The Prairie Mother Part 24

"Isn't it rather late for that?" I reminded him.

"Yes, I suppose it is," he admitted, with a disturbing new note of humility. Then he looked up at me, almost defiantly. "But you need my help."

It was masterful man, once more a.s.serting himself. It was a trivial misstep, but a fatal one. It betrayed, at a flash, his entire misjudgment of me, of my feelings, of what I was and what I intended to be.

"I'm afraid I've rather outlived that period of Bashi-Bazookism," I coolly and quietly explained to my lord and master. "You may have the good luck to be confronting me when I seem to be floored. I've been hailed out, it's true. But that has happened to other people, and they seem to have survived. And there are worse calamities, I find, than the loss of a crop."

"Are you referring to anything that I have done?" asked d.i.n.ky-Dunk, with a slightly belligerent look in his eye.

"If the shoe fits, put it on," I observed.

"But there are certain things I want to explain," he tried to argue, with the look of a man confronted by an overdraft on his patience.

"Somebody has said that a friend," I reminded him, "is a person to whom one need never explain. And any necessity for explanation, you see, removes us even from the realm of friendship."

"But, hang it all, I'm your husband," protested my obtuse and somewhat indignant interlocutor.

"We all have our misfortunes," I found the heart, or rather the absence of heart, to remark.

"I'm afraid this isn't a very good beginning," said d.i.n.ky-Dunk, his dignity more ruffled than ever.

"It's not a beginning at all," I reminded him. "It's more like an ending."

That kept him silent for quite a long while.

"I suppose you despise me," he finally remarked.

"It's scarcely so active an emotion," I tried to punish him by retorting.

"But I at least insist on explaining what took me to the Coast," he contended.

"That is scarcely necessary," I told him.

"Then you know?" he asked.

"I imagine the whole country-side does," I observed.

He made a movement of mixed anger and protest.

"I went to Vancouver because the government had agreed to take over my Vancouver Island water-front for their new shipbuilding yards. If you've forgotten just what that means, I'd like to remind you that there's----"

"I don't happen to have forgotten," I interrupted, wondering why news which at one time would have set me on fire could now leave me quite cold. "But what caused the government to change its mind?"

"Allie!" he said, after a moment's hesitation, fixing a slightly combative eye on mine.

"She seems to have almost unlimited powers," I observed as coolly as I could, making an effort to get my scattered thoughts into line again.

"On the contrary," d.i.n.ky-Dunk explained with quite painful politeness, "it was merely the accident that she happened to know the naval officer on the Imperial Board. She was at Banff the week the board was there, and she was able to put in a good word for the Vancouver Island site. And the Imperial verdict swung our own government officials over."

"You were lucky to have such an attractive wirepuller," I frigidly announced.

"The luck wasn't altogether on my side," d.i.n.ky-Dunk almost as frigidly retorted, "when you remember that it was giving her a chance to get rid of a ranch she was tired of!"

I did my best to hide my surprise, but it wasn't altogether a success.

The dimensions of the movement, apparently, were much greater than my poor little brain had been able to grasp.

"Do you mean it's going to let you take Casa Grande off her ladyship's hands?" I diffidently inquired.

"That's already arranged for," d.i.n.ky-Dunk quite casually informed me.

We were a couple of play-actors, I felt, each deep in a role of his own, each stirred much deeper than he was ready to admit, and each a little afraid of the other.

"You are to be congratulated," I told d.i.n.ky-Dunk, chilled in spite of myself, never for a moment quite able to forget the sinister shadow of Lady Alicia which lay across our trodden little path of everyday life.

"It was you and the kiddies I was thinking of," said my husband, in a slightly remote voice. And the mockery of that statement, knowing what I knew, was too much for me.

"I'm sorry you didn't think of us a little sooner," I observed. And I had the bitter-sweet reward of seeing a stricken light creep up into d.i.n.ky-Dunk's eyes.

"Why do you say that?" he asked.

But I didn't answer that question of his. Instead, I asked him another.

"Did you know that Lady Alicia came here and announced that she was in love with you?" I demanded, resolved to let the light in to that tangled mess which was fermenting in the silo of my soul.

"Yes, I know," he quietly affirmed, as he hung his head. "She told me about it. And it was _awful_. It should never have happened. It made me ashamed even--even to face you!"

"That was natural," I agreed, with my heart still steeled against him.

"It makes a fool of a man," he protested, "a situation like that."

"Then the right sort of man wouldn't encourage it," I reminded him, "wouldn't even permit it." And still again I caught that quick movement of impatience from him.

"What's that sort of thing to a man of my age?" he demanded. "When you get to where I am you don't find love looming so large on the horizon.

What--"

"No, it clearly doesn't loom so large," I interrupted.

"What you want then," went on d.i.n.ky-Dunk, ignoring me, "is power, success, the consolation of knowing you're not a failure in life.

_That's_ the big issue, and that's the stake men play big for, and play hard for."

It was, I remembered in my bitterness of soul, what I myself had been playing hard for--but I had lost. And it had left my heart dry. It had left my heart so dry that my own d.i.n.ky-Dunk, standing there before me in the open sunlight, seemed millions of miles removed from me, mysteriously depersonalized, as remote in spirit as a stranger from Mars come to converse about an inter-stellar telephone-system.

"Then you've really achieved your ambition," I reminded my husband, as he stood studying a face which I tried to keep tranquil under his inspection.

"Oh, no," he corrected, "only a small part of it."

"What's the rest?" I indifferently inquired, wondering why most of life's victories, after all, were mere Pyrrhic victories.

"You," declared d.i.n.ky-Dunk, with a reckless light in his eyes, "You, and the children, now that I'm in a position to give them what they want."