CHAPTER VII.Three RingsRevenge. Out of all that crazy conversation the one word kept pestering me like a leaking faucet. No matter what I was doing, or thinking, that word, revenge, kept drip, drip, dripping, until my mind was fairly drenched with it. I got all mixed up about it. Did people revenge other people, or have revenge on them, or—what? I looked it up in the dictionary. “Malicious injuring in return for an injury or offense received.”I got a piece of paper and wrote it down. “The Canneziano girls want to injure, maliciously, some one on the Desert Moon Ranch, in return for an injury or an offense received.” I crossed out “The Canneziano girls,” and wrote, “Gabrielle Canneziano,” since Danny had said that she had never considered that side of it at all. It did not help any. It did not make sense.Since Sam and I were the only people on the ranch they had known before they came here this time, it seemed as if they had come to injure, maliciously, one of us. I had never done either of them a mite of harm in my life. Sam had never done anything but good for them. Of course, Sam had not been very gentle with their father. But, as I took pains to discover, neither of them had any kind feelings for their father. Gaby said, straight out, that she hated him. Danny, who was too gentle speaking to use such a word as hate, said that she had never liked him, never loved him. Both of them laid their mother’s death at Canneziano’s door. They thought that his cruelty and his neglect had killed her. It was senseless to suppose that they were harboring a grudge against Sam for anything that he had ever done to Canneziano.Of course, I see now that all that part of it was as plain as the Roman nose on Hubert Hand’s face. How I missed seeing it, even then, I don’t know. I was, I guess, like a little boy so busy trying to watch all three rings at the circus at one time that he missed the elephant parade.The Desert Moon was like that sure enough; like a three ring circus, during the months of May and June. There were the girls, everlastingly searching for something: leaving the house shortly after the men left it, each morning; returning, tired out, just in time for dinner; off again for the afternoon, and coming home just in time to pretty up for supper. After a while, I began to lose interest in that; and, being a woman, I allowed my attention to become distracted by the center ring where all the love interest was going on.Not that Danny and John were interesting. If there is anything that will make two people duller to all other people than being engaged to each other, I am sure I don’t know what it is. Gaby’s unceasing efforts to win John away from Danny were interesting enough, I suppose, to folks who can stand to look at that sort of thing. Personally, I shut my eyes to it as much as possible. Most of my attention I gave to the clown in the ring—to Chad.I can not explain it, now or ever; but Chad, from the very first, was head over heels in love with Gaby. He had no more chance of winning her, penniless, funny, kind little fellow that he was, than an amateur has of riding an outlaw pony. I told him that, once, in those very words.“I know it, Mary,” he said. “But you are wrong about one thing. I’m not riding for a fall. I’m not even mounted. I know I haven’t a chance with her. I know I can’t pull one of those stars out of the sky up there with a fishhook. I’m not trying. But I can sit here in the dark and look at the stars, can’t I? Stars make all the difference—in the dark. And, maybe, sometime I can serve her in someway. That’s all I ask. . . .” So on. If it hadn’t been Chad, and therefore heartbreaking, it would have been downright funny.She never gave him two looks. He couldn’t even make her laugh with his jokes and his songs, as he could the rest of us. Once she did deign to allow him to try to teach her the trick of his ventriloquism. She could not learn it, and she was furious with him, and said that he did not want her to learn it. But he followed her about, and waited on her. He brought her pony up to the house, instead of allowing one of the outfit to do it. He brought her desert flowers, which she tossed away to wither. If Connie hadn’t had a strong constitution he would have worn her out, taking pictures of Gaby. Page after page in his album filled with, “Gaby by the window;” “Gaby on the porch;” “Gaby and Danny starting on a walk;” “Gaby in riding costume;” Gaby here, there, and everywhere. And Martha half mad with jealousy.Right at first, I think that some of the others thought that Martha’s jealousy was something of a joke. I never did think so. Before long we all began to feel that it was more than a little serious. Sam talked to Chad, and to Gaby about it. Chad did the best he could, after that, to be as attentive to Martha as he had been before; but, if he so much as opened a door for Gaby, Martha would go into temper fits, and sulking spells.As for Gaby, Sam’s talk with her made things worse. She had never noticed Chad at all, so she had not noticed that Martha was jealous of him. She welcomed the news as another tool she could use to tease and torment the poor girl. All along she had delighted in teasing and tormenting Martha, though she had dared not do it when Sam was present.The very evening after Sam had talked to her in the morning, Gaby went and sat beside Chad and curled his pretty, yellow curls around her finger.It was a cloudy evening, not chilly; but Sam had lighted the fire as he always does when he has half an excuse, and Martha was sitting in front of it, pretending to read a magazine. She had been pretending to read that same magazine, on the same page, for the last five years. She seemed to get pleasure out of sitting and holding it in her hands. No other magazine would do.Of a sudden, this evening, she thrust the magazine in the flames for an instant, jerked it out, and rushed at Gaby with the burning torch. No harm was done. John snatched it and tossed it back into the fireplace. But all of us, except Gaby, had the good sense to be thoroughly frightened.Things weren’t ever quite the same for Martha after that. No other magazine, or picture book, would take the place of the one she had burned. She would wander about the house, evenings, quietly, but restless, like a cat who had lost her kittens.One of Gaby’s pleasant little ways was to refer to Martha as an idiot, right before her face.“La-la!” Gaby exclaimed one evening, when Martha was wandering about. “The idiot gets on my nerves. Can’t you make her keep still, Mrs. Ricker?”“She isn’t harming anyone,” I said, since Mrs. Ricker, as usual, said nothing. “You leave her alone, and stop talking like that, Miss.”“I’m not harming anyone, now,” Martha piped up. “But someday I might. I’d like to. I won’t, though,” she walked over close to Gaby, “if you’ll give me the gold monkey. I’ll be good then, for always.”It was a bracelet charm of Gaby’s, a gold monkey, about the size of a large almond, with jade eyes. The minute Martha had seen it she had begun to beg for it. There weren’t any monkeys in the jewelry catalogs, but Sam sent off and got her a bear and a turtle. She wouldn’t have any truck with them. She wanted that one, particular monkey. Gaby would not give it to her; would not so much as allow her to wear it for a few hours at a time. As usual, this evening, she refused to let Martha touch it.“Yes, and you’ll be sorry,” Martha threatened.She went upstairs and emptied a can of pepper in Gaby’s handkerchief box.She was always playing tricks of the sort on Gaby, if we did not watch her. For my own part, I wouldn’t have bothered with watching her but for the fact that, more than often, she got the two girls mixed up and it was Danny whose pretty dress would be tied to the chair to tear, instead of Gaby’s; or Danny’s hair would receive the contents of Chad’s paste-pot; and then Martha, discovering her mistake, would make herself ill with crying and remorse. Just as she had hated Gaby from the start, she had loved Danny; but she could not tell them apart.It seemed incredible that even Martha could be confused about the two girls; because, if ever girls were opposites, those girls were. Of course, they were the same size, about five feet and two inches tall, I should judge, and the same weight—both of them too skinny to my way of thinking, flat as bread-boards. Their faces, just their faces, did look alike. They both had long brown eyes, straight noses, small mouths—Gaby painted her lips until they looked much fuller and more curved than Danny’s—pointed chins, and complexions the color of real light caramel frosting. Danny’s cheeks showed a faint pink, coming and going. Gaby painted her cheekbones, clear back to her ears, with a deep orange-pink color. They both had wavy, dark brown hair, cut just the same in the back, real close fitting and down to a point. But Gaby brushed her hair straight back from her forehead, and put varnish stuff on it till it was as sleek and shining as patent leather. She left all of her ears showing, and she always wore big earrings, dangling from them. Danny parted her hair on the side, and allowed it to wave, loose and soft and pretty. She never wore earrings. Gaby’s clothes were all loud colored, or seemed to be—black turned gaudy when she put it on—and they were all insecure appearing, too defiant of paper patterns to be quite moral. Danny’s clothes were as neat and quiet as a pigeon’s.No wonder that these frequent mistakes of Martha’s made me decide that she was losing her eyesight. I spoke to Sam about it, suggesting that Mrs. Ricker would better take her to San Francisco to visit an oculist.According to his usual custom, Sam laughed at me. He said that he had about concluded that Martha was the only one on the place who could use her eyes to see deeper than gee-gaws and fol-de-rols.“If you are insinuating,” I said, “that those two girls are alike in any respect, inside or outside, you’ve lost your senses.”“Why shouldn’t they be alike?” Sam questioned. “They are twin sisters. They were brought up together, they have had the same friends, the same teaching, the same environments. Of course they are alike. One of them is play-acting. I don’t know which one. I suspect Danielle, on account of John.”I may as well state, right here, that all of this remark of Sam’s, with the exception of the girls being twin sisters, was a mistake from beginning to end. I didn’t, at that time, know much of anything about their past lives. I did know their present characters. I told him so.He laughed again, and wanted to know what had become of all my theories concerning our modern young girls. Ever since the war, I had been standing up for them, through thick and thin.“It takes a pretty stout theory,” I admitted, “to hear a young lady called a ‘damn good sport,’ and see her receive it as a choice compliment.”“Who said that to who?” Sam wanted to know.“Who do you suppose? Hubert Hand to Gaby, of course.”“Hubert Hand,” Sam said, “had better behave himself.”Since Hubert Hand was too selfish ever to love anything that his Roman nose wasn’t attached to, his carryings on with Gaby should be classed, I think, not in the center ring, but as the main attraction of the third ring. And he almost old enough to be her father, with white coming into his hair at his temples!To this day I have never understood those two, during those months. Gaby was in love with John. Hubert Hand was in love with Hubert Hand. Yet they hugged and kissed, and seemed to think that calling it “necking” made it respectable. It wasn’t a flirtation, with them. It was more like a fight, where each of them was fighting for something they did not want. A perfectly footless, none too wholesome performance.“You make him behave himself, Sam,” I urged.“He is free, white and twenty-one. And she sure can take care of herself, if ever a girl could. It’s none of my put-in.”“What about the rest of us,” I said, “forced to watch such goings on?”“Don’t watch. If you watch Belle, and Sadie and Goldie, that is watching enough for one woman.”Belle, Sadie and Goldie were the Indian women I had, at that time, to help me around the place. I suppose they were pretty good girls. They did all the actual work there was to do around the house, except the cooking, with me directing them every step they took. But when I remember how they all deserted me, in the time of our terrible trouble, it makes me so fighting mad that I don’t like to give them credit for anything, nor think about them at all, even yet.
Revenge. Out of all that crazy conversation the one word kept pestering me like a leaking faucet. No matter what I was doing, or thinking, that word, revenge, kept drip, drip, dripping, until my mind was fairly drenched with it. I got all mixed up about it. Did people revenge other people, or have revenge on them, or—what? I looked it up in the dictionary. “Malicious injuring in return for an injury or offense received.”
I got a piece of paper and wrote it down. “The Canneziano girls want to injure, maliciously, some one on the Desert Moon Ranch, in return for an injury or an offense received.” I crossed out “The Canneziano girls,” and wrote, “Gabrielle Canneziano,” since Danny had said that she had never considered that side of it at all. It did not help any. It did not make sense.
Since Sam and I were the only people on the ranch they had known before they came here this time, it seemed as if they had come to injure, maliciously, one of us. I had never done either of them a mite of harm in my life. Sam had never done anything but good for them. Of course, Sam had not been very gentle with their father. But, as I took pains to discover, neither of them had any kind feelings for their father. Gaby said, straight out, that she hated him. Danny, who was too gentle speaking to use such a word as hate, said that she had never liked him, never loved him. Both of them laid their mother’s death at Canneziano’s door. They thought that his cruelty and his neglect had killed her. It was senseless to suppose that they were harboring a grudge against Sam for anything that he had ever done to Canneziano.
Of course, I see now that all that part of it was as plain as the Roman nose on Hubert Hand’s face. How I missed seeing it, even then, I don’t know. I was, I guess, like a little boy so busy trying to watch all three rings at the circus at one time that he missed the elephant parade.
The Desert Moon was like that sure enough; like a three ring circus, during the months of May and June. There were the girls, everlastingly searching for something: leaving the house shortly after the men left it, each morning; returning, tired out, just in time for dinner; off again for the afternoon, and coming home just in time to pretty up for supper. After a while, I began to lose interest in that; and, being a woman, I allowed my attention to become distracted by the center ring where all the love interest was going on.
Not that Danny and John were interesting. If there is anything that will make two people duller to all other people than being engaged to each other, I am sure I don’t know what it is. Gaby’s unceasing efforts to win John away from Danny were interesting enough, I suppose, to folks who can stand to look at that sort of thing. Personally, I shut my eyes to it as much as possible. Most of my attention I gave to the clown in the ring—to Chad.
I can not explain it, now or ever; but Chad, from the very first, was head over heels in love with Gaby. He had no more chance of winning her, penniless, funny, kind little fellow that he was, than an amateur has of riding an outlaw pony. I told him that, once, in those very words.
“I know it, Mary,” he said. “But you are wrong about one thing. I’m not riding for a fall. I’m not even mounted. I know I haven’t a chance with her. I know I can’t pull one of those stars out of the sky up there with a fishhook. I’m not trying. But I can sit here in the dark and look at the stars, can’t I? Stars make all the difference—in the dark. And, maybe, sometime I can serve her in someway. That’s all I ask. . . .” So on. If it hadn’t been Chad, and therefore heartbreaking, it would have been downright funny.
She never gave him two looks. He couldn’t even make her laugh with his jokes and his songs, as he could the rest of us. Once she did deign to allow him to try to teach her the trick of his ventriloquism. She could not learn it, and she was furious with him, and said that he did not want her to learn it. But he followed her about, and waited on her. He brought her pony up to the house, instead of allowing one of the outfit to do it. He brought her desert flowers, which she tossed away to wither. If Connie hadn’t had a strong constitution he would have worn her out, taking pictures of Gaby. Page after page in his album filled with, “Gaby by the window;” “Gaby on the porch;” “Gaby and Danny starting on a walk;” “Gaby in riding costume;” Gaby here, there, and everywhere. And Martha half mad with jealousy.
Right at first, I think that some of the others thought that Martha’s jealousy was something of a joke. I never did think so. Before long we all began to feel that it was more than a little serious. Sam talked to Chad, and to Gaby about it. Chad did the best he could, after that, to be as attentive to Martha as he had been before; but, if he so much as opened a door for Gaby, Martha would go into temper fits, and sulking spells.
As for Gaby, Sam’s talk with her made things worse. She had never noticed Chad at all, so she had not noticed that Martha was jealous of him. She welcomed the news as another tool she could use to tease and torment the poor girl. All along she had delighted in teasing and tormenting Martha, though she had dared not do it when Sam was present.
The very evening after Sam had talked to her in the morning, Gaby went and sat beside Chad and curled his pretty, yellow curls around her finger.
It was a cloudy evening, not chilly; but Sam had lighted the fire as he always does when he has half an excuse, and Martha was sitting in front of it, pretending to read a magazine. She had been pretending to read that same magazine, on the same page, for the last five years. She seemed to get pleasure out of sitting and holding it in her hands. No other magazine would do.
Of a sudden, this evening, she thrust the magazine in the flames for an instant, jerked it out, and rushed at Gaby with the burning torch. No harm was done. John snatched it and tossed it back into the fireplace. But all of us, except Gaby, had the good sense to be thoroughly frightened.
Things weren’t ever quite the same for Martha after that. No other magazine, or picture book, would take the place of the one she had burned. She would wander about the house, evenings, quietly, but restless, like a cat who had lost her kittens.
One of Gaby’s pleasant little ways was to refer to Martha as an idiot, right before her face.
“La-la!” Gaby exclaimed one evening, when Martha was wandering about. “The idiot gets on my nerves. Can’t you make her keep still, Mrs. Ricker?”
“She isn’t harming anyone,” I said, since Mrs. Ricker, as usual, said nothing. “You leave her alone, and stop talking like that, Miss.”
“I’m not harming anyone, now,” Martha piped up. “But someday I might. I’d like to. I won’t, though,” she walked over close to Gaby, “if you’ll give me the gold monkey. I’ll be good then, for always.”
It was a bracelet charm of Gaby’s, a gold monkey, about the size of a large almond, with jade eyes. The minute Martha had seen it she had begun to beg for it. There weren’t any monkeys in the jewelry catalogs, but Sam sent off and got her a bear and a turtle. She wouldn’t have any truck with them. She wanted that one, particular monkey. Gaby would not give it to her; would not so much as allow her to wear it for a few hours at a time. As usual, this evening, she refused to let Martha touch it.
“Yes, and you’ll be sorry,” Martha threatened.
She went upstairs and emptied a can of pepper in Gaby’s handkerchief box.
She was always playing tricks of the sort on Gaby, if we did not watch her. For my own part, I wouldn’t have bothered with watching her but for the fact that, more than often, she got the two girls mixed up and it was Danny whose pretty dress would be tied to the chair to tear, instead of Gaby’s; or Danny’s hair would receive the contents of Chad’s paste-pot; and then Martha, discovering her mistake, would make herself ill with crying and remorse. Just as she had hated Gaby from the start, she had loved Danny; but she could not tell them apart.
It seemed incredible that even Martha could be confused about the two girls; because, if ever girls were opposites, those girls were. Of course, they were the same size, about five feet and two inches tall, I should judge, and the same weight—both of them too skinny to my way of thinking, flat as bread-boards. Their faces, just their faces, did look alike. They both had long brown eyes, straight noses, small mouths—Gaby painted her lips until they looked much fuller and more curved than Danny’s—pointed chins, and complexions the color of real light caramel frosting. Danny’s cheeks showed a faint pink, coming and going. Gaby painted her cheekbones, clear back to her ears, with a deep orange-pink color. They both had wavy, dark brown hair, cut just the same in the back, real close fitting and down to a point. But Gaby brushed her hair straight back from her forehead, and put varnish stuff on it till it was as sleek and shining as patent leather. She left all of her ears showing, and she always wore big earrings, dangling from them. Danny parted her hair on the side, and allowed it to wave, loose and soft and pretty. She never wore earrings. Gaby’s clothes were all loud colored, or seemed to be—black turned gaudy when she put it on—and they were all insecure appearing, too defiant of paper patterns to be quite moral. Danny’s clothes were as neat and quiet as a pigeon’s.
No wonder that these frequent mistakes of Martha’s made me decide that she was losing her eyesight. I spoke to Sam about it, suggesting that Mrs. Ricker would better take her to San Francisco to visit an oculist.
According to his usual custom, Sam laughed at me. He said that he had about concluded that Martha was the only one on the place who could use her eyes to see deeper than gee-gaws and fol-de-rols.
“If you are insinuating,” I said, “that those two girls are alike in any respect, inside or outside, you’ve lost your senses.”
“Why shouldn’t they be alike?” Sam questioned. “They are twin sisters. They were brought up together, they have had the same friends, the same teaching, the same environments. Of course they are alike. One of them is play-acting. I don’t know which one. I suspect Danielle, on account of John.”
I may as well state, right here, that all of this remark of Sam’s, with the exception of the girls being twin sisters, was a mistake from beginning to end. I didn’t, at that time, know much of anything about their past lives. I did know their present characters. I told him so.
He laughed again, and wanted to know what had become of all my theories concerning our modern young girls. Ever since the war, I had been standing up for them, through thick and thin.
“It takes a pretty stout theory,” I admitted, “to hear a young lady called a ‘damn good sport,’ and see her receive it as a choice compliment.”
“Who said that to who?” Sam wanted to know.
“Who do you suppose? Hubert Hand to Gaby, of course.”
“Hubert Hand,” Sam said, “had better behave himself.”
Since Hubert Hand was too selfish ever to love anything that his Roman nose wasn’t attached to, his carryings on with Gaby should be classed, I think, not in the center ring, but as the main attraction of the third ring. And he almost old enough to be her father, with white coming into his hair at his temples!
To this day I have never understood those two, during those months. Gaby was in love with John. Hubert Hand was in love with Hubert Hand. Yet they hugged and kissed, and seemed to think that calling it “necking” made it respectable. It wasn’t a flirtation, with them. It was more like a fight, where each of them was fighting for something they did not want. A perfectly footless, none too wholesome performance.
“You make him behave himself, Sam,” I urged.
“He is free, white and twenty-one. And she sure can take care of herself, if ever a girl could. It’s none of my put-in.”
“What about the rest of us,” I said, “forced to watch such goings on?”
“Don’t watch. If you watch Belle, and Sadie and Goldie, that is watching enough for one woman.”
Belle, Sadie and Goldie were the Indian women I had, at that time, to help me around the place. I suppose they were pretty good girls. They did all the actual work there was to do around the house, except the cooking, with me directing them every step they took. But when I remember how they all deserted me, in the time of our terrible trouble, it makes me so fighting mad that I don’t like to give them credit for anything, nor think about them at all, even yet.