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

“‘The wild hawk to the wind-swept sky,
The deer to the wholesome world,
And the heart of a man to the heart of a maid
As it was in the days of old —
The heart of a man to the heart of a maid,
Light of my tents be fleet,”
Morning waits at the end of the world,
And the world is all at our feet.’”

He looked for her to look up as the last notes died away, but she remained quiet a moment, her eyes bent on the keys. And then the face that was turned to his was the face of the Little Lady of the Big House, the mouth smiling mischievously, the eyes filled with roguery, as she said:

“Let us go and devil[319] Dick – he’s losing. I’ve never seen him lose his temper at cards, but he gets ridiculously blue[320] after a long siege of losing.”

“And he does love gambling,” she continued, as she led the way to the tables. “It’s one of his modes of relaxing. It does him good. About once or twice a year, if it’s a good poker game, he’ll sit in all night to it and play to the blue sky if they take off the limit.”

Chapter XVIII

Almost immediately after the singing of the “Gypsy Trail,” Paula emerged from her seclusion, and Graham found himself hard put, in the tower room, to keep resolutely to his work when all the morning he could hear snatches of song and opera from her wing, or laughter and scolding of dogs from the great patio, or the continuous pulse for hours of the piano from the distant music room. But Graham, patterning after Dick, devoted his mornings to work, so that he rarely encountered Paula before lunch.

She made announcement that her spell of insomnia was over and that she was ripe for all gaieties and excursions Dick had to offer her. Further, she threatened, in case Dick grudged these personal diversions, to fill the house with guests and teach him what liveliness was. It was at this time that her Aunt Martha – Mrs. Tully – returned for a several days’ visit, and that Paula resumed the driving of Duddy and Fuddy in the high, one-seated Studebaker trap. Duddy and Fuddy were spirited trotters, but Mrs. Tully, despite her elderliness and avoirdupois[321], was without timidity when Paula held the reins.

As Mrs. Tully told Graham: “And that is a concession I make to no woman save Paula. She is the only woman I can trust myself to with horses. She has the horse-way about her. When she was a child she was wild over horses. It’s a wonder she didn’t become a circus rider.”

More, much more, Graham learned about Paula in various chats with her aunt. Of Philip Desten, Paula’s father, Mrs. Tully could never say enough[322]. Her eldest brother, and older by many years, he had been her childhood prince. His ways had been big ways, princely ways – ways that to commoner folk had betokened a streak of madness. He was continually guilty of the wildest things and the most chivalrous things. It was this streak that had enabled him to win various fortunes, and with equal facility to lose them, in the great gold adventure of Forty-nine. Himself of old New England stock, he had had for great-grandfather a Frenchman – a trifle of flotsam from a mid-ocean wreck and landed to grow up among the farmer-sailormen of the coast of Maine.

“And once, and once only, in each generation, that French Desten crops out,” Mrs. Tully assured Graham. “Philip was that Frenchman in his generation, and who but Paula, and in full measure, received that same inheritance in her generation. Though Lute and Ernestine are her half-sisters, no one would imagine one drop of the common blood was shared. That’s why Paula, instead of going circus-riding, drifted inevitably to France. It was that old original Desten that drew her over.”

And of the adventure in France, Graham learned much. Philip Desten’s luck had been to die when the wheel of his fortune had turned over and down[323]. Ernestine and Lute, little tots, had been easy enough for Desten’s sisters to manage. But Paula, who had fallen to Mrs. Tully, had been the problem – because of that Frenchman.