Ewing's Lady Part 4

"To paint voices?" she queried.

"Voices, yes; how could yours be painted? It couldn't. You'll see that.

I thought of a jumble of things--wine and velvet, for instance; some kind of rich, golden wine and purple velvet, and then, warm flickers of light in a darkened room, and a big bronze bell struck with something soft that would m.u.f.fle it and yet make everything about it tremble. You see, don't you?" he concluded with a questioning look of deep seriousness.

His own voice was low and eager, with its undernote of wistfulness.

Already he had renewed upon her that companionable charm which she had felt the day before, a charm compounded of half-shy directness, of flashes of self-forgetfulness, of quick-trusting comrades.h.i.+p. She rejected a cant phrase of humorous disclaimer that habit brought to her lips. It would puzzle or affront his forthrightness.

"Very well, we'll agree that my voice can't be painted," she said at last. "So let us talk of you."

"I guess I should like that pretty well," he answered after a moment's pondering. "I don't believe I've ever talked much; but now I feel as if I could tire you out, talking as we did yesterday. Queer, wasn't it?"

He fell silent, however, when the trail narrowed to climb the long ridge, as if the acknowledgment of his desire to speak had somehow quenched it. She fell in ahead, half turning in her saddle to address him from time to time, but he would talk only about things of the moment. In a marshy spot at the edge of the meadow he pointed out a bear wallow, and farther on a deer lick. "It's a sulphur spring," he exclaimed, "and deer come from miles around to drink there."

"Do you shoot them?" she asked.

"We always have fresh meat when we need. Ben Crider says he won't let a deer come up and bite him without trying to defend himself."

"It's like murder, isn't it?"

"Well, I never murdered anyone myself, but I hit the first deer I ever shot at, and I felt as if I'd lain in wait at a street corner and killed a schoolboy on his way home. But I missed the next three or four, and that made me blood-thirsty. I guess if you carried that feeling back far enough a man could go out and shoot his little sister if he'd had to still-hunt her over rough ground all day, and especially if he'd missed two or three cousins or an uncle in the meantime. I think that would raise the savage in him enough."

They were skirting the lake now, a glinting oval of sapphire in its setting of granite. Beyond this they rode through the thinned timber--where c.o.o.ney was dissuaded, not without effort, from pursuing his ancient charge, and emerged into the glare of the clearing.

As they dismounted at the door of the cabin a melancholy of minor chords from a guitar came to their ears, and a voice, nasal, but vibrant with emotion, sang the final couplet of what had too plainly been a ballad of pathos:

"While they were honeymooning in a mansion on the hill, Kind friends were laying Nellie out behind the mill."

"That's one of Ben's best songs," said Ewing, with so genuine a gravity that he stifled quite another emotion in the lady as she caught his look.

"Indeed! I must hear him sing more," she managed with some difficulty.

The sorrowful one arose as they entered, hastily thrusting aside his guitar as might an a.s.sa.s.sin have cast away his weapon. His face was shaven to a bitter degree; in spots it was scarified. But the drooping lines of woe unutterable were still there in opposition to his Sabbath finery--a spreading blue-satin cravat, lighted by a stone of impressive bulk, elegant black trousers, and suspenders of red silk embroidered with pansies and a running vine of green. He greeted the visitor as one who would say, "Yes, it's a sad affair--wholly unexpected," and, c.o.c.king an eye of long-suffering negation on Ewing, he went out to the horses.

As they entered the studio Mrs. Laithe saw that the easel had been wheeled into the light from the big window and that a woman's portrait had been placed upon it. Had Ewing looked at her on the instant he might have detected that her face seemed to ripple under some wind of emotion.

But his own eyes had been on the portrait.

"That's my mother," he said, unconsciously hus.h.i.+ng his voice.

"I should have known it," she answered, with a kind of spurious animation. "The face is so much like yours. It is a face one seems to have known before, one of those elusive resemblances that haunt the mind. It is well done." She ended the speech glibly enough.

"She was beautiful. My father did it. He had that trick of color, as you call it, or he could never have painted her. She was so slight, but she had color. And she was quick and fiery. I used to see her rage when I was very small. I believed there were coals in her eyes, and that something blew on them inside to make them blaze. I wouldn't know what it was about, only that it wasn't us she raged at--not my father or me.

I could go up and catch her hand even when she frightened me. And sometimes, after a while, my father would get excited, too. He was slower to take fire, but he burned longer. And at last she would become afraid and grow quiet herself and try to soothe him. I never could tell what they were at war with."

They looked in silence at the vivid young face on the canvas, a thin, daring, eager face, a face of delicate features, but strong in a perfect balance. The eyes were darkly alive.

"You were young when she died?" the woman asked at last.

"Too young to understand. I was eight, I think. There was a lot I shall never understand. Sometimes my father would tell me about their life here in the West, but never of the time before they came here. It always seemed to me that either he or she had quarreled with their people. They were poor when they came here. We lived in Leadville when I first remember. My mother sang in a church choir and made a little money and nights--you'll think this queer--my father played a piano in a dance hall. They had to live. Days, he painted. He had studied abroad in Paris and Munich, but he wasn't selling his pictures then. It took him years to do much of that. Sometimes they were hungry, though I didn't know it." He paused, overwhelmed by a sudden realization that he was talking much.

"Tell me more," she said very quietly. "I wish to hear the rest."

"Well, at the last my mother was in bed a long time, and my father worked hard to get things for her, things she must have. But one night she died--it was a cold night in winter. He and I were alone with her.

I'll not soon forget that. I sat up on the cot where I slept and saw my father sitting on the bed looking down at my mother. They were both still, and he wouldn't answer or turn his head when I spoke. Then I cried, for it was cold in the little cabin and my father's stillness scared me. But I don't think he heard me crying. He kept looking down at my mother's face, even when I called to him as loud as I could. Then I was afraid to see him that way any longer, so I pulled the blankets over my head and I must have cried myself to sleep.

"He was sitting the same way when I woke in the morning, still looking at my mother's face. Even when the people came to take her away he kept silent--and while they put her in the ground in a great, snowy field with little short waves all over it. And when we were back in the cabin not a word could I get from him, nor a look. He just sat on the bed again, looking at her pillow.

"In the evening some one brought a letter. I lighted a candle and took this letter to him, crowding it into his hand. I wanted him to notice me. I saw him study the envelope, then tear it open and look at a little slip of green paper that fell out. It was money, you understand, for pictures he had sent to New York. I knew this at once. I'd heard them talk of its coming and of wonderful things they'd do with it when it did come. I was glad in an instant, for I thought that now we could get my mother back out of the ground. I was sure we could when he held the green slip close to the candle and began to laugh. It wasn't the way he usually laughed, it was louder and longer, but it was the first sound I'd heard from him, and it made me happy. I began to laugh myself as loud as I could, and danced before him, and his laugh went still higher at that. I ran for my jacket and mittens and cap. I wanted him to stop laughing and hurry along. I pulled his arm and he stopped laughing and looked down at me. I shouted 'Hurry--let's hurry and bring her back--let me carry the money!' He caught my shoulder and looked so astonished, then he burst into that loud laugh again, after he'd made me say it over. I ran for his overcoat, too, but when I came with it I saw he wasn't laughing at all. He was crying, and it was so much like his laugh that I hadn't noticed the change."

He had kept his eyes on the portrait while he spoke. He stopped abruptly now, turning to the listening woman, searching her face with new signs of confusion.

"I--I didn't know I was telling you all that."

She did not answer at once.

"And you came here after that?" she said at last.

"Yes; my father found this place. He wanted to be alone. I think he began to die when my mother went. He couldn't live without her. He taught me what he could, about books and pictures, but I couldn't have been much to him. I think it hurt him that I looked like her--he said I looked like her. He worked on that portrait to the very last, even on the morning of the day he died."

"What was your father's name?"

"Gilbert Denham Ewing. I was named for him."

"And your mother's name before marriage was----"

"I'm ashamed that I never knew. It must have been spoken often, but I was so young; it never stayed in my mind. And a little while before he died my father burned all his letters and papers. I've wondered about their life long ago before I came, but I think my father meant me not to know. He had some reason."

"I am glad you have told me all you did know," she said.

"But you have made _me_ glad," he a.s.sured her, returning to his livelier manner.

"Your mother's first name"--she asked--"what did your father call her?"

"Oh, that--Katharine. He called her Kitty."

"Kitty!" She repeated it after him, softly, as if she spoke it in compa.s.sion to the portrait.

"But see," he continued, "it's late. Stay and eat with us and I'll take you back by moonlight. I've ordered a fine, big, silver moon to be set up in the sky at seven, and Ben is already getting supper."

He pulled aside the blanket portiere, and through the doorway she could see the saturnine one--a man fas.h.i.+oned for tragedies, for deeds of desperate hazard--incongruously busied with a pan of soda biscuits and a hissing broiler.

When they rode back to Bar-7 the hills were struck to silver by the moon. They were companionably silent for most of the ride, though the youth from time to time, when the trail narrowed to put him in the rear, crooned stray bits of a song with which Ben Crider had favored them while he prepared the evening meal. The lines Mrs Laithe remembered were:

"Take back your gold, for gold it cannot buy me; Make me your wife, 'tis all I ask of you."

When they parted she said, "You must think about leaving here. It's time you rode out into the world. I think my brother will be back from his cattle-driving trip to-morrow, and I mean to bring him to see your pictures very soon. Perhaps he will suggest something for you."

"This moonlight does such wonderful things to your face," he remarked.

"Good night! I'm sorry you have so far to go."