The girl stood looking at the ingenious forger with an odd, breathless smile. It was difficult to determine, however, if gratified curiosity were not its most dominant expression.
“And you've got a wife—and THAT'S her?” she resumed.
“Yes.”
“Where did you first meet her? Who is she?”
“She's an actress—mighty popular in 'Frisco—I mean New York. Lot o' chaps tried to get her—I cut 'em out. For all dad's trying to keep me at Dawson's—I ain't such a fool, eh?”
Nevertheless, as he stood there stroking his fair mustache, his astuteness did not seem to impress his sister to enthusiastic assent. Yet she did not relax her breathless, inquisitive smile as she went on:—
“And what are you going to do about dad?”
He turned upon her querulously.
“Well, that's what I want to talk about.”
“You'll catch it!” she said impressively. But here her brother's nervousness broke out into a weak, impotent fury. It was evident, too, that in spite of its apparent spontaneous irritation its intent was studied. Catch it! Would he? Oh, yes! Well, she'd see WHO'D catch it! Not him. No, he'd had enough of this meanness, and wanted it ended! He wasn't a woman to be treated like his sister,—like their mother—like their brother, if it came to that, for he knew how he was to be brought back to take Bijah's place in the spring; he'd heard the whole story. No, he was going to stand up for his rights,—he was going to be treated as the son of a man who was worth half a million ought to be treated! He wasn't going to be skimped, while his father was wallowing in money that he didn't know what to do with,—money that by rights ought to have been given to their mother and their sister. Why, even the law wouldn't permit such meanness—if he was dead. No, he'd come back with Lottie, his wife, to show his father that there was one of the family that couldn't be fooled and bullied, and wouldn't put up with it any longer. There was going to be a fair division of the property, and his sister Annie's property, and hers—Zuleika's—too, if she'd have the pluck to speak up for herself. All this and much more he said. Yet even while his small fury was genuine and characteristic, there was such an evident incongruity between himself and his speech that it seemed to fit him loosely, and in a measure flapped in his gestures like another's garment. Zuleika, who had exhibited neither disgust nor sympathy with his rebellion, but had rather appeared to enjoy it as a novel domestic performance, the morality of which devolved solely upon the performer, retained her curious smile. And then a knock at the door startled them.
It was the stranger,—slightly apologetic and still humorous, but firm and self-confident withal. She was sorry to interrupt their family council, but the fire was going out where she sat, and she would like a cup of tea or some refreshment. She did not look at Jack, but, completely ignoring him, addressed herself to Zuleika with what seemed to be a direct challenge; in that feminine eye-grapple there was a quick, instinctive, and final struggle between the two women. The stranger triumphed. Zuleika's vacant smile changed to one of submission, and then, equally ignoring her brother in this double defeat, she hastened to the kitchen to do the visitor's bidding. The woman closed the door behind her, and took Zuleika's place before the fire.
“Well?” she said, in a half-contemptuous toleration.
“Well?” said Jack, in an equally ill-disguised discontent, but an evident desire to placate the woman before him. “It's all right, you know. I've had my say. It'll come right, Lottie, you'll see.”
The woman smiled again, and glanced around the bare walls of the room.
“And I suppose,” she said, drily, “when it comes right I'm to take the place of your sister in the charge of this workhouse and succeed to the keys of that safe in the other room?”
“It'll come all right, I tell you; you can fix things up here any way you'll like when we get the old man straight,” said Jack, with the iteration of feebleness. “And as to that safe, I've seen it chock full of securities.”
“It'll hold one less to-night,” she said, looking at the fire.
“What are you talking about?” he asked, in querulous suspicion.
She drew a paper from her pocket.
“It's that draft of yours that you were crazy enough to sign Dawson's name to. It was lying out there on the desk. I reckon it isn't a thing you care to have kept as evidence, even by your father.”
She held it in the flames until it was consumed.
“By Jove, your head is level, Lottie!” he said, with an admiration that was not, however, without a weak reserve of suspicion.
“No, it isn't, or I wouldn't be here,” she said, curtly. Then she added, as if dismissing the subject, “Well, what did you tell her?”
“Oh, I said I met you in New York. You see I thought she might think it queer if she knew I only met you in San Francisco three weeks ago. Of course I said we were married.”
She looked at him with weary astonishment.
“And of course, whether things go right or not, she'll find out that I've got a husband living, that I never met you in New York, but on the steamer, and that you've lied. I don't see the USE of it. You said you were going to tell the whole thing squarely and say the truth, and that's why I came to help you.”
“Yes; but don't you see, hang it all!” he stammered, in the irritation of weak confusion, “I had to tell her SOMETHING. Father won't dare to tell her the truth, no more than he will the neighbors. He'll hush it up, you bet; and when we get this thing fixed you'll go and get your divorce, you know, and we'll be married privately on the square.”
He looked so vague, so immature, yet so fatuously self-confident, that the woman extended her hand with a laugh and tapped him on the back as she might have patted a dog. Then she disappeared to follow Zuleika in the kitchen.
When the two women returned together they were evidently on the best of terms. So much so that the man, with the easy reaction of a shallow nature, became sanguine and exalted, even to an ostentatious exhibition of those New York graces on which the paternal Hays had set such store. He complacently explained the methods by which he had deceived Dr. Dawson; how he had himself written a letter from his father commanding him to return to take his brother's place, and how he had shown it to the Doctor and been three months in San Francisco looking for work and assisting Lottie at the theatre, until a conviction of the righteousness of his cause, perhaps combined with the fact that they were also short of money and she had no engagement, impelled him to his present heroic step. All of which Zuleika listened to with childish interest, but superior appreciation of his companion. The fact that this woman was an actress, an abomination vaguely alluded to by her father as being even more mysteriously wicked than her sister and mother, and correspondingly exciting, as offering a possible permanent relief to the monotony of her home life, seemed to excuse her brother's weakness. She was almost ready to become his partisan—AFTER she had seen her father.
They had talked largely of their plans; they had settled small details of the future and the arrangement of the property; they had agreed that Zuleika should be relieved of her household drudgery, and sent to a fashionable school in San Francisco with a music teacher and a dressmaker. They had discussed everything but the precise manner in which the revelation should be conveyed to Hays. There was still plenty of time for that, for he would not return until to-morrow at noon, and it was already tacitly understood that the vehicle of transmission should be a letter from the Summit Hotel. The possible contingency of a sudden outburst of human passion not entirely controlled by religious feeling was to be guarded against.
They were sitting comfortably before the replenished fire; the wind was still moaning in the chimney, when, suddenly, in a lull of the storm the sound of sleigh-bells seemed to fill the room. It was followed by a voice from without, and, with a hysterical cry, Zuleika started to her feet. The same breathless smile with which she had greeted her brother an hour ago was upon her lips as she gasped:—
“Lord, save us!—but it's dad come back!”
I grieve to say that here the doughty redresser of domestic wrongs and retriever of the family honor lapsed white-faced in his chair idealess and tremulous. It was his frailer companion who rose to the occasion and even partly dragged him with her. “Go back to the hotel,” she said quickly, “and take the sled with you,—you are not fit to face him now! But he does not know ME, and I will stay!” To the staring Zuleika: “I am a stranger stopped by a broken sleigh on my way to the hotel. Leave the rest to me. Now clear out, both of you. I'll let him in.”
She looked so confident, self-contained, and superior, that the thought of opposition never entered their minds, and as an impatient rapping rose from the door they let her, with a half-impatient, half-laughing gesture, drive them before her from the room. When they had disappeared in the distance, she turned to the front door, unbolted and opened it. Hays blundered in out of the snow with a muttered exclamation, and then, as the light from the open office door revealed a stranger, started and fell back.
“Miss Hays is busy,” said the woman quietly, “I am afraid, on my account. But my sleigh broke down on the way to the hotel and I was forced to get out here. I suppose this is Mr. Hays?”
A strange woman—by her dress and appearance a very worldling—and even braver in looks and apparel than many he had seen in the cities—seemed, in spite of all his precautions, to have fallen short of the hotel and been precipitated upon him! Yet under the influence of some odd abstraction he was affected by it less than he could have believed. He even achieved a rude bow as he bolted the door and ushered her into the office. More than that, he found himself explaining to the fair trespasser the reasons of his return to his own home. For, like a direct man, he had a consciousness of some inconsistency in his return—or in the circumstances that induced a change of plans which might conscientiously require an explanation.
“You see, ma'am, a rather singular thing happened to me after I passed the summit. Three times I lost the track, got off it somehow, and found myself traveling in a circle. The third time, when I struck my own tracks again, I concluded I'd just follow them back here. I suppose I might have got the road again by tryin' and fightin' the snow—but ther's some things not worth the fightin'. This was a matter of business, and, after all, ma'am, business ain't everythin', is it?”
He was evidently in some unusual mood, the mood that with certain reticent natures often compels them to make their brief confidences to utter strangers rather than impart them to those intimate friends who might remind them of their weakness. She agreed with him pleasantly, but not so obviously as to excite suspicion. “And you preferred to let your business go, and come back to the comfort of your own home and family.”
“The comfort of my home and family?” he repeated in a dry, deliberate voice. “Well, I reckon I ain't been tempted much by THAT. That isn't what I meant.” But he went back to the phrase, repeating it grimly, as if it were some mandatory text. “The comfort of my OWN HOME AND FAMILY! Well, Satan hasn't set THAT trap for my feet yet, ma'am. No; ye saw my daughter? well, that's all my family; ye see this room? that's all my home. My wife ran away from me; my daughter cleared out too, my eldest son as was with me here has quo'lled with me and reckons to set up a rival business agin me. No,” he said, still more meditatively and deliberately; “it wasn't to come back to the comforts of my own home and family that I faced round on Heavy Tree Hill, I reckon.”
As the woman, for certain reasons, had no desire to check this auspicious and unlooked for confidence, she waited patiently. Hays remained silent for an instant, warming his hands before the fire, and then looked up interrogatively.
“A professor of religion, ma'am, or under conviction?”
“Not exactly,” said the lady smiling.
“Excuse me, but in spite of your fine clothes I reckoned you had a serious look just now. A reader of Scripture, may be?”
“I know the Bible.”
“You remember when the angel with the flamin' sword appeared unto Saul on the road to Damascus?”
“Yes.”
“It mout hev been suthin' in that style that stopped me,” he said slowly and tentatively. “Though nat'rally I didn't SEE anything, and only had the queer feelin'. It might hev been THAT shied my mare off the track.”
“But Saul was up to some wickedness, wasn't he?” said the lady smilingly, “while YOU were simply going somewhere on business?”
“Yes,” said Hays thoughtfully, “but my BUSINESS might hev seemed like persecution. I don't mind tellin' you what it was if you'd care to listen. But mebbe you're tired. Mebbe you want to retire. You know,” he went on with a sudden hospitable outburst, “you needn't be in any hurry to go; we kin take care of you here to-night, and it'll cost you nothin'. And I'll send you on with my sleigh in the mornin'. Per'aps you'd like suthin' to eat—a cup of tea—or—I'll call Zuleika;” and he rose with an expression of awkward courtesy.
But the lady, albeit with a self-satisfied sparkle in her dark eyes, here carelessly assured him that Zuleika had already given her refreshment, and, indeed, was at that moment preparing her own room for her. She begged he would not interrupt his interesting story.
Hays looked relieved.
“Well, I reckon I won't call her, for what I was goin' to say ain't exackly the sort o' thin' for an innocent, simple sort o' thing like her to hear—I mean,” he interrupted himself hastily—“that folks of more experience of the world like you and me don't mind speakin' of—I'm sorter takin' it for granted that you're a married woman, ma'am.”
The lady, who had regarded him with a sudden rigidity, here relaxed her expression and nodded.
“Well,” continued Hays, resuming his place by the fire, “you see this yer man I was goin' to see lives about four miles beyond the summit on a ranch that furnishes most of the hay for the stock that side of the Divide. He's bin holdin' off his next year's contracts with me, hopin' to make better terms from the prospects of a late spring and higher prices. He held his head mighty high and talked big of waitin' his own time. I happened to know he couldn't do it.”
He put his hands on his knees and stared at the fire, and then went on:—
“Ye see this man had had crosses and family trials. He had a wife that left him to jine a lot of bally dancers and painted women in the 'Frisco playhouses when he was livin' in the southern country. You'll say that was like MY own case,—and mebbe that was why it came to him to tell me about it,—but the difference betwixt HIM and ME was that instead of restin' unto the Lord and findin' Him, and pluckin' out the eye that offended him 'cordin' to Scripter, as I did, HE followed after HER tryin' to get her back, until, findin' that wasn't no use, he took a big disgust and came up here to hide hisself, where there wasn't no playhouse nor play-actors, and no wimmen but Injin squaws. He pre-empted the land, and nat'rally, there bein' no one ez cared to live there but himself, he had it all his own way, made it pay, and, as I was sayin' before, held his head high for prices. Well—you ain't gettin' tired, ma'am?”
“No,” said the lady, resting her cheek on her hand and gazing on the fire, “it's all very interesting; and so odd that you two men, with nearly the same experiences, should be neighbors.”
“Say buyer and seller, ma'am, not neighbors—at least Scriptoorily—nor friends. Well,—now this is where the Speshal Providence comes in,—only this afternoon Jim Briggs, hearin' me speak of Horseley's offishness”—
“WHOSE offishness?” asked the lady.
“Horseley's offishness,—Horseley's the name of the man I'm talkin' about. Well, hearin' that, he says: 'You hold on, Hays, and he'll climb down. That wife of his has left the stage—got sick of it—and is driftin' round in 'Frisco with some fellow. When Horseley gets to hear that, you can't keep him here,—he'll settle up, sell out, and realize on everything he's got to go after her agin,—you bet.' That's what Briggs said. Well, that's what sent me up to Horseley's to-night—to get there, drop the news, and then pin him down to that contract.”
“It looked like a good stroke of business and a fair one,” said the lady in an odd voice. It was so odd that Hays looked up. But she had somewhat altered her position, and was gazing at the ceiling, and with her hand to her face seemed to have just recovered from a slight yawn, at which he hesitated with a new and timid sense of politeness.
“You're gettin' tired, ma'am?”
“Oh dear, no!” she said in the same voice, but clearing her throat with a little cough. “And why didn't you see this Mr. Horseley after all? Oh, I forgot!—you said you changed your mind from something you'd heard.”
He had turned his eyes to the fire again, but without noticing as he did so that she slowly moved her face, still half hidden by her hand, towards him and was watching him intently.
“No,” he said, slowly, “nothin' I heard, somethin' I felt. It mout hev been that that set me off the track. It kem to me all of a sudden that he might be sittin' thar calm and peaceful like ez I might be here, hevin' forgot all about her and his trouble, and here was me goin' to drop down upon him and start it all fresh agin. It looked a little like persecution—yes, like persecution. I got rid of it, sayin' to myself it was business. But I'd got off the road meantime, and had to find it again, and whenever I got back to the track and was pointed for his house, it all seemed to come back on me and set me off agin. When that had happened three times, I turned round and started for home.”
“And do you mean to say,” said the lady, with a discordant laugh, “that you believe, because YOU didn't go there and break the news, that nobody else will? That he won't hear of it from the first man he meets?”
“He don't meet any one up where he lives, and only Briggs and myself know it, and I'll see that Briggs don't tell. But it was mighty queer this whole thing comin' upon me suddenly,—wasn't it?”
“Very queer,” replied the lady; “for”—with the same metallic laugh—“you don't seem to be given to this kind of weakness with your own family.”
If there was any doubt as to the sarcastic suggestion of her voice, there certainly could be none in the wicked glitter of her eyes fixed upon his face under her shading hand. But haply he seemed unconscious of both, and even accepted her statement without an ulterior significance.
“Yes,” he said, communingly, to the glaring embers of the hearth, “it must have been a special revelation.”
There was something so fatuous and one-idea'd in his attitude and expression, so monstrously inconsistent and inadequate to what was going on around him, and so hopelessly stupid—if a mere simulation—that the angry suspicion that he was acting a part slowly faded from her eyes, and a hysterical smile began to twitch her set lips. She still gazed at him. The wind howled drearily in the chimney; all that was economic, grim, and cheerless in the room seemed to gather as flitting shadows around that central figure. Suddenly she arose with such a quick rustling of her skirts that he lifted his eyes with a start; for she was standing immediately before him, her hands behind her, her handsome, audacious face bent smilingly forward, and her bold, brilliant eyes within a foot of his own.
“Now, Mr. Hays, do you want to know what this warning or special revelation of yours REALLY meant? Well, it had nothing whatever to do with that man on the summit. No. The whole interest, gist, and meaning of it was simply this, that you should turn round and come straight back here and”—she drew back and made him an exaggerated theatrical curtsey—“have the supreme pleasure of making MY acquaintance! That was all. And now, as you've HAD IT, in five minutes I must be off. You've offered me already your horse and sleigh to go to the summit. I accept it and go! Good-by!”
He knew nothing of a woman's coquettish humor; he knew still less of that mimic stage from which her present voice, gesture, and expression were borrowed; he had no knowledge of the burlesque emotions which that voice, gesture, and expression were supposed to portray, and finally and fatally he was unable to detect the feminine hysteric jar and discord that underlay it all. He thought it was strong, characteristic, and real, and accepted it literally. He rose.
“Ef you allow you can't stay, why I'll go and get the horse. I reckon he ain't bin put up yet.”
“Do, please.”
He grimly resumed his coat and hat and disappeared through the passage into the kitchen, whence, a moment later, Zuleika came flying.
“Well, what has happened?” she said eagerly.
“It's all right,” said the woman quickly, “though he knows nothing yet. But I've got things fixed generally, so that he'll be quite ready to have it broken to him by this time to-morrow. But don't you say anything till I've seen Jack and you hear from HIM. Remember.”
She spoke rapidly; her cheeks were quite glowing from some sudden energy; so were Zuleika's with the excitement of curiosity. Presently the sound of sleigh-bells again filled the room. It was Hays leading the horse and sleigh to the door, beneath a sky now starlit and crisp under a northeast wind. The fair stranger cast a significant glance at Zuleika, and whispered hurriedly, “You know he must not come with me. You must keep him here.”
She ran to the door muffled and hooded, leaped into the sleigh, and gathered up the reins.
“But you cannot go alone,” said Hays, with awkward courtesy. “I was kalkilatin'”—
“You're too tired to go out again, dad,” broke in Zuleika's voice quickly. “You ain't fit; you're all gray and krinkly now, like as when you had one of your last spells. She'll send the sleigh back to-morrow.”
“I can find my way,” said the lady briskly; “there's only one turn off, I believe, and that”—
“Leads to the stage station three miles west. You needn't be afraid of gettin' off on that, for you'll likely see the down stage crossin' your road ez soon ez you get clear of the ranch.”
“Good-night,” said the lady. An arc of white spray sprang before the forward runner, and the sleigh vanished in the road.
Father and daughter returned to the office.
“You didn't get to know her, dad, did ye?” queried Zuleika.
“No,” responded Hays gravely, “except to see she wasn't no backwoods or mountaineering sort. Now, there's the kind of woman, Zuly, as knows her own mind and yours too; that a man like your brother Jack oughter pick out when he marries.”
Zuleika's face beamed behind her father. “You ain't goin' to sit up any longer, dad?” she said, as she noticed him resume his seat by the fire. “It's gettin' late, and you look mighty tuckered out with your night's work.”
“Do you know what she said, Zuly?” returned her father, after a pause, which turned out to have been a long, silent laugh.
“No.”
“She said,” he repeated slowly, “that she reckoned I came back here to-night to have the pleasure of her acquaintance!” He brought his two hands heavily down upon his knees, rubbing them down deliberately towards his ankles, and leaning forward with his face to the fire and a long-sustained smile of complete though tardy appreciation.
He was still in this attitude when Zuleika left him. The wind crooned over him confidentially, but he still sat there, given up apparently to some posthumous enjoyment of his visitor's departing witticism.
It was scarcely daylight when Zuleika, while dressing, heard a quick tapping upon her shutter. She opened it to the scared and bewildered face of her brother.
“What happened with her and father last night?” he said hoarsely.
“Nothing—why?”
“Read that. It was brought to me half an hour ago by a man in dad's sleigh, from the stage station.”
He handed her a crumpled note with trembling fingers. She took it and read:—
“The game's up and I'm out of it! Take my advice and clear out of it too, until you can come back in better shape. Don't be such a fool as to try and follow me. Your father isn't one, and that's where you've slipped up.”
“He shall pay for it, whatever he's done,” said her brother with an access of wild passion. “Where is he?”
“Why, Jack, you wouldn't dare to see him now?”
“Wouldn't I?” He turned and ran, convulsed with passion, before the windows towards the front of the house. Zuleika slipped out of her bedroom and ran to her father's room. He was not there. Already she could hear her brother hammering frantically against the locked front door.
The door of the office was partly open. Her father was still there. Asleep? Yes, for he had apparently sunk forward before the cold hearth. But the hands that he had always been trying to warm were colder than the hearth or ashes, and he himself never again spoke nor stirred.
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