CHAPTER VI
GINGER could understand bullets; she could understand a broken arm or leg or collar bone; a broken neck was entirely comprehensible to her. But she could not understand fainting; not, above all, a man’s fainting.
As soon as she was sure that he was not dead (she had heard of sudden death by heart failure) she was not aware of any feeling but deep chagrin. She did not follow when he was helped into the house and to his room by Estrada and ’Rome Ojeda; she sent old Manuela to him but she did not go herself. She went instead to her room and got out of her dust-grimed riding things and under a cold shower, and into one of the evening frocks which her Aunt Fan had made her buy. It was the scarlet one, and she piled her dark hair high and put in her carved ivory comb which had come down to her from her Valdés grandmother, and put a red flower behind her ear, and regarded herself in her small mirror with hearty and entiresatisfaction. Not three times in her life had she ever dressed herself so painstakingly, or been so pleased with the result.
She went to the dining room and looked over the lavish supper and summoned in her guests, and after the riotous meal she started the dance with ’Rome Ojeda, and she was dancing with him for the fourth time in an hour when her aunt came into the room and called her.
Mrs. Featherstone told her that she was annoyed beyond words, but this seemed hardly a correct statement of her case, as she proceeded to emit sharp staccato showers of them. She called her niece among other things a heartless young savage and asked her what she thought of herself, eating and dancing and flirting like that, when her sweetheart was sick and suffering. Ginger, as a matter of fact, thought very well of herself that evening; she was as hard and bright as polished metal and no more tender. Presently—in the morning, perhaps—she would be wretchedly aware of the crudeness and cruelty of her attitude; now she was unyielding.
“Oh, does he want to see me?” She shrugged, and when she did that she was all Valdés. DeanWolcott would have been reminded of a Goya painting, but Aunt Fan was too angry to be reminded of anything.
“Of course he wants to see you! Why shouldn’t he?”
“Did he ask you to bring me?” Her eyes were fathomless.
“No, he didn’t; he has too much pride, of course, but——”
“Pride!” said Ginger, bitterly. “I shouldn’t think he’d have much pride left, after to-day!”
“Now, that just shows how childish and ridiculous your standards are,” her aunt scolded. “Just because he happens not to be able to ride like a buckeroo—because he’s lived a different sort of life——”
“You don’t understand,” said Ginger. Her voice was adamant, too. “You don’t understand at all. Well—I’ll see him, for a minute.” She nodded to a hovering partner and went down the long corridor to Aleck’s room. Her aunt did not understand and she did not understand herself, all that was swaying her. It wasn’t alone that her lover had cut a sorry figure on horseback; it was that she, Ginger McVeagh, feudallady of the range, princess of the blood in the eyes of her henchmen, had said, in effect—“There is no one among you all fit to be my mate; I must have a stranger, an easterner, some one higher and finer. Now I have found him! Wait until you see him—wait, and behold why I have chosen him.” They had waited and they had beheld, and now, she knew, for all their civility about it and their good-natured inquiries about him they were amused and amazed that she should have picked Dean Wolcott; they were aghast, as she was aghast.
Old Manuela was seated beside the bed but she rose at once and waddled out into the hall. She had been waiting and watching anxiously for her mistress for an hour, and she was sure, in her simple heart, that everything would be all right now.
The big room was only dimly lit, but she could see how shockingly white and ill he looked. Nevertheless, it roused in her no whispering gentleness this time, as it had done on Christmas Day; healthy young animal that she was—she had taken mumps and measles and chicken pox onher feet and never spent an hour of daylight in bed in all her life—it rather repelled her.
He opened his eyes in time to catch something of her mood in her expression and his own face stiffened. “You shouldn’t have bothered to come; I’m quite all right. Manuela and your aunt have looked after me.” Again, he blinked his tired eyes a little, as he had at his first sight of her, months ago; she was too bright, too vivid, too glowing.
It would not have been difficult to recapture the magic of the night before; if Ginger had dropped to her knees and kissed him as she had kissed him then—if Dean had managed a ragged sentence of regret for disappointing her—’Rome Ojeda would have waited long for his next dance. But instead, she stood looking down at his pallor and limpness and he lay looking up at her scarlet cheeks and her incredible vigor, and the moment got away from them. Presently, Ginger hoped with an edge in her voice that he’d have a good night, and Dean trusted, with ice in his, that she’d have a good time.
They did their best, in the week that followed. Dean was limping about by noon and Gingerstaying at home to be with him, and they were gentle with each other, but it scared and sobered them to see that it wasn’t any use. It was as if they had been blowing bubbles together, lovely, shimmering iridescent ones, which had fallen and burst, and now they were trying to gather up the little damp spots which were left and make billowy, floating bubbles out of them again.
The truth was that they had arrived, simultaneously, at the third stage of their knowledge of each other. The first had been her breathless reverence for him, the messenger from her dead brother, the worn young visitant from another world, and his dazed recognition of her warm and vital beauty; next—when they had come together on Aleck’s bridge and in the fortnight following—she had made him into a saint and fairy prince and lover, and he—his senses smitten with loveliness, his returning strength and virility leaping to meet hers, leaning on it, mingling with it; now they were regarding each other quite clearly, with detachment. She saw a rather pale and precise young man, obviously out of drawing in her landscape, and he saw a highly colored and careless young woman who fitted so snugly intothe rough western picture that he doubted the possibility of ever seeing her against a different background.
For a little space they were painstakingly gentle with each other; then, mysteriously, irritations sprang at them out of thin air. If it made Ginger impatient to find him clumsy and inept at the things of her world, it jarred increasingly upon him to have her say, “It sure does look like we’re going to have a scorcher,” to find her utterly blank about books and plays and music. In her milder moods it seemed as if he might beguile her into reading, but the question of where to begin appalled him. It was not what she should read, but what she should have read. It was all summed up in that one sentence—the empty lack which he found in her. In her swiftly melting moods of tenderness, when she gave up a ride to stay with him in the cool oldadobe, closed against the hot air from eight o’clock in the morning, after the California tradition, she was singularly unsatisfactory as a companion, what time she was not in his arms. He discovered exactly why this was the case. She might pull off her jingling spurs and fling aside her Stetson and come into the big livingroom and sit down, and stay docilely for an hour or more—but hermindnever came indoors. That was it. She might sit as softly as her Valdés great-grandmother in Sevilla, but her whole preoccupation was with the vigorous world outside.
He began to see, reluctantly, and with a chill sense of disaster, the impermanence of their relation. While he was kissing Ginger there were no questions and no problems, but life, he was cannily sure, could not consist wholly of kissing Ginger. The house of their love had been built upon the sands; shining, golden sands, but sands for all that, and he told himself grimly—able, now and then, to stand away from his situation and see it with a saving grain of humor—that the lasting structure of his affection must be built not only upon the rock, but upon Plymouth Rock. He found himself stressing his purity of speech, professing even more ignorance than was really his with regard to horses and cattle and crops; and Ginger, for her part, let the dresses she had bought in San Francisco hang idle in her closet and strode in to supper in her worn corduroy trousers and her brown shirt.
It needed, presently, only a small weight to tipthe scales, and ’Rome Ojeda supplied it. It was a day of dry and dazzling heat, and they had planned a cool and quiet afternoon in the merciful sanctuary of the house. Ginger had brought out the old Spanish chests which had come to Dos Pozos with Rosalía Valdés and they were to revel in old Spanish laces and embroideries and jewelry, and puzzle over yellowed Spanish letters, and Dean was happier and more hopeful than he had been for days. Ginger had changed her riding things for a thin thing in yellow, and she was adorably gentle.
Then ’Rome Ojeda rode noisily up to the veranda and called them to come for a ride. He was on Pedro, leading Snort, and he said he would slip down to the corral and saddle Diablo while Ginger was changing her clothes.
It was astonishing to see how quickly the cool old room, dimly shaded, had changed into a field of hot battle. They were never able to remember subsequently, either of them, just what went before the final challenge; there must have been speeches ripe with bitterness on both sides before Dean heard himself saying slowly—like a personin a play—“Very well, then; if you go, this is the end.”
Ginger went, flinging herself into her riding suit and marching through the house with her Scotch chin held high and her Spanish mouth hard, slamming the door for good measure and springing into Snort’s saddle and loping furiously away, but she didn’t really believe it was the end. She had a very good time with ’Rome Ojeda and a wild and satisfying ride, and when she came back, four hours later, she was good-natured again. She wasn’t entirely ready to forgive Dean, but she was ready to consider forgiving him, and she went into the house to find him and tell him so.
She did not find him. She found, instead, an irate and voluble Aunt Fan who had been generating rage for hours.
“You needn’t call him,” she said. “He won’t hear you, not unless you can shout loud enough to make yourself heard at San Luis Obispo. I dare say you could, if you put your mind to it—it’s simply horrible, the way you yell to the men in the corral. Tomboys are all right and very fetching, but let me tell you, Ginger McVeagh, you’ve grown up, and tom-womenaren’tcunning at all, and if you can’t key down and act more like a lady and less like a——”
“San Luis?” Ginger stood still and looked at her. She did not seem to have heard anything else beside the name of the town. “San Luis?What’s he doing there?”
“He’s catching the Coaster to Los Angeles to-night; that’s what he’s doing there, Ginger McVeagh. And to-morrow morning he’ll be on his way to Boston, and why he hasn’t gone before, heaven only knows—I don’t. Now if you’ve got anything in your head but ’Rome Ojeda and long-horned steers and alfalfa crops you’ll stop staring at me and get——”
“Did hesayanything?” she wanted to know in a mild and wondering voice. “What did he say, Aunt Fan?”
“He said, ‘Tell her I’ve gone; she will understand,’ and he was white as a sheet. If ever anybody in this world looked like death on a pale horse, that boy did when he walked out of this house. He telephoned into town for a machine and he was packed before it got here, and he shook hands with me and with Manuelaand Ling and out he marched, and if you want my opinion, Ginger McVeagh——”
Ginger did not in the least want her opinion; she wanted Dean Wolcott, sharply and imperatively. She walked out of the corridor and into the living room where they had begun the afternoon together. The old chests were there still, and the table was spread with a litter of ancient treasures. She picked up a fichu of yellowed lace and put it down again, and a fan with sticks of carved ivory and looked at it gravely, as if she had never seen it before. It had surprised her and worried her a little to find him so warmly interested in things of that sort; she would have preferred having him clumsily ignorant about them, good-humoredly tolerant. Now, she realized, it would never need to worry her again. She stood staring down at the beautiful old things; they looked mellow and very wise. Three generations of Valdés women had used them before her, but she knew, suddenly, that she hated them and never wanted to see them again. She began to stuff them hastily back into the carved chests of dark and satiny wood, and called to Manuela to put them away in the storeroom.
Her aunt followed her before she had finished. “If you hurry,” she said urgently, “if you get out the car this minute and fly, you can catch him at San Luis!”
Ginger did not answer her for an instant. Then she said, deliberately and without passion, “I don’t want to catch him at San Luis, Aunt Fan. I don’t want to catch him—anywhere.”
Mrs. Featherstone went home to San Francisco the next day, thoroughly out of temper with her niece and heartily willing to wash her hands of her. She told her, at parting, that she had missed the one golden and handsome opportunity of her life which was far beyond her deserts, and that she would never have another such and it served her right; she sincerely hoped she would marry ’Rome Ojeda and have seven wild children, all born with spurs on. It sounded like the laying on of a robust old-fashioned curse.
Ginger let Estrada drive her aunt in to town to take her train. She was very tired of being berated; she didn’t want to talk about Dean Wolcott any more and she didn’t want to think about him any more. She went steadily about the businessof Dos Pozos in the days that followed; old Manuela wiped her eyes furtively and burned three candles to the saint of the impossible, and Estrada was gravely regretful.
“I miss very much that youngseñor,” he said to his silent mistress. “That is a very fine gentleman,Señorita.”
There were many inquiries for him at first among her rancher neighbors, but after she had said—“He has gone. No, he is not coming back,” to a few of them, the word went over the whole vicinity; they stopped asking for him, and they were immensely cordial and approving in their manner to Ginger.
’Rome Ojeda showed less restraint; he was openly triumphant about it. “Snappy work,” he said to Ginger, with his flashing grin. “I guess maybe we didn’t show him up, between us, me’n Snort! Say, I’m a-goin’ to get that hawse a medal! He sure did spill the Boston beans!”
Ginger listened to him at first without comment, but she said, presently, “’Rome, he was Aleck’s friend; I’m never going to forget that.”
“Lord,” said ’Rome Ojeda, comfortably, “I guess a feller’d bunk in with ’most anybody, overthere.” But he stopped talking about Dean Wolcott and he did not immediately urge his own claims. There was something about Ginger, about her looks and her voice, that he didn’t quite understand. He told himself that he’d better just let things loaf along, “as was,” for the present.
Dr. Gurney Mayfield made a detour to take in Dos Pozos on his motor trip next month. He was greatly surprised and disappointed not to find his young friend, Dean Wolcott.
“Well, well,” he said, regretfully, “so Dean had to go home, did he? Well, I expect he had to get back to business. How was he feeling?”
“He seemed to be feeling all right,” said Ginger briefly.
“That’s good,” said the doctor, heartily, “that’sgood! You know, Ginger, that boy isn’t out of the woods yet, not by a long sight. Shell shock ... meanest thing in the world to get over, clear over! They’ll think they are fit as a fiddle, and then let something out of the ordinary happen—some slight shock, or strain or overexertion— By the way, Dean didn’t do any rough stuff here,did he? I thought afterward that I should have warned him, but it never occurred to me that he’d try it. Did he?”
“What do you mean by rough stuff?” said Ginger. Her voice was very low, and she did not look at him.
“Oh—hard riding—all-day-in-the-saddle trips—anything that would tire him beyond his strength, you know. It’ll be many a long day before he’s absolutely himself again—body or brain. Was he pretty careful and sensible? I know how hard it is to make these young chaps take care of themselves, but I expect you could manage him, Ginger!” He twinkled upon her, kindly. It was one of the dozen excellent reasons for his belovedness that Dr. Gurney Mayfield always fitted people out with the best possible motives and intentions. He presupposed them to have justice and fairness and gentleness and good will, just as certainly as they had tonsils and livers and lungs and spines, and he confidently expected to see the manifestations of them.
“I don’t believe I—managed him—very carefully,” said Ginger. She did not meet his eyes. “I expect he did—overdo, sometimes.”
Manuela came in, then, to say that dinner was waiting, and Ginger jumped up thankfully and hurried the doctor in to the table, and she began to talk briskly about her Aunt Fan and to ask interested questions about his summer camp in Monterey County, and it was not until he was well on his way again that Dr. Mayfield realized how skillfully she had kept the talk away from the subject of Dean Wolcott.