Ewing's Lady Part 34

When the work did not claim him he stayed by her side, watchful for service, jealous of Virginia for little acts he might not himself perform. His eyes seldom left her, she thought, though she could not long endure their look, and she knew that he read this evasion of hers in the light of what Teevan had told him. Through all his devotion there was a gentle aloofness, a constant withdrawing, as if he knew that he must never come close.

She had laughter and tears again for this when she was alone, though there were times when, in her weakness, her wild craving for the fullness of what she might not have, she would have told it all in one surrendering cry to him but for the eyes of Kitty Teevan. They were always upon her now--Ewing had hung the portrait in the studio--holding her with pa.s.sionate entreaty, the mother pleading for herself in the son's memory. She could never tell him, she knew, under those eyes. She must live out her few days in content with that wondrous thing his own eyes revealed for her. She thought it comic and tragic and beautiful.

One night she dreamed that she was not to die, and woke in horror of what his belief would then mean. But morning restored her serenity, and she reposed placidly again on the unquestioned sureness of her going.

Best of all times she liked the late morning and midday, when she could be alone in the sun-heated nook out of doors and give her body to the warmth. She knew it was a primal, sensuous pleasure, but she surrendered to it; turned and bathed writhingly in the sun flood, feeling herself transparent to it. And the pleasure had its reverse side. Autumn came presently in these upper reaches; a less splendid autumn than would set the Eastern woods ablaze with flaunts of gold and scarlet, but an autumn more eloquent of death, the faded yellow of the aspen groves, broken but rarely by some flaming shrub that only emphasized the monotone. This, the unending, lifeless yellow, and the dead green of spruce and hemlock--a false green, she felt, with its tale of ever-living--made a coloring of nice symbolism for her state.

Had she felt the need of a death's head at her sun feast, this neutral, denying flatness would have sufficed. The end had come home to her. It was her unseen familiar, voiceless, but ever present, with a look unhurrying but constant.

And there were the mountains themselves, things that had once leaped alive and tortured themselves into frenzied furies of striving only to be stricken and left at last in all the broken tossing of their folly.

They had tried the fighting death, and it had availed only to fix their last agonies. Their scarred hulks testified to the wisdom of submission.

Yet her mind was normal in these sun-warmed hours of musing. She knew that those dead hills with their dying leaf.a.ge told another tale to the pair of young lives housed with her. To them they were but inspirations to life vital and triumphant; eminences to be scaled in joyous effort, offering to youth's dreaming, half-true clairvoyance, unending reaches to provoke; near enough to seem attainable; far enough to be plausible with promise of delights.

Nor did she fail to rejoice in the fervor of this fresh view so unlike her own. She was conscious of its truth to untouched souls like theirs, and she sought to throw them together, urging them to excursions through the hills. She thought of them at first as her pair whom she had set in a garden where the fruit of no tree was forbidden.

She coolly studied Ewing on the days when he worked indoors, detaching herself from his life as one about to go on a long journey. From her shadowed couch she scanned his face as he bent over the drawing board.

It had filled in the year since she first saw it, and was an older face, the strength of it more conscious, the promise of it almost kept in its well-controlled, level-eyed maturity. Much of the boy remained to flash out, but she saw that this would never go; that it would kindle his eyes when the brown hair had gone white. It was this eternal boyishness, she saw, that made him quick of response to another's interest; this that had made him seem too ductile under Teevan's manipulation, when in truth he had merely been loath to hurt, fearing nothing so much as another's pain. The forward line of the nose and the smoldering fierceness of eye should have been more informing. That was the face, vital, fearless, patently self-willed for all its kindly immaturities of concession, that Teevan had thought to prevail over by his stings of waspish contempt.

She smiled pityingly for Teevan, until she recalled that she also had misread its lines. There were moments when her beaten spirit fluttered up at thought of Teevan's being blasted by what he had thought to blast.

But a look at the mother's restraining face, or, still more, a look at Ewing as he would glance from his work up to the portrait, stilled this craving for battle. It was well, she thought, as it had fallen.

Ewing had set to work doubtingly at first, but with laughing energy when he found that the lines came again at his call. He felt, indeed, that his facility had been increased, and he confided this to Mrs. Laithe one day as she lay watching him.

"I don't have to 'squeeze' the way I did," he said. "Perhaps I really learned something there in spite of myself, in all that messing with colors. I didn't learn to paint, but I seem to have a new line on bucking bronchos and bucked cowboys." He stopped in sudden thought.

"There, I've forgotten that old painting of mine. I'll treat us both to a look at it."

He went off to Ben's room beyond the kitchen and came back with the dusty canvas. He wiped it with a cloth and placed it on the easel.

She did not look at this. She knew it too well. Her look was for his face as he studied it. She saw surprise there, bewilderment, incredulity, and then, slowly dawning, a consternation of dropped jaw and squinting scowl. Yet this broke at length, and, to her great relief, he laughed, heartily, honestly. She smiled, not at the poor painting, but in sympathy with him. Then he remembered that she had looked at this same canvas once before, and that neither of them had laughed. His face sobered, and he went over to her.

"You had nerve, didn't you--after seeing that thing?"

"You remember I didn't praise it."

"But you saw I didn't know any better, and you never let me see that _you_ did. You must have thought highly of me, I can see that." He stooped and laid one of his hands on hers with a friendly, thanking pressure.

"I saw plainly enough what you could do," she protested.

He went to stand again before the despised canvas, playing upon it with humorous disparagement.

"But if you see now," she said, "that it's so--if it seems so----"

"Say the word--do!"

"If it seems bad to you now, that's a good sign. It means that you've learned something about color. Suppose it had still seemed good."

He took the thing off the easel.

"If I've learned as much about color as I think this is bad--well there's only a little left for me to learn."

"Now you will paint others that will seem faultless at the time and bad a year later. That's the penalty of growth, but it's the proof. Make your prayer to the G.o.d of painting: 'May everything I do seem bad when it's a year old!'"

"I'll try to," he returned gravely. Then, "Let's put this out of sight quick, before Virginia sees it."

"You didn't burn it," she asked, when he returned.

"I should think not. I'd have to fight Ben if I burned that. Of course I didn't know any better when I gave it to him, any more than I knew about his songs. That's another thing you must have laughed at me for."

He laughed himself as she looked up at him with puzzled inquiry, and went on to confess how he had sung Ben's choicest ballad at the Monastery.

"Of course it's a funny song," he continued, as he returned to the drawing board, "but it isn't so very much funnier than a lot that aren't supposed to be funny at all. Come, now," he rallied her, "don't they all rub in the sadness, even the ones you might think serious? There must be a million songs about 'Dreaming,' 'I Dreamed that You Were with Me, Love!' and 'It was All a Dream!' and 'Could I but Recall that Day!' and 'Alas, It was not so to be!' and 'Must We, then, Part Forever!' Always crying about something! Always moaning 'if only' something or other.

They're about as teary a lot as Ben's songs. I told Virginia last night I never wanted to hear another 'Could I but--' song; they're as bad as 'The Fatal Wedding.'"

Though he had rushed at the drawings with a powerful incentive--to make himself free so that he could perform one great service for his lady--he yielded often to the persuasions of Mrs. Laithe and took Virginia out for adventures. They explored box canons that she believed to be impenetrable until he nonchalantly opened a way to their secret recesses. They whipped trout streams and he complacently caught fish from holes she would angle in without result. He tried to persuade her that certain brown patches he professed to detect off through the forest from time to time were deer; but vainly each time, until there would be a sudden terrific shattering amid the underbrush, and perhaps a fleeting glimpse of the brown patch with its white center, flying in swift rebuke to her unbelief. They climbed hills together, and he irritated her by his continued ease of breath under the strain, while her own "wind" that she had thought so well of in Kensington was exhausted by the first moments of effort. She believed him guilty of a polite fiction when he explained that the alt.i.tude made all the difference. She disbelieved his tale of the lake water's coldness--it was annoying to be told that even he wanted no more than a single plunge in it--and bathed there one day to her undoing. She refused to believe that he could shoot accurately with a rifle that made so much noise, or with a revolver that wobbled when one tried to hold it still, until he had demonstrated these matters. And she refused to concede that she could not ride a certain half-broken little mare--which Ewing rode without apparent difficulty--until the mare proved it to the satisfaction of all concerned.

These little disbeliefs were not unpleasant to Ewing. He revenged himself for having been proved a "duffer" at her own games.

It was on their return from an afternoon's fishing one day that they found Bartell bestowing c.o.o.ney on his sister.

"I bought him for you from Pierce," he was explaining. "Of course Virgie can ride him until you're fit again."

The sick woman greeted her old friend formally in the presence of the others. But when they had gone inside she led the little roan around to the corral, and there, sheltered by its wall, she put an arm tightly over his lowered neck and laid her face to his with fond little words of greeting and remembrance. He had carried her so well on a day when nothing had happened; when she was a girl herself, it almost seemed, more curious of the world than knowing.

That had been an age--a year--ago. The little horse had been bravely doing his work, carrying his inconsequent burdens as they listed, while she had been losing herself in protests. She had begun doing that, it seemed, the first day he brought her there. She wondered if he could remember it. She doubted that; but at least he remembered Ewing and loved him. She clasped the arm more tightly about his neck, and the little horse whinnied, pawing the earth with a small forefoot, and moving his head up and down in a knowing way. To the woman he had the effect of seeking to return her caress, so that in a moment she was sobbing in a sudden weakness of love for him.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE WHITE TIME

The days went, shortening. She kept to her couch through all but those hours when the sun was high. Then she lay to be warmed in the open while the year died before her. She could not see another year. She must read all her meanings into this one. September went and October waned. The sky was often overcast. They had ceased to talk of her going back. Her brother reminded her cheerfully that he had half expected a long stay for her. She must be patient. She spoke in his own vein of hopefulness, promising patience, and smiled as ever on her pair, who still wandered in that garden, bantering comrades, tasting the fruit of every tree but one.

And one day she knew that all her imaginings about this pair had been vain, caught it in the deepened look of Ewing as he turned from Virginia to herself. It was a thing to bask in--that look--like the fervid sun itself. But it hurt her, too; made it harder to let go of life. Yet always before her was the face of Kitty Teevan with its beseeching eyes: "You have so little time to live, and I must live in his memory always!"

And so she put the thing away, letting him think as he must, wincing under his look of pity, and that devouring thing that lurked always back of his pity, and striving for lightness when she talked with him.

"I understand why our land seemed unreal to you," she said to him while they loitered in the blue dusk of the pine woods near the cabin one day.

The peaks beyond were misty behind gray clouds that lay sullenly along the horizon. "I understand why you called our land a stage land, for this is unreal to me, painted, theatrical, impossible. I keep hearing the person who's seen the play telling his neighbor what's to come next."

"It's real enough," he answered, looking away from her. "I have a way of telling when a land is real."

"You have?"

"Any land is real where you are. New England or Colorado or Siberia or----"

"There, there!" she soothed him mockingly--"or India's coral strand.