Bunch Grass Part 38

We gleaned a few more details. Angela was the daughter of a doctor at Surbiton, and apparently a damsel of accomplishments. She could punt, play tennis, dance, sing, and make her own blouses; in a word, a "ripper," "top-hole," and no mistake! Ajax slightly raised his brows when we learned that the course of true love had run smooth; but the doctor's blessing was adequately accounted for--Angela had five sisters.

"But when your lungs went wrong----?"

Misterton laughed.

"Being a doctor, you see--and a devilish clever chap--he knew that I'd be as right as rain out here. 'If you want Angela,' he said, 'you must go full steam for fresh air and sunshine.'"

Riding home through the cactus and manzanita Ajax said irritably, "Is there any Paradise on earth without a fool in it?"

The following spring, Angela came out. We attended the wedding, Ajax a.s.sisting as best man. Afterwards, somewhat reluctantly, we agreed that Angela's photograph had aroused expectations not quite satisfied.

She was very pretty, but her manners were neither of the town nor of the country. Ajax said, "There must be hundreds like her in Upper Tooting; that's where she ought to live."

Because I was more than half a.s.sured of this, I made a point of disputing it.

"She's plastic, anyway; a nice little thing."

"Is a nice little thing the right sort of a wife for a squatter?"

"If she loves him--"

"Of course she loves him--now."

"Look at her pluck in coming out!"

"Pluck? She has five sisters in Upper Tooting."

"Surbiton."

"I'm sure it's Upper Tooting."

"And she can make her own blouses."

"Can she cook, can she milk a cow, can she keep a house clean?"

"Give her time!"

"Time? I'd like to give her father six months. What's the use of jawing? We've been aiding and abetting a crime. We might have prevented this slaughter of the innocents. What will that skin be like in one year from now?"

"If she were sallow, you would be less excited."

We spent a few days in San Francisco; and then we returned to the ranch to give a luncheon in the bride's honour. The table was set under some splendid live-oaks in the home-pasture, which, in May, presents the appearance of a fine English park. A creek tinkled at our feet, and beyond, out of the soft, lavender-coloured haze, rose the blue peaks of the Santa Lucia mountains.

"Reminds one a little of the Old Country," I remarked to Angela, who was all smiles and quite conscious of being the most interesting object in the landscape.

"Oh, please, don't speak of England!"

Her pretty forehead puckered, and her mouth drooped piteously. Then she laughed, as she launched into a vivid description of her first attempt to bake bread. Whenever she spoke, I saw Jim's large, slightly prominent eyes fix themselves upon her face. His beaming satisfaction in everything she did or said would have been delightful had I been able to wean my thoughts from the place which he still believed to be --Eden. At intervals I heard him murmur, "This is rippin'!"

After luncheon, Angela asked to see the ranch-house, and almost as soon as we were out of hearing, she said with disconcerting abruptness--

"Does your ranch pay?" She added half-apologetically, "I do so want to know."

"It doesn't pay," I answered grimly.

"You are not going--behind?" she faltered, using the familiar phrase of the country in which she had spent as yet but three weeks.

"We are going behind," I answered, angry with her curiosity: not old enough or experienced enough to see beneath it fear and misery. Angela said nothing more till we pa.s.sed into the house. Then, with lack- l.u.s.tre eyes, she surveyed our belongings, murmuring endless commonplace phrases. Presently she stopped opposite a photograph of a girl in Court dress.

"What a lovely frock!" she exclaimed, with real interest. "I do wish I'd been presented at Court. Who is she? Oh, a cousin. I wonder you can bear to look at her."

Without another word she burst into tears, heart-breaking sobs, the more vehement because obviously she was trying to suppress them. I stared at her, helpless with dismay, confronted for the first time with an emergency which seemed to paralyse rather than stimulate action. Had I sympathised, had I presented any aspect other than that of the confounded idiot, she might have become hysterical. Without doubt, my impa.s.sivity pulled her together. The sobs ceased, and she said with a certain calmness--

"I couldn't help it. You and your brother have this splendid ranch; you have experience, capital, everything looks so prosperous, and yet you are going--_behind_. And if that is the case, what is to become of us?"

"I dare say things will brighten up a bit."

"Brighten up?" She laughed derisively.

"That's the worst of it. The brightness is appalling. These hard, blue skies without a cloud in them, this everlasting sunshine--how I loathe it!"

Again I became tongue-tied.

"Jim thinks it _is_ Eden. When he showed me that ugly hut, and his sickly fruit trees, and that terrible little garden where every flower seemed to be protesting against its existence, I had to make- believe that it was Eden to me. Each day he goes off to his work, and he always asks the same question: 'You won't be lonesome, little woman, will you?' and I answer, 'No.' But I am lonesome, so lonesome that I should have gone mad if I hadn't found someone--you--to whom I could speak out."

"I'm frightfully sorry," I stammered.

"Thanks. I know you are. And your brother is sorry, and everybody else, too. The women, my neighbours in the brush-hills, look at me with the same question in their eyes: 'What are you doing here?' they say.

"How impertinent!"

"Pertinent, I call it."

From that moment I regarded her with different eyes. If she had brains to measure obstacles, she might surmount them, for brains in a new country are the one possession which adversity increases.

"Mrs. Misterton," I said slowly, "you are in a tight place, and I won't insult your intelligence by calling it by a prettier name; but you can pull yourself and Jim out of it, and I believe you will."

"Thanks," she said soberly.

For some weeks after this we saw little of the Mistertons. Then Jim rode down to the ranch with an exciting piece of news.

"I've got a pup coming out."

A "pup" in California means a young English gentleman, generally the fool of the family, who pays a premium to some fellow-countryman in return for board and lodging and the privilege of learning not so much how to do things as how not to do them--the latter being the more common object-lesson afforded him. Ajax and I had gleaned experience with pups, and we had long ago determined that no premium was adequate compensation for the task and responsibility of breaking them in. Jim went into details.

"It's Tomlinson-Thorpe. You fellows have heard of him, of course?"