The Californians Part 11

And--and--she even s.n.a.t.c.hed off papa's skull-cap once."

Trennahan threw back his head and laughed loud and long. "And you would have me believe that all that is what moves you to admiration. Don't you know, my dear child, that you love your friend in spite of her tomboy eccentricities, not because of them? You wouldn't be or do one of those things if you could."

Again Magdalena hesitated. The implied approval was delightful; but she would not hold it on false pretences. She answered firmly,--

"I went to the fire with her."

"You? Delightful! Tell me about it. Every detail."

She told him everything except the terrible sequel. It was lamely presented, but he cared nothing for the episode. His sympathies were immediate if temporary, and experience had eaten off the very cover of the book of seals. He followed her through every mental phase she unconsciously rehea.r.s.ed; and when she brought the story to an abrupt close, lacking the art to run it off into generalities, he inferred something of the last development and did not press her to continue. He pitied her grimly. But he was an intensely practical man.

"You must never think of doing that sort of thing again," he said.

"Unless a person is naturally eccentric, the attempt to be so demoralises him, because there is nothing so demoralising as failure--except on one's own particular lines. Did you, for instance, jump on a horse and career barebacked through Menlo Park like a wild Indian,--a performance which your friend would probably carry off with any amount of dash and _chic_--you would feel a hopeless fool; whereas,"

he gave her a keen side glance, "if you felt that you possessed a talent--for music, say--and failed forty times before achieving success, you would feel that your failures partook of the dignity of their cause, and of your own character."

She turned to him with quickening pulse. "Do you think," she faltered, hunting for phrases that would not commit her, "that if a person loved an art very much, even if he could not be sure that he had genius, that he would be right to go on and on, no matter how often he became discouraged?"

Her eyes were staring at her horse's neck; she did not see him smile. He had felt quite sure that she sought relief for the silences of her life in literary composition. When an unattractive woman has not talent she finds a double revenge in the torture of words, he thought. What shall I say to her? That she is whittling thorns for her own soul? Bah! Did I not find enjoyment once in the very imaginings of all that has scourged me since? Would I have thanked anyone for opening my eyes? And the positive is the one thing that grips the memory. It is as well to have what high lights one can.

She had raised her head and was looking at him expectantly.

"Certainly," he said. "He should go on, by all means. Love of an art presupposes a certain degree of talent."--May Heaven forgive me for that lie, he thought.

She detected his lack of spontaneity, but attributed it to the fact that he had not guessed her personal interest in the question. "Have you met many literary people?" she asked. "But of course you must. Did you like them very much?"

"I have inquired carefully, and ascertained that there are none in Menlo. If there were, I should not think twice about the Mark Smith place."

Magdalena felt herself burning to her hair. She glanced at him quickly, but he averted his eyes and called her attention to a magnificent oak whose limbs trailed on the ground. Should I tell him? she thought, every nerve quaking. _Should_ I? Then she set her lips in scorn. He spoke of "literary" people, she continued. It will be many a day before I am that. Meanwhile, as Helena would say, what he doesn't know won't hurt him.

He had no intention of letting her make any such confidences. "Tell me,"

he said. "I have heard something of the old Spanish families of California. You, of course, belong to them. That is what gives you your delightful individuality. I should like to hear something of that old life. Of course it interests you?"

"Oh, I love it,--at least, I loved it once. My aunt, my father's sister, used to talk constantly of that time, but I have no one to talk to of it now; she has lived in Santa Barbara for the last three years. She told me many stories of that time. It must have been wonderful."

He drew one leg across the horse's neck and brought him to a stand. They had entered the backwoods and were walking their horses. The groom was nowhere to be seen. He was, in fact, awaiting them at the edge of the woods, his beast tethered, himself p.r.o.ne, the ring-master of a tarantula fight.

"Tell me those stories," commanded Trennahan. He knew they would bore him, but the girl was very interesting.

Magdalena began the story of Ysabel Herrara. At first she stumbled, and was obliged to begin no less than three times, but when fairly started she told it very well. Many of her aunt's vivid picturesque phrases sprang from their dusty shelves; her own early enthusiasm revived. When she had finished she pa.s.sed on to the pathetic little histories of elena Duncan and Benicia Ortega. She had told over those stories many times to herself; to-day they were little more than the recital of a well-studied lesson. The intense earnestness of Trennahan's gaze magnetised her out of self-consciousness. When she was concluding the third, his horse s.h.i.+ed suddenly at a snake, and while he quieted it she tumbled back to the present. She sat with parted lips and thumping heart. Had she talked as well as that? She, Magdalena Yorba, the dull, the silent, the terrified? She felt a glad pride in herself, and a profound grat.i.tude to the wizard who had worked the spell.

"I have never been more interested," he said in a moment. "How delightfully you talk! What a pity you don't write!"

Magdalena's heart shook her very throat, but she managed to answer, "And then you wouldn't buy the Mark Smith place?"

"Well, no, perhaps I wouldn't," he answered hurriedly, lest she might be moved to confidence. He had a lively vision of Magdalena reading her ma.n.u.scripts to him, or sending them to him for criticism. "But you must tell me a story every time we--I am so fortunate as to have you all to myself like this. I suppose we should be going back now."

Magdalena took out her watch. The little air of pride in her new possession amused Trennahan, although he saw the pathos of it.

"Yes," she said; "it is nearly eight. We must go. Papa does not like us to be late for breakfast."

As they reached the edge of the woods, Magdalena gave an exclamation of disgust; but Trennahan leaned forward with much interest. The two tarantulas, after tearing each other's fur and legs off, were locked in the death embrace, leaping and rolling.

"Get on your horse at once," said Magdalena, sternly. "You are a cruel boy."

"But that is very interesting," said Trennahan; "I never saw it before."

"They are always doing it here. They pour water--" She turned to the boy, who was mounted, and close behind them, now that they were likely to come within the range of the old don's vision at any moment. "d.i.c.k,"

she said sternly, "how did you get those tarantulas up? Have you a whiskey flask about you?"

She spoke with all her father's harsh pride when addressing an inferior: Don Roberto regarded servants, in spite of the heavy wage they commanded, as he had the Indians of his early manhood. Trennahan watched her closely, remarking upon the variety a man might find in a woman if he chose to look for it.

The boy a.s.sured Magdalena that the tarantulas had been above ground. She shrugged her shoulders and turned her back expressively upon him.

"You see those little round holes covered with white film?" she said to Trennahan. "They lead down to the tarantulas' houses,--real little houses, with doors on hinges. People pour water down, and the old tarantula comes up--back first, dragging his legs after him--to see what is the matter. Then they set two of them at each other with sticks, and they--the tarantulas--never stop fighting until they have torn each other to death: they have two curved sharp teeth."

Good sport for variety's sake, thought Trennahan. I see myself engaged on warm afternoons.

XVII

After breakfast Trennahan lay in a long chair on the verandah and smoked undisturbed. Mrs. Yorba was busy, and Magdalena sat up in her room, longing to go down, but fearing to weary him. She recalled the early hours with vivid pleasure. For the first time in her life she was almost pleased with herself. She took out her writing materials; but her beloved art would not hold her. She went to the window and unfastened the shutter softly. Trennahan was not talking to himself nor even walking up and down the hard boards below, but the aroma of his cigar gave evidence that he was there. It mingled with the perfume of the pink and white roses swarming over the roof of the verandah almost to her window.

She experienced her first impulse to decorate herself, to gather a handful of those roses and place them in her hair. Her aunt had never been without that national adornment, worn with the grace of her slender girlhood.

She stepped over the sill, catching her breath as the tin roof cracked beneath her feet, but gathered the roses and returned to her mirror.

With the nimble fingers of her race she arranged the roses at one side of her head, above and behind the ear. Certainly they were becoming. She also discovered that she had her aunt's turn of the head, her graceful way of raising her hand to her ear.

But it is so little, she thought with a sigh; if I could only have the rest!

Her mind wandered back to the heroines of her aunt's tales. If she but had the beauty of those wondrous girls, Trennahan would have taken fire in the hour that he met her, as their caballeros had done. The thought made her sigh again, not with a woman's bitterness,--she had lived too little for that,--but with a girl's romantic sadness. Why had she been defrauded of her birthright? She recalled something Colonel Belmont had once said about "cross-breeding being death on beauty in nine cases out of ten." Why could not her father have married another woman of his race? She dismissed these reflections as unfilial and wicked, and returned to her work; but it was only to bite the end of her pen-holder and dream.

Meanwhile Trennahan fell asleep and dreamed that his Menlo house caught fire one night and that all the maidens of his new acquaintance came in a body to extinguish the flames. Miss Montgomery played a hose considerably larger round than her neck, with indomitable energy and persistence. Miss Brannan, in a das.h.i.+ng red cap and jacket, danced like a bacchante on the roof, albeit manipulating large buckets of water.

Mrs. Was.h.i.+ngton was also there, and, swinging in a hammock, encouraged the workers with her characteristic optimism expressed in picturesque American. Magdalena, in a suit of her father's old clothes, was handing his books through the library window to Miss Folsom. Miss Geary was scrambling up the ladder, a hose coiled about her like a python. The leader of the company stood on the roof directly above the front door, giving orders with imperious voice and gesture. But although the flames leaped high about her, starting the leaves of a neighbouring tree into sharp relief, he could not see her face.

XVIII

Trennahan did not see Magdalena until luncheon. She came in late, and her manner was a shade colder and more reserved than usual. After much excogitation, she had decided to leave the roses in her hair, but it had taken her ten minutes to summon up courage to go downstairs.

He understood perfectly, and his soul grinned. Then he sighed. Youth had been very sweet to him, all manifestations of femininity in a woman very dear. There were four long windows in the dining-room, but the roof of the verandah, the thick vines springing from pillar to pillar, the lilac-trees and willows just beyond, chastened the light in the room.

Magdalena looked almost pretty, with her air of proud reserve, the roses nestling in her dark hair. Ten years ago he might have loved her, perhaps, in spite of her complexion.

Mrs. Yorba did not notice the roses. Her mind was blind with wrath: the cream sauce of the chicken was curdled. During at least half the meal she did not utter a word; and Trennahan, wondering if fate were forcing him into the permanent role of the garrulous American, a breed for which he had all the finely bred American's contempt, talked of the weather, the woods, the climate, the beauty of the Californian women, with little or no a.s.sistance from Magdalena. The moment he paused, and he was hungry, the catlike tread of the Chinese butlers was the only sound in the large house; the silence was so oppressive that he reflected with grat.i.tude that his visit would be done with the morrow's morn.