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

Dick stiffened his shoulders, unconsciously bracing himself to face what was now soon to happen. Well, it was the beginning of the end. Oh Dear knew. Soon more would know, all would know. And in a way he was glad of it, glad that the torment of suspense would endure but little longer.

But when he started to leave he whistled a merry jingle to advertise to Oh Dear that the world wagged very well with him so far as he knew anything about it.

The same afternoon, while Dick was out and away with Froelig and Martinez and Graham, Paula stole a pilgrimage to Dick’s quarters. Out on his sleeping porch she looked over his rows of press buttons, his switchboard that from his bed connected him with every part of the ranch and most of the rest of California, his phonograph on the hinged and swinging bracket, the orderly array of books and magazines and agricultural bulletins waiting to be read, the ash tray, cigarettes, scribble pads, and thermos bottle.

Her photograph, the only picture on the porch, held her attention. It hung under his barometers and thermometers, which, she knew, was where he looked oftenest. A fancy came to her, and she turned the laughing face to the wall and glanced from the blankness of the back of the frame to the bed and back again. With a quick panic movement, she turned the laughing face out. It belonged[487], was her thought; it did belong.

The big automatic pistol in the holster on the wall, handy to one’s hand from the bed, caught her eye. She reached to it and lifted gently at the butt. It was as she had expected – loose – Dick’s way. Trust him, no matter how long unused, never to let a pistol freeze in its holster.

Back in the work room she wandered solemnly about, glancing now at the prodigious filing system, at the chart and blue-print cabinets, at the revolving shelves of reference books, and at the long rows of stoutly bound herd registers. At last she came to his books – a goodly row of pamphlets, bound magazine articles, and an even dozen ambitious tomes. She read the titles painstakingly: Corn in California, Silage Practice, Farm Organization, Farm Book-keeping, The Shire in America, Humus Destruction, Soilage, Alfalfa in California, Cover Crops for California, The Shorthorn in America – at this last she smiled affectionately with memory of the great controversy he had waged for the beef cow and the milch cow as against the dual purpose cow.

She caressed the backs of the books with her palm, pressed her cheek against them and leaned with closed eyes. Oh, Dick, Dick – a thought began that faded to a vagueness of sorrow and died because she did not dare to think it.

The desk was so typically Dick. There was no litter.[488] Clean it was of all work save the wire tray with typed letters waiting his signature and an unusual pile of the flat yellow sheets on which his secretaries typed the telegrams relayed by telephone from Eldorado. Carelessly she ran her eyes over the opening lines of the uppermost sheet and chanced upon a reference that puzzled and interested her. She read closely, with in-drawn brows, then went deeper into the heap till she found confirmation. Jeremy Braxton was dead – big, genial, kindly Jeremy Braxton. A Mexican mob of pulque-crazed peons had killed him in the mountains through which he had been trying to escape from the Harvest into Arizona. The date of the telegram was two days old. Dick had known it for two days and never worried her with it. And it meant more. It meant money. It meant that the affairs of the Harvest Group were going from bad to worse[489]. And it was Dick’s way.

And Jeremy was dead. The room seemed suddenly to have grown cold. She shivered. It was the way of life – death always at the end of the road. And her own nameless dread came back upon her. Doom lay ahead. Doom for whom? She did not attempt to guess. Sufficient that it was doom. Her mind was heavy with it, and the quiet room was heavy with it as she passed slowly out.

Chapter XXIX

“’Tis a birdlike sensuousness that is all the Little Lady’s own,” Terrence was saying, as he helped himself to a cocktail from the tray Ah Ha was passing around.

It was the hour before dinner, and Graham, Leo and Terrence McFane had chanced together in the stag room.

“No, Leo,” the Irishman warned the young poet. “Let the one suffice you.[490] Your cheeks are warm with it. A second one and you’ll conflagrate. ’Tis no right you have to be mixing beauty and strong drink in that lad’s head of yours. Leave the drink to your elders. There is such a thing as consanguinity for drink. You have it not. As for me —”

He emptied the glass and paused to turn the cocktail reminiscently on his tongue.