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

“I’ll have Leo know that he is not the only poet and love-knight on the ranch. Listen to Mountain Lad’s song, all wonder and wild delight, Terrence, and more. Mountain Lad doesn’t moon about the loved one. He doesn’t moon at all. He incarnates love, and rears right up in meeting and tells them so. Listen to him!”

Dick filled the room and shook the air with wild, glad, stallion nickering; and then, with mane-tossing and foot-pawing, chanted:

“Hear me! I am Eros! I stamp upon the hills. I fill the wide valleys. The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures; for they know me. The land is filled with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the spring. The spring is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the spring. The mares remember my voice. They knew me aforetimes through their mothers before them. Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills, and the wide valleys are my heralds, echoing the sound of my approach.”

It was the first time the sages of the madroño grove had heard Dick’s song, and they were loud in applause. Hancock took it for a fresh start in the discussion[407], and was beginning to elaborate a biologic Bergsonian definition of love, when he was stopped by Terrence, who had noticed the pain that swept across Leo’s face.

“Go on, please, dear lady,” Terrence begged. “And sing of love, only of love; for it is my experience that I meditate best upon the stars to the accompaniment of a woman’s voice.”

A little later, Oh Joy, entering the room, waited till Paula finished a song, then moved noiselessly to Graham and handed him a telegram. Dick scowled at the interruption.

“Very important – I think,” the Chinese explained to him.

“Who took it?” Dick demanded.

“Me – I took it,” was the answer. “Night clerk at Eldorado call on telephone. He say important. I take it.”

“It is, fairly so,” Graham spoke up, having finished reading the message. “Can I get a train out to-night for San Francisco, Dick?”

“Oh Joy, come back a moment,” Dick called, looking at his watch. “What train for San Francisco stops at Eldorado?”

“Eleven-ten,” came the instant information. “Plenty time. Not too much. I call chauffeur?”

“Dick nodded.

“You really must jump out to-night?” he asked Graham.

“Really. It is quite important. Will I have time to pack?”

Dick gave a confirmatory nod to Oh Joy, and said to Graham:

“Just time to throw the needful into a grip[408].” He turned to Oh Joy. “Is Oh My up yet?”

“Yessr.”

“Send him to Mr. Graham’s room to help, and let me know as soon as the machine is ready. No limousine. Tell Saunders to take the racer.”

“One fine big strapping man, that,” Terrence commented, after Graham had left the room.

They had gathered about Dick, with the exception of Paula, who remained at the piano, listening.

“One of the few men I’d care to go along with, hell for leather[409], on a forlorn hope or anything of that sort,” Dick said. “He was on the Nethermere when she went ashore at Pango in the ’97 hurricane. Pango is just a strip of sand, twelve feet above high water-mark, a lot of cocoanuts, and uninhabited. Forty women among the passengers, English officers’ wives and such. Graham had a bad arm, big as a leg – snake bite.

“It was a thundering sea. Boats couldn’t live. They smashed two and lost both crews. Four sailors volunteered in succession to carry a light line ashore. And each man, in turn, dead at the end of it, was hauled back on board. While they were untying the last one, Graham, with an arm like a leg, stripped for it and went to it. And he did it, although the pounding he got on the sand broke his bad arm and staved in three ribs[410]. But he made the line fast before he quit. In order to haul the hawser ashore, six more volunteered to go in on Evan’s line to the beach. Four of them arrived. And only one woman of the forty was lost – she died of heart disease and fright.

“I asked him about it once. He was as bad as an Englishman. All I could get out of the beggar was that the recovery was uneventful. Thought that the salt water, the exercise, and the breaking of the bone had served as counter-irritants and done the arm good.”

Oh Joy and Graham entered the room from opposite ends. Dick saw that Graham’s first questing glance was for Paula.

“All ready, sir,” Oh Joy announced.

Dick prepared to accompany his guest outside to the car; but Paula evidenced her intention of remaining in the house. Graham started over to her to murmur perfunctory regrets and good-bye.

And she, warm with what Dick had just told of him, pleasured at the goodly sight of him, dwelling with her eyes on the light, high poise of head, the careless, sun-sanded hair, and the lightness, almost debonaireness, of his carriage despite his weight of body and breadth of shoulders. As he drew near to her, she centered her gaze on the long gray eyes whose hint of drooping lids hinted of boyish sullenness. She waited for the expression of sullenness to vanish as the eyes lighted with the smile she had come to know so well.