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

“You see, she’s healthy and strong and all that,” he explained, “but she was born with insomnia. She never could sleep. She couldn’t sleep as a little baby even. But it’s never hurt her any, because she’s got a will, and won’t let it get on her nerves. She’s just about as tense as they make them, yet, instead of going wild when she can’t sleep, she just wills to relax, and she does relax. She calls them her ‘white nights,’ when she gets them. Maybe she’ll fall asleep at daybreak, or at nine or ten in the morning; and then she’ll sleep the rest of the clock around and get down to dinner as chipper as you please[212].”

“It’s constitutional[213], I fancy,” Graham suggested.

Bert nodded.

“It would be a handicap to nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of a thousand. But not to her. She puts up with it, and if she can’t sleep one time – she should worry – she just sleeps some other time and makes it up.”

More and other things Bert Wainwright told of his hostess, and Graham was not slow in gathering that the young man, despite the privileges of long acquaintance, stood a good deal in awe of her.

“I never saw anybody whose goat she couldn’t get if she went after it,” he confided. “Man or woman or servant, age, sex, and previous condition of servitude – it’s all one when she gets on the high and mighty[214]. And I don’t see how she does it. Maybe it’s just a kind of light that comes into her eyes, or some kind of an expression on her lips, or, I don’t know what – anyway, she puts it across and nobody makes any mistake about it.”

“She has a… a way with her,” Graham volunteered.

“That’s it!” Bert’s face beamed. “It’s a way she has. She just puts it over. Kind of gives you a chilly feeling, you don’t know why. Maybe she’s learned to be so quiet about it because of the control she’s learned by passing sleepless nights without squealing out or getting sour. The chances are she didn’t bat an eye all last night[215] – excitement, you know, the crowd, swimming Mountain Lad and such things. Now ordinary things that’d keep most women awake, like danger, or storm at sea, and such things, Dick says don’t faze her. She can sleep like a baby, he says, when the town she’s in is being bombarded or when the ship she’s in is trying to claw off a lee shore. She’s a wonder, and no mistake. You ought to play billiards with her – the English game. She’ll go some.”

A little later, Graham, along with Bert, encountered the girls in the morning-room, where, despite an hour of ragtime song and dancing and chatter, he was scarcely for a moment unaware of a loneliness, a lack, and a desire to see his hostess, in some fresh and unguessed mood and way, come in upon them through the open door.

Still later, mounted on Altadena and accompanied by Bert on a thoroughbred mare called Mollie, Graham made a two hours’ exploration of the dairy center of the ranch, and arrived back barely in time to keep an engagement with Ernestine in the tennis court.

He came to lunch with an eagerness for which his keen appetite could not entirely account; and he knew definite disappointment when his hostess did not appear.

“A white night,” Dick Forrest surmised for his guest’s benefit, and went into details additional to Bert’s of her constitutional inaptitude for normal sleep. “Do you know, we were married years before I ever saw her sleep. I knew she did sleep, but I never saw her. I’ve seen her go three days and nights without closing an eye and keep sweet and cheerful all the time, and when she did sleep, it was out of exhaustion. That was when the All Away went ashore in the Carolines and the whole population worked to get us off. It wasn’t the danger, for there wasn’t any. It was the noise. Also, it was the excitement. She was too busy living. And when it was almost all over, I actually saw her asleep for the first time in my life.”

A new guest had arrived that morning, a Donald Ware, whom Graham met at lunch. He seemed well acquainted with all, as if he had visited much in the Big House; and Graham gathered that, despite his youth, he was a violinist of note[216] on the Pacific Coast.

“He has conceived a grand passion for Paula,” Ernestine told Graham as they passed out from the dining-room.

Graham raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, but she doesn’t mind,” Ernestine laughed. “Every man that comes along does the same thing. She’s used to it. She has just a charming way of disregarding all their symptoms, and enjoys them, and gets the best out of them in consequence. It’s lots of fun to Dick. You’ll be doing the same before you’re here a week. If you don’t, we’ll all be surprised mightily. And if you don’t, most likely you’ll hurt Dick’s feelings. He’s come to expect it as a matter of course[217]. And when a fond, proud husband gets a habit like that, it must hurt terribly to see his wife not appreciated.”