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

Once, chancing into the room at the end of a Schumann[305] song and just after Ware had departed, Graham found Paula still seated at the piano, an expression of rapt dreaming on her face. She regarded him almost unrecognizingly, gathered herself mechanically together, uttered an absent-minded commonplace or so, and left the room. Despite his vexation and hurt, Graham tried to think it mere artist-dreaming on her part, a listening to the echo of the just-played music in her soul. But women were curious creatures, he could not help moralizing, and were prone to lose their hearts most strangely and inconsequentially. Might it not be that by his very music this youngster of a man was charming the woman of her[306]?

With the departure of Ware, Paula Forrest retired almost completely into her private wing behind the door without a knob. Nor did this seem unusual, Graham gleaned from the household.

“Paula is a woman who finds herself very good company,” Ernestine explained, “and she often goes in for periods of aloneness, when Dick is the only person who sees her.”

“Which is not flattering to the rest of the company,” Graham smiled.

“Which makes her such good company whenever she is in company,” Ernestine retorted.

The driftage through the Big House was decreasing. A few guests, on business or friendship, continued to come, but more departed. Under Oh Joy and his Chinese staff the Big House ran so frictionlessly and so perfectly, that entertainment of guests seemed little part of the host’s duties. The guests largely entertained themselves and one another.

Dick rarely appeared, even for a moment, until lunch, and Paula, now carrying out her seclusion program, never appeared before dinner.

“Rest cure[307],” Dick laughed one noon, and challenged Graham to a tournament with boxing gloves, single-sticks, and foils.

“And now’s the time,” he told Graham, as they breathed between bouts, “for you to tackle your book. I’m only one of the many who are looking forward to reading it, and I’m looking forward hard. Got a letter from Havely yesterday – he mentioned it, and wondered how far along you were[308].”

So Graham, in his tower room, arranged his notes and photographs, schemed out the work, and plunged into the opening chapters. So immersed did he become that his nascent interest in Paula might have languished, had it not been for meeting her each evening at dinner. Then, too, until Ernestine and Lute left for Santa Barbara, there were afternoon swims and rides and motor trips to the pastures of the Miramar Hills and the upland ranges of the Anselmo Mountains. Other trips they made, sometimes accompanied by Dick, to his great dredgers working in the Sacramento basin, or his dam-building on the Little Coyote and Los Cuatos creeks, or to his five-thousandacre colony of twenty-acre farmers, where he was trying to enable two hundred and fifty heads of families, along with their families, to make good on the soil.

That Paula sometimes went for long solitary rides, Graham knew, and, once, he caught her dismounting from the Fawn at the hitching rails.

“Don’t you think you are spoiling that mare for riding in company?” he twitted.

Paula laughed and shook her head.

“Well, then,” he asserted stoutly, “I’m spoiling for a ride with you.”

“There’s Lute, and Ernestine, and Bert, and all the rest.”

“This is new country,” he contended. “And one learns country through the people who know it. I’ve seen it through the eyes of Lute, and Ernestine and all the rest; but there is a lot I haven’t seen and which I can see only through your eyes.”

“A pleasant theory,” she evaded. “A – a sort of landscape vampirism.”

“But without the ill effects of vampirism,” he urged quickly.

Her answer was slow in coming. Her look into his eyes was frank and straight, and he could guess her words were weighed and gauged.

“I don’t know about that,” was all she said finally; but his fancy leaped at the several words, ranging and conjecturing their possible connotations.

“But we have so much we might be saying to each other,” he tried again. “So much we… ought to be saying to each other.”

“So I apprehend[309],” she answered quietly; and again that frank, straight look accompanied her speech.

So she did apprehend – the thought of it was flame to him, but his tongue was not quick enough to serve him to escape the cool, provoking laugh as she turned into the house.

Still the company of the Big House thinned. Paula’s aunt, Mrs. Tully, much to Graham’s disappointment (for he had expected to learn from her much that he wanted to know of Paula), had gone after only a several days’ stay. There was vague talk of her return for a longer stay; but, just back from Europe, she declared herself burdened with a round of duty visits which must be performed before her pleasure visiting began.