it ran the river, glimmering silver through the night, and jeweled by the shining of the stars. Suddenly she shook the reins and urged the horse to a frantic gallop down the slope.
“What’s the matter?” cried Carrigan.
Yes, how could he know that even at that moment her father, with a band of hard-riding liegemen, had thundered into view behind them and that death raced closely on their heels? She drew rein, panting on the edge of the river.
Then Carrigan proved himself a knight indeed. They dared not imperil that gown of green, so he sat in the saddle with his legs crossed in front of the horn and lifted her in his arms. Then he gave the horse its way, and the cunning old cattle-pony picked a safe way along a sand-bank. The water rose higher. They slipped, floundering into little hollows, and clambered back into shallower places. Once the water rose so high that Carrigan could have put down his hand and touched it.
“Steady!” he said encouragingly to the girl.
The voice was deep and vibrant. It blended with her dream of romance. Her tyrant father with his villain knights sat their horses on the bank of the river, not daring to attempt the passage, and now that her hero was about to bear her safe to the other shore— She drew a long breath and relaxed in his arms, her strong, young body now soft and yielding. The horse pawed for a footing and then lurched up the bank with a snort. Her arms tightened around Carrigan’s neck; her lips pressed eagerly to his.
“Jac!”
How could he know that that word carried her dream away like dead leaves on a wind? She covered her face from him.
“We are late already,” she said.