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

“Or it will be: ‘Mr. Parkman, Simpkins has the best long-time record of any of our milkers. Now he’s slumped. What’s up?’ Mr. Parkman doesn’t know. ‘Investigate,’ says Dick. ‘There’s something on his chest. Talk to him like an uncle and find out. We’ve got to get it off his chest.’ And Mr. Parkman finds out. Simpkins’ boy, working his way through Stanford University, has elected the joy-ride path[463] and is in jail waiting trial for forgery. Dick put his own lawyers on the case, smoothed it over, got the boy out on probation, and Simpkins’ milk reports came back to par. And the best of it is, the boy made good, Dick kept an eye on him, saw him through the college of engineering, and he’s now working for Dick on the dredging end, earning a hundred and fifty a month, married, with a future before him, and his father still milks.’

“You are right,” Graham murmured sympathetically. “I well named him when I named him Great Heart.”

“I call him my Rock of Ages,” Paula said gratefully. “He is so solid. He stands in any storm. – Oh, you don’t really know him. He is so sure. He stands right up. He’s never taken a cropper in his life.[464] God smiles on him. God has always smiled on him. He’s never been beaten down to his knees… yet. I… I should not care to see that sight. It would be heartbreaking. And, Evan – ” Her hand went out to his in a pleading gesture that merged into a half-caress. “– I am afraid for him now. That is why I don’t know what to do. It is not for myself that I back and fill and hesitate. If he were ignoble, if he were narrow, if he were weak or had one tiniest shred of meanness, if he had ever been beaten to his knees before, why, my dear, my dear, I should have been gone with you long ago.”

Her eyes filled with sudden moisture. She stilled him with a pressure of her hand, and, to regain herself, she went back to her recital:

“‘Your little finger, Mr. Smith, I consider worth more to me and to the world,’ Dick told him, ‘than the whole body of this woman’s husband. Here’s the report on him: willing, eager to please, not bright, not strong, an indifferent workman at best. Yet you have to go down the hill, and I am very, very sorry.’

“Oh, yes, there was more. But I’ve given you the main of it. You see Dick’s code there. And he lives his code. He accords latitude to the individual. Whatever the individual may do, so long as it does not hurt the group of individuals in which he lives, is his own affair. He believed Smith had a perfect right to love the woman, and to be loved by her if it came to that. I have heard him always say that love could not be held nor enforced. Truly, did I go with you, he would say, ‘Bless you, my children.’ Though it broke his heart he would say it. Past love, he believes, gives no hold over the present[465]. And every hour of love, I have heard him say, pays for itself, on both sides, quittance in full. He claims there can be no such thing as a love-debt, laughs at the absurdity of love-claims.

“And I agree with him,” Graham said. “‘You promised to love me always,’ says the jilted one, and then strives to collect as if it were a promissory note for so many dollars. Dollars are dollars, but love lives or dies. When it is dead how can it be collected? We are all agreed, and the way is simple. We love. It is enough. Why delay another minute?”

His fingers strayed along her fingers on the keyboard as he bent to her, first kissing her hair, then slowly turning her face up to his and kissing her willing lips.

“Dick does not love me like you,” she said; “not madly, I mean. He has had me so long, I think I have become a habit to him. And often and often, before I knew you, I used to puzzle whether he cared more for the ranch or more for me.”

“It is so simple,” Graham urged. “All we have to do is to be straightforward. Let us go.”

He drew her to her feet and made as if to start.

But she drew away from him suddenly, sat down, and buried her flushed face in her hands.

“You do not understand, Evan. I love Dick. I shall always love him.”

“And me?” Graham demanded sharply.

“Oh, without saying,” she smiled. “You are the only man, besides Dick, that has ever kissed me this… way, and that I have kissed this way. But I can’t make up my mind[466]. The triangle, as you call it, must be solved for me. I can’t solve it myself. I compare the two of you, weigh you, measure you. I remember Dick and all our past years. And I consult my heart for you. And I don’t know. I don’t know. You are a great man, my great lover. But Dick is a greater man than you. You – you are more clay, more – I grope to describe you – more human, I fancy. And that is why I love you more… or at least I think perhaps I do.