The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“I don’t know that I shall ever be happy again, Red Cloud. When I see what I have brought into your face… And I was so happy and contented all our dozen years. I can’t forget it. That is why I have been unable to decide. But you are right. The time has come for me to solve the…” She hesitated and could not utter the word “triangle” which he saw forming on her lips. “The situation,” her voice trailed away. “We’ll all go hunting. I’ll talk with him as we ride, and I’ll send him away, no matter what I do.”

“I shouldn’t be precipitate, Paul,” Dick advised. “You know I don’t care a hang for morality except when it is useful. And in this case it is exceedingly useful. There may be children. – Please, please,” he hushed her. “And in such case even old scandal is not exactly good for them. Desertion takes too long. I’ll arrange to give you the real statutory grounds[548], which will save a year in the divorce.”

“If I so make up my mind,” she smiled wanly.

He nodded.

“But I may not make up my mind that way. I don’t know it myself. Perhaps it’s all a dream, and soon I shall wake up, and Oh Dear will come in and tell me how soundly and long I have slept.”

She turned away reluctantly, and paused suddenly when she had made half a dozen steps.

“Dick,” she called. “You have told me your heart, but not what’s in your mind. Don’t do anything foolish. Remember Denny Holbrook – no hunting accident, mind.”

He shook his head, and twinkled his eyes in feigned amusement, and marveled to himself that her intuition should have so squarely hit the mark[549].

“And leave all this?” he lied, with a gesture that embraced the ranch and all its projects. “And that book on in-and-in-breeding? And my first annual home sale of stock just ripe to come off?”

“It would be preposterous,” she agreed with brightening face. “But, Dick, in this difficulty of making up my mind, please, please know that – ” She paused for the phrase, then made a gesture in mimicry of his, that included the Big House and its treasures, and said, “All this does not influence me a particle. Truly not.”

“As if I did not know it,” he assured her. “Of all unmercenary women —”

“Why, Dick,” she interrupted him, fired by a new thought, “if I loved Evan as madly as you think, you would mean so little that I’d be content, if it were the only way out, for you to have a hunting accident. But you see, I don’t. Anyway, there’s a brass tack for you to ponder[550].”

She made another reluctant step away, then called back in a whisper, her face over her shoulder:

“Red Cloud, I’m dreadfully sorry… And through it all I’m so glad that you do still love me.”

Before Blake returned, Dick found time to study his face in the glass. Printed there was the expression that had startled his company the preceding evening. It had come to stay.[551] Oh, well, was his thought, one cannot chew his heart between his teeth without leaving some sign of it.

He strolled out on the sleeping porch and looked at Paula’s picture under the barometers. He turned it to the wall, and sat on the bed and regarded the blankness for a space. Then he turned it back again.

“Poor little kid,” he murmured, “having a hard time of it just waking up at this late day[552].”

“But as he continued to gaze, abruptly there leaped before his eyes the vision of her in the moonlight, clinging to Graham and drawing his lips down to hers.

Dick got up quickly, with a shake of head to shake the vision from his eyes.

By half past nine his correspondence was finished and his desk cleaned save for certain data to be used in his talks with his Shorthorn and Shire managers. He was over at the window and waving a smiling farewell to Lute and Ernestine in the limousine, as Mendenhall entered. And to him, and to Manson next, Dick managed, in casual talk, to impress much of his bigger breeding plans.

“We’ve got to keep an eagle eye on the bull-get of King Polo,” he told Manson. “There’s all the promise in the world for a greater than he from Bleakhouse Fawn, or Alberta Maid, or Moravia’s Nellie Signal. We missed it this year so far, but next year, or the year after, soon or late, King Polo is going to be responsible for a real humdinger of winner.”

And as with Manson, with much more talk, so with Mendenhall, Dick succeeded in emphasizing the far application of his breeding theories.

With their departure, he got Oh Joy on the house ’phone and told him to take Graham to the gun room to choose a rifle and any needed gear.

At eleven he did not know that Paula had come up the secret stairway from the library and was standing behind the shelves of books listening. She had intended coming in but had been deterred by the sound of his voice. She could hear him talking over the telephone to Hanley about the spillway of the Buckeye dam.