CHAPTER III
DEAN WOLCOTT sent a dignified and satisfying design for the bridge, and Ginger had it executed in rough stone brought down from the hills. When it was finished it was a sincere and lasting thing, and she never went over it too quickly to rest her eyes on the plate set into the rock which bore Aleck’s name and the dates of his birth and death, and, beneath—“From his sister and his friend.”
After a little time the letters had begun to come; long, fluent, vivid letters; realistic stories of the life he and Aleck had lived together. Ginger read them with laughter and with tears, and wrote short, shy answers on cheap stationery. Ordinarily, she would have used the official ranch paper, with the name at the top—“Dos Pozos, Virginia Valdés McVeagh, sole proprietor,” and a neat cut of a long-horned steer at one side and a bucking horse at the other—but she had a dim sense of what the other Mr. Wolcott’s expressionwould be when he saw. Therefore, she used tablet paper and envelopes which did not quite match; sometimes she used the regular stamped envelopes. Her writing was unformed and uninteresting; she loathed composing letters and they sounded and looked as if she did. She had never cared about getting them, save Aleck’s. The Los Angeles and San Francisco relatives wrote chiefly to ask if they might come and bring the children for a little visit with dear Virginia, and grateful bread-and-butter notes after they had gone home. She liked getting letters now, however; she found Dean Wolcott’s many-sheeted ones the most enthralling reading she had ever done. He was steadily gaining weight and strength and poise again, he told her. In the early summer he began to talk about coming, and in July he announced that he would arrive at San Luis Obispo on the twenty-sixth.
Ginger sat a long time with this letter in her hand. Then she went to the telephone and called up her favorite aunt by long distance, in San Francisco, and asked if she might come up to her next day and do some shopping.
Her Aunt Fan was cordial and kind. She wasreally very fond of Ginger; fond enough to like having her with her for little visits but not quite fond enough to visit her on the ranch. Aunt Fan’s idea of the country was a tiresome geographical division through which you passed on your way to a city. Besides, it was a place of beguiling cream and broilers and hot breadstuffs; a place where one invariably and weakly ate too much.
Now she said that Ginger was to come at once and they’d have a wonderful time together; she’d been meaning to send for her, anyway.
Ginger took the day train from San Luis Obispo and reached San Francisco in the evening; this, she knew, was an easier time for her aunt to meet her than in the morning. Aunt Fan had a taxi waiting and bundled her delightedly into it.
“Dearie, are you simplydead? I told the doctor we might join him at Tait’s for a little while, to hear the music and— But I don’t know—” she broke off, looking at her niece’s costume, and shaking her head. “My dear child,wheredid you get that dress?”
It was a one-piece thing in blue serge of ordinary quality, listlessly trimmed with black braid,and the neck line was just too low and a good deal too high.
“In San Luis,” said Ginger, meekly. She was always meek with her aunt on the subject of clothes. “It was only twenty-two fifty.”
“It looks it,” said Aunt Fan, briefly. “And that mal-formed hat, and light-topped shoes (there hasn’t been a light-topped shoe worn since the flood!) and brown gloves!My dear!” She hailed the chauffeur. “Straight back to the St. Agnes, please.”
“I bought all these things ages ago,” said Ginger, humble still, “before I went into mourning. I’ve given all the black stuff to Manuela. I didn’t think it mattered, just for the train.”
“My child,” said her aunt with solemn and passionate conviction, “clothesalwaysmatter. I wouldn’t bedivorcedin a dress like that.” She sighed. “How you, with your Spanish blood, can have so little sense of line and color— Oh, I know you look well enough on the ranch, on a horse—‘Daring Nell, the Cattle Queen’—that sort of thing, but you can’t ride your horse into restaurants and drawing-rooms and theaters, and as soon as you dismount you look like the hiredhelp!” She was heartily angry with her by the time they arrived at the apartment house. No one could fathom why it had been named the St. Agnes; it was a good deal more like the Queen of Sheba.
Ginger followed her into Apartment C. It was the first time she had visited her aunt here, and it struck her that it was like the inside of a silk-lined and padded candy boxde luxe; it was a good deal like Aunt Fan herself.
It began to strike Mrs. Featherstone that her niece was turning the other cheek with unprecedented docility. “Look here,” she cried, catching hold of her and turning her face to the light, “let me look at you. What is it? What’s come over you?” She shook her as ’Rome Ojeda had shaken her but with less muscular authority. “What do you want clothes for?”
“Because I have only things like this, and—” she was entirely unflurried and direct about it—“because Dean Wolcott, Aleck’s friend, you know, is coming out for a visit.”
Aunt Fan studied her thoughtfully. “When’s he coming?”
“The twenty-sixth—a week from Saturday.”
“Oh,Lord!” said her aunt with deep feeling. “How Idodetest the country in July! Well, Manuela’ll simply have to bring me a breakfast tray, whether she thinks it immoral or not. I willnotget up in the middle of the night.”
“But, Aunt Fan, I didn’t expect you to come.” Ginger was wholly frank about it.
“My dear girl, I don’t suppose you want me any more than I want to come and listen to the crickets with their mufflers open all night, but—I ask you—can you entertain a strange young man,Boston, too, isn’t he?—alone?”
“I don’t see why not,” said her niece, coolly. “He isn’t strange at all; he was Aleck’s friend.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter whether you see or not,” said Mrs. Featherstone, crisply. “I’m coming. I suppose I’ll gain eighteen pounds as I did before. See here, will you promise not to let Ling make waffles?” Her carefully tinted face broke up suddenly into little wrinkles of smiles. “There, never mind! I love you if you do weigh a hundred and ten and eat everything!”
Mrs. Featherstone weighed a hundred and sixty-nine and she ate like a canary and thought about food most of the time, and her large, comelyface had a chronic expression of wistful yearning. Clergymen and lecturers and interpreters liked having her in the front row; they found her intense concentration and her blue-eyed gaze extremely helpful and inspiring, and they had no way of knowing that she was thinking raptly to herself— “If I should go over to the Palace for lunch and have turkey hash and potatoesau gratinand popovers and a cup of chocolate, and walk all the way home,fast, I don’t believe I’d gain anounce!”
She was Ginger’s father’s half sister, and she had been twice married. Her first husband had died and her second had been divorced, but she was still on very kindly and pleasant terms with him. He gave her a generous alimony and she was able to live in a smart apartment with a smart maid and wear the smartest of clothes and she wanted for nothing in the world except food.
“Here’s your room, dearie,” she said, piloting her niece into a tiny apricot-colored guest chamber. “I suppose it looks small after the ranch; you couldn’t rope a steer in it, but it’s large enough, if you’re not boisterous. You had to sleep on the davenport when I was at the Livingston, didn’tyou? This is no end nicer; it ought to be, heaven knows, with what I pay for it. Jim voluntarily gave me another hundred a month, did I tell you?” She sighed and winked her blue eyes violently. “He’s a prince, if ever there was one. He said it was only fair—H. C. of L., and all that. Now, I’ll just slip into something loose and we’ll have a chatter. Lucinda,” she called the little trim negress, “you make Miss McVeagh a cup of chocolate. You’ll see,” she turned to her niece again, “I’ll watch you drink it without a quiver. I ought to be a martyr or something—you know—hunger strikes—” She went away breathlessly to get out of her armor, and Ginger opened the window and let the keen, foggy night air into the little soft room. She always felt trapped in her Aunt Fan’s pretty abiding places. Nevertheless, she stayed a whole week this time, and got snugly into her aunt’s good graces by buying everything she suggested.
“We’ll get downtownearly.” Mrs. Featherstone planned earnestly, the night of her arrival, “oh, bright and early, before any one’s out—by eleven o’clock if we can possibly manage it—andget you some things you can wear right out of the shop, before any one sees you.”
She had an excellent sense of values, Ginger’s Aunt Fan, and she let the girl keep true to type in her selections—a mannish coat suit of heather brown jersey, sport blouse of rough creamy silk, snub-nosed little Scotch brogues and wool stockings, fabric gloves with gauntlet cuffs and smart buckles, and a small brown hat which had plenty of assurance even without its stab of burnt orange. “Now,” said Mrs. Featherstone with a sigh of deep relief, “let’s go!”
They went tirelessly, late forenoons and solid afternoons and Ginger had presently a large trunkful of clever clothes—gay ginghams and crisp organdies, boldly plaided sport skirts and sweaters in solid colors to match, and two evening frocks (though these Ginger protested she would never need) in scarlet and persimmon. “I’m having a color spree,” said Aunt Fan. “All the things I’d adore to wear and can’t.”
They were at Dos Pozos four days before Dean Wolcott was due. Mrs. Featherstone had been watching her niece narrowly. “What’s he like,this chap?” she had wanted to know a day or so after Ginger had come to her.
The girl waited an instant before answering. “I—don’t know, Aunt Fan.”
“You don’t know?”
The girl shook her head. “You see, he was only at the ranch one day, and he slept most of that—he was so exhausted. I don’t believe I saw him for two hours in all.”
Aunt Fan stared. “Well—but you must have formed some impression. What do youthinkhe’s like, if you don’t know?”
This time she waited even longer before answering. She was calling up the memory of the Christmas day—the first meeting in the morning; the look of him as he came toward her in the rich light of the setting sun, his weary speech; the way his eyes had kindled. “I think,” she said, wholly unaware that she was speaking with the same whispering gentleness with which she had spoken to him, “he is different from—everybody else in the world.”
Aunt Fan said nothing more, and tiptoed hastily away from the subject. She wrote that night to her former husband—she always wrote to thankhim for the alimony—“Jim, I’m keeping my fingers crossed! She’s simply bowled over by this chap, and he certainly must be interested, to cross the continent in July. Heavens, but I’d be glad to see her settled—married to somebody beside a cow-puncher—living in civilization! I wish you’d slip down to Boston and look him up, will you? That’s a lamb! His name is Dean Wolcott and he’s a Harvard man, and a sort of architect. When I think what it would mean to me, to be sure I’d never have to visit her on the ranch again! Be careful not to rush around in the heat, Jim; Boston air is like pudding sauce and you know you never had any sense of taking care of yourself. Let me hear immediately what you find out.”
Ginger had been honest with her aunt. She didn’t know what Dean Wolcott was like, but she would know on Friday! She was not analytical or introspective enough to know what he stood for; to realize that he was—up to that time—not a person to her, but a quality, a substance; he was all the heroes of all the books she had never read; he was the music she had never heard; the far places she had never seen. And he was silveredand hallowed by his association with her beloved dead brother.
Dean Wolcott’s cousin—the other Mr. Wolcott who had disapprovingly guided him across the continent and back—asked him, searchingly, what he was going out to Californiafor. Dean Wolcott wasn’t able to tell him; he wasn’t able to tell himself. He said to his kinsman and reiterated to himself that he wanted to have a look at that bridge; he had designed it in a white heat of enthusiasm, and while he believed it was good, he was anxious to see it finished. Also, he was at some pains to tell his cousin and his own consciousness, he felt he ought to see Miss McVeagh again; he had been a spineless weakling, sleeping away his one day there; it was the very least he could do for old Aleck to see her once more, and tell her, by word of mouth, the things which were flat and cold on the written page.
Nevertheless, passing up many pleasant summer plans made by his family and his friends, making his little explanation over and over again, he felt rather foolish, and the Wolcott connection, as the cousin would have said, did not enjoy feelingfoolish. The trip across the sweltering states was unendurably hot; while they were going through Kansas he thought several times of wiring to Dos Pozos that he was ill again, and must turn back. He was still wondering, in Los Angeles, just why he had come, and he wondered from eight to three, in the parlor car of the coast-line day train, rumbling through scenery that was brown and dry and hot, but when he got out at San Luis Obispo he stopped wondering. He knew, at once and definitely, why he had come.
The reason was waiting for him on the platform. She wore a white flannel sport skirt and a scarlet coat of jersey and a black hat with scarlet poppies on it, and she glowed like a poppy herself in heat which wilted other people and made them look faded and drained.
She was driving Aleck’s car, a seasoned and dependable old vehicle, and they said very little, after the necessities of luggage had been seen to, until they had left the town behind and were mounting into the hills. It was hot; Dean Wolcott thought he had never known such heat, but it had a fine, dry, shimmering quality; the breeze, though it might have blown out of an oven, was electric,bracing. He took off his hat and let the sun shine on his head and the wind muss up the precision of his hair. Ginger did not look at him; she never took her eyes from the road when she was driving—a promise she had made Aleck—but she could feel that he was looking at her. She felt very silent and shy and a good deal frightened.
Dean, on the other hand, was feeling, with every minute and every mile, more serene confidence; a greater sense of glad decision. This was why he had come; he must always have known, secretly, in his depths.
“I want to see the bridge,” he said, after the longest of their pauses.
“Yes. I’ll tell you when to begin looking. You can see it a long way.” Eyes rigidly front, even though they had left the worst of the grade now.
He knew that she was frightened and it made him feel tremendously triumphant; surer of himself than he had been since he went down on the last day of fighting.
“Now you can see the bridge,” said Ginger, lifting one hand from the wheel to point it out to him.
“Yes,” said Dean. He did not speak againuntil they had reached it. Then pride rose in him for an instant. “Itisgood,” he sighed, contentedly. “I couldn’t be sure. It’sgood!” He got out of the car and waited for her to follow, but she would not.
“No; I want you to see it first—alone.”
He went over it, beyond it; stood well away from it and studied it. Then he came on to it again, halting half-way, looking at her. “Now will you come?”
And, just as he had stopped wondering, Ginger stopped being afraid. She went to him steadily, her head high.
He was bareheaded still, and she noticed now for the first time that his hair was very fair and very fine, brushed sleekly back from his forehead, shining; that he was taller than she had realized; that there was a look of power about him for all his slimness and his cool coloring. Then she stopped noticing altogether, because he had come swiftly to her and caught her in his arms.
“Here, on Aleck’s bridge,” he said, happily. “We’ve come to each other across Aleck’s bridge; it was Aleck who brought us together.” Then he ceased talking about Aleck and kissed her.“Scotch granite and Spanish flame; that is what you are,” he told her, holding her away from him for an instant to consider her. “There was never any one like you; you have a stern Scotch chin and a soft Spanish mouth; you are—” then, aware of the way he was wasting time, he left off making phrases and kissed her Spanish mouth, and Estrada, riding in from the range, reined in his horse and stared, wide-eyed, and Aunt Fan, coming out on to the veranda, looked down at them and gasped, and wondered when the result of Jim’s investigations would come, and old Manuela, watching from a window, crossed herself and called fervently upon her favorite saint.
But for the two on Aleck’s bridge there was, for that slender, golden, perishable moment, no one else in the glowing world.