The Little Lady of the Big House Part 42

CHAPTER XXIX

"'Tis a birdlike sensuousness that is all the Little Lady's own,"

Terrence was saying, as he helped himself to a c.o.c.ktail from the tray Ah Ha was pa.s.sing 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. 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 gla.s.s and paused to turn the c.o.c.ktail reminiscently on his tongue.

"'Tis women's drink," he shook his head in condemnation. "It likes me not. It bites me not. And devil a bit of a taste is there to it.--Ah Ha, my boy," he called to the Chinese, "mix me a highball in a long, long gla.s.s--a stiff one."

He held up four fingers horizontally to indicate the measure of liquor he would have in the gla.s.s, and, to Ah Ha's query as to what kind of whiskey, answered, "Scotch or Irish, bourbon or rye--whichever comes nearest to hand."

Graham shook his head to the Chinese, and laughed to the Irishman.

"You'll never drink me down, Terrence. I've not forgotten what you did to O'Hay."

"'Twas an accident I would have you think," was the reply. "They say when a man's not feeling any too fit a bit of drink will hit him like a club."

"And you?" Graham questioned.

"Have never been hit by a club. I am a man of singularly few experiences."

"But, Terrence, you were saying... about Mrs. Forrest?" Leo begged. "It sounded as if it were going to be nice."

"As if it could be otherwise," Terrence censured. "But as I was saying, 'tis a bird-like sensuousness--oh, not the little, hoppy, wagtail kind, nor yet the sleek and solemn dove, but a merry sort of bird, like the wild canaries you see bathing in the fountains, always twittering and singing, flinging the water in the sun, and glowing the golden hearts of them on their happy b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 'Tis like that the Little Lady is. I have observed her much.

"Everything on the earth and under the earth and in the sky contributes to the pa.s.sion of her days--the untoward purple of the ground myrtle when it has no right to aught more than pale lavender, a single red rose tossing in the bathing wind, one perfect d.u.c.h.esse rose bursting from its bush into the sunshine, as she said to me, 'pink as the dawn, Terrence, and shaped like a kiss.'

"'Tis all one with her--the Princess's silver neigh, the sheep bells of a frosty morn, the pretty Angora goats making silky pictures on the hillside all day long, the drifts of purple lupins along the fences, the long hot gra.s.s on slope and roadside, the summer-burnt hills tawny as crouching lions--and even have I seen the sheer sensuous pleasure of the Little Lady with bathing her arms and neck in the blessed sun."

"She is the soul of beauty," Leo murmured. "One understands how men can die for women such as she."

"And how men can live for them, and love them, the lovely things,"

Terrence added. "Listen, Mr. Graham, and I'll tell you a secret. We philosophers of the madrono grove, we wrecks and wastages of life here in the quiet backwater and eas.e.m.e.nt of d.i.c.k's munificence, are a brotherhood of lovers. And the lady of our hearts is all the one--the Little Lady. We, who merely talk and dream our days away, and who would lift never a hand for G.o.d, or country, or the devil, are pledged knights of the Little Lady."

"We would die for her," Leo affirmed, slowly nodding his head.

"Nay, lad, we would live for her and fight for her, dying is that easy."

Graham missed nothing of it. The boy did not understand, but in the blue eyes of the Celt, peering from under the mop of iron-gray hair, there was no mistaking the knowledge of the situation.

Voices of men were heard coming down the stairs, and, as Martinez and Dar Hyal entered, Terrence was saying:

"'Tis fine weather they say they're having down at Catalina now, and I hear the tunny fish are biting splendid."

Ah Ha served c.o.c.ktails around, and was kept busy, for Hanc.o.c.k and Froelig followed along. Terrence impartially drank stiff highb.a.l.l.s of whatever liquor the immobile-faced Chinese elected to serve him, and discoursed fatherly to Leo on the iniquities and abominations of the flowing bowl.

Oh My entered, a folded note in his hand, and looked about in doubt as to whom to give it.

"Hither, wing-heeled Celestial," Terrence waved him up.

"'Tis a pet.i.tion, couched in very proper terms," Terrence explained, after a glance at its contents. "And Ernestine and Lute have arrived, for 'tis they that pet.i.tion. Listen." And he read: "'Oh, n.o.ble and glorious stags, two poor and lowly meek-eyed does, wandering lonely in the forest, do humbly entreat admission for the brief time before dinner to the stamping ground of the herd.'

"The metaphor is mixed," said Terrence. "Yet have they acted well. 'Tis the rule--d.i.c.k's rule--and a good rule it is: no petticoats in the stag-room save by the stags' unanimous consent.--Is the herd ready for the question? All those in favor will say 'Aye.'--Contrary minded?--The ayes have it.

"Oh My, fleet with thy heels and bring in the ladies."

"'With sandals beaten from the crowns of kings,'" Leo added, murmuring the words reverently, loving them with his lips as his lips formed them and uttered them.

"'Shall he tread down the altars of their night,'" Terrence completed the pa.s.sage. "The man who wrote that is a great man. He is Leo's friend, and d.i.c.k's friend, and proud am I that he is my friend."

"And that other line," Leo said. "From the same sonnet," he explained to Graham. "Listen to the sound of it: 'To hear what song the star of morning sings'--oh, listen," the boy went on, his voice hushed low with beauty-love for the words: "'With perished beauty in his hands as clay, Shall he restore futurity its dream--'"

He broke off as Paula's sisters entered, and rose shyly to greet them.

Dinner that night was as any dinner at which the madrono sages were present. d.i.c.k was as robustly controversial as usual, locking horns with Aaron Hanc.o.c.k on Bergson, attacking the latter's metaphysics in sharp realistic fashion.

"Your Bergson is a charlatan philosopher, Aaron," d.i.c.k concluded. "He has the same old medicine-man's bag of metaphysical tricks, all decked out and frilled with the latest ascertained facts of science."

"'Tis true," Terrence agreed. "Bergson is a charlatan thinker. 'Tis why he is so popular--"

"I deny--" Hanc.o.c.k broke in.

"Wait a wee, Aaron. 'Tis a thought I have glimmered. Let me catch it before it flutters away into the azure. d.i.c.k's caught Bergson with the goods on him, filched straight from the treasure-house of science. His very c.o.c.ksureness is filched from Darwin's morality of strength based on the survival of the fittest. And what did Bergson do with it?

Touched it up with a bit of James' pragmatism, rosied it over with the eternal hope in man's breast that he will live again, and made it all a-shine with Nietzsche's 'nothing succeeds like excess--'"

"Wilde's, you mean," corrected Ernestine.

"Heaven knows I should have filched it for myself had you not been present," Terrence sighed, with a bow to her. "Some day the antiquarians will decide the authorship. Personally I would say it smacked of Methuselah--But as I was saying, before I was delightfully interrupted..."

"Who more c.o.c.ksure than d.i.c.k?" Aaron was challenging a little later; while Paula glanced significantly to Graham.

"I was looking at the herd of yearling stallions but yesterday,"

Terrence replied, "and with the picture of the splendid beasties still in my eyes I'll ask: And who more delivers the goods?"

"But Hanc.o.c.k's objection is solid," Martinez ventured. "It would be a mean and profitless world without mystery. d.i.c.k sees no mystery."

"There you wrong him," Terrence defended. "I know him well. d.i.c.k recognizes mystery, but not of the nursery-child variety. No c.o.c.k-and-bull stories for him, such as you romanticists luxuriate in."

"Terrence gets me," d.i.c.k nodded. "The world will always be mystery. To me man's consciousness is no greater mystery than the reaction of the gases that make a simple drop of water. Grant that mystery, and all the more complicated phenomena cease to be mysteries. That simple chemical reaction is like one of the axioms on which the edifice of geometry is reared. Matter and force are the everlasting mysteries, manifesting themselves in the twin mysteries of s.p.a.ce and time. The manifestations are not mysteries--only the stuff of the manifestations, matter and force; and the theater of the manifestations, s.p.a.ce and time."

d.i.c.k ceased and idly watched the expressionless Ah Ha and Ah Me who chanced at the moment to be serving opposite him. Their faces did not talk, was his thought; although ten to one was a fair bet that they were informed with the same knowledge that had perturbed Oh Dear.