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

“Red Cloud, dear Red Cloud,” she said, “your reasoning is all wrong. I think I love you best. I am just about making up my mind, and it’s for you. And now, just to help me to be sure, tell me what you told me a little while ago – you know – ‘I love the woman, the one woman. After a dozen years of possession I love her quite madly, oh, so sweetly madly.’ Say it to me, Red Cloud.”

“I do truly love the woman, the one woman,” Dick repeated. “After a dozen years of possession I do love her quite madly, oh, so sweetly madly.”

There was a pause when he had finished, which, waiting, he did not dare to break.

“There is one little thing I almost forgot to tell you,” she said, very softly, very slowly, very clearly. “I do love you. I have never loved you so much as right now. After our dozen years you’ve bowled me over at last. And I was bowled over from the beginning, although I did not know it. I have made up my mind now, once and for all[559].”

She hung up abruptly.

With the thought that he knew how a man felt receiving a reprieve at the eleventh hour[560], Dick sat on, thinking, forgetful that he had not hooked the receiver, until Bonbright came in from the secretaries’ room to remind him.

“It was from Mr. Bishop,” Bonbright explained. “Sprung an axle. I took the liberty of sending one of our machines to bring them in.”

“And see what our men can do with repairing theirs,” Dick nodded.

Alone again, he got up and stretched, walked absently the length of the room and back.

“Well, Martinez, old man,” he addressed the empty air, “this afternoon you’ll be defrauded out of as fine a histrionic stunt as you will never know you’ve missed.”

He pressed the switch for Paula’s telephone and rang her up.

Oh Dear answered, and quickly brought her mistress.

“I’ve a little song I want to sing to you, Paul,” he said, then chanted the old negro ‘spiritual’:

“‘Fer itself, fer itself,
Fer itself, fer itself,
Every soul got ter confess
Fer itself.’

“And I want you to tell me again, fer yourself, fer yourself, what you just told me.”

Her laughter came in a merry gurgle that delighted him.

“Red Cloud, I do love you,” she said. “My mind is made up. I shall never have any man but you in all this world. Now be good[561], and let me dress. I’ll have to rush for lunch as it is.”

“May I come over? – for a moment?” he begged.

“Not yet, eager one. In ten minutes. Let me finish with Oh Dear first. Then I’ll be all ready for the hunt. I’m putting on my Robin Hood outfit – you know, the greens and russets and the long feather. And I’m taking my 30-30. It’s heavy enough for mountain lions.”

“You’ve made me very happy,” Dick continued.

“And you’re making me late[562]. Ring off. – Red Cloud, I love you more this minute —”

He heard her hang up, and was surprised, the next moment, that somehow he was reluctant to yield to the happiness that he had claimed was his. Rather, did it seem that he could still hear her voice and Graham’s recklessly singing the “Gypsy Trail.”

Had she been playing with Graham? Or had she been playing with him? Such conduct, for her, was unprecedented and incomprehensible. As he groped for a solution, he saw her again in the moonlight, clinging to Graham with upturned lips, drawing Graham’s lips down to hers.

Dick shook his head in bafflement, and glanced at his watch. At any rate, in ten minutes, in less than ten minutes, he would hold her in his arms and know.

So tedious was the brief space of time that he strolled slowly on the way, pausing to light a cigarette, throwing it away with the first inhalation, pausing again to listen to the busy click of typewriters from the secretaries’ room. With still two minutes to spare, and knowing that one minute would take him to the door without a knob, he stopped in the patio and gazed at the wild canaries bathing in the fountain.

When they startled into the air, a cloud of fluttering gold and crystal droppings in the sunshine, Dick startled. The report of the rifle had come from Paula’s wing above, and he identified it as her 30-30 as he dashed across the patio. She beat me to it[563], was his next thought, and what had been incomprehensible the moment before was as sharply definite as the roar of her rifle.

And across the patio, up the stairs, through the door left wide-flung behind him, continued to pulse in his brain: She beat me to it. She beat me to it.

She lay, crumpled and quivering, in hunting costume complete, save for the pair of tiny bronze spurs held over her in anguished impotence by the frightened maid.