The Prairie Mother Part 4

"Lady Alicia had better rope in her ranch when the roping is good," I retorted, chilled a little by her repeated intrusion into the situation. For I had no intention of speaking of Lady Alicia Newland with bated breath, just because she had a t.i.tle. I'd scratched dances with a duke or two myself, in my time, even though I could already see myself once more wielding a kitchen-mop and tamping a pail against a hog-trough, over at the Harris Ranch.

"You're missing the point," began d.i.n.ky-Dunk.

"Listen!" I suddenly commanded. A harried roebuck has nothing on a young mother for acuteness of hearing. And thin and faint, from above-stairs, I caught the sound of a treble wailing which was promptly augmented into a duet.

"Poppsy's got Pee-Wee awake," I announced as I rose from my chair. It seemed something suddenly remote and small, this losing of a fortune, before the more imminent problem of getting a pair of crying babies safely to sleep. I realized that as I ran upstairs and started the swing-box penduluming back and forth. I even found myself much calmer in spirit by the time I'd crooned and soothed the Twins off again. And I was smiling a little, I think, as I went down to my poor old d.i.n.ky-Dunk, for he held out a hand and barred my way as I rounded the table to resume my seat opposite him.

"You don't despise me, do you?" he demanded, holding me by the sleeve and studying me with a slightly mystified eye. It was an eye as wistful as an old hound's in winter, an eye with a hunger I'd not seen there this many a day.

"Despise you, Acushla?" I echoed, with a catch in my throat, as my arms closed about him. And as he clung to me, with a forlorn sort of desperation, a soul-Chinook seemed to sweep up the cold fogs that had gathered and swung between us for so many months. I'd worried, in secret, about that fog. I'd tried to tell myself that it was the coming of the children that had made the difference, since a big strong man, naturally, had to take second place to those helpless little mites. But my d.i.n.ky-Dunk had a place in my heart which no snoozerette could fill and no infant could usurp. He was my man, my mate, my partner in this tangled adventure called life, and so long as I had him they could take the house with the laundry-chute and the last acre of land.

"My dear, my dear," I tried to tell him, "I was never hungry for money. The one thing I've always been hungry for is love. What'd be the good of having a millionaire husband if he looked like a man in a hair-shirt on every occasion when you asked for a moment of his time?

And what's the good of life if you can't crowd a little affection into it? I was just thinking we're all terribly like children in a Maypole dance. We're so impatient to get our colored bands wound neatly about a wooden stick, a wooden stick that can never be ours, that we make a mad race of what really ought to be a careless and leisurely joy. We don't remember to enjoy the dancing, and we seem to get so mixed in our ends. So _carpe diem_, say I. And perhaps you remember that sentence from Epictetus you once wrote out on a slip of paper and pinned to my bedroom door: 'Better it is that great souls should live in small habitations than that abject slaves should burrow in great houses!'"

d.i.n.ky-Dunk, as I sat brushing back his top-knot, regarded me with a sad and slightly acidulated smile.

"You'd need all that philosophy, and a good deal more, before you'd lived for a month in a place like the Harris shack," he warned me.

"Not if I knew you loved me, O Kaikobad," I very promptly informed him.

"But you do know that," he contended, man-like. I was glad to find, though, that a little of the bitterness had gone out of his eyes.

"Feather-headed women like me, Diddums, hunger to hear that sort of thing, hunger to hear it all the time. On that theme they want their husbands to be like those little j.a.panese wind-harps that don't even know how to be silent."

"Then why did you say, about a month ago, that marriage was like Hogan's Alley, the deeper one got into it the tougher it was?"

"Why did you go off to Edmonton for three whole days without kissing me good-by?" I countered. I tried to speak lightly, but it took an effort. For my husband's neglect, on that occasion, had seemed the first intimation that the glory was over and done with. It had given me about the same feeling that we used to have as flapperettes when the circus-manager mounted the tub and began to announce the after-concert, all for the price of ten cents, one dime!

"I wanted to, Tabbie, but you impressed me as looking rather unapproachable that day."

"When the honey is scarce, my dear, even bees are said to be cross," I reminded him. "And that's the thing that disturbs me, d.i.n.ky-Dunk. It must disturb any woman to remember that she's left her happiness in one man's hand. And it's more than one's mere happiness, for mixed up with that is one's sense of humor and one's sense of proportion. They all go, when you make me miserable. And the Lord knows, my dear, that a woman without a sense of humor is worse than a dipper without a handle."

d.i.n.ky-Dunk sat studying me.

"I guess it was my own sense of proportion that got out of kilter, Gee-Gee," he finally said. "But there's one thing I want you to remember. If I got deeper into this game than I should have, it wasn't for what money meant to me. I've never been able to forget what I took you away from. I took you away from luxury and carted you out here to the end of Nowhere and had you leave behind about everything that made life decent. And the one thing I've always wanted to do is make good on that over-draft on your bank-account of happiness. I've wanted to give back to you the things you sacrificed. I knew I owed you that, all along. And when the children came I saw that I owed it to you more than ever. I want to give d.i.n.ky-d.i.n.k and Poppsy and Pee-Wee a fair chance in life. I want to be able to start them right, just as much as you do. And you can't be dumped back into a three-roomed wickiup, with three children to bring up, and feel that you're doing the right thing by your family."

It wasn't altogether happy talk, but deep down in my heart I was glad we were having it. It seemed to clear the air, very much as a good old-fashioned thunder-storm can. It left us stumbling back to the essentials of existence. It showed us where we stood, and what we meant to each other, what we must mean to each other. And now that the chance had come, I intended to have my say out.

"The things that make life decent, d.i.n.ky-Dunk, are the things that we carry packed away in our own immortal soul, the homely old things like honesty and self-respect and contentment of mind. And if we've got to cut close to the bone before we can square up our ledger of life, let's start the carving while we have the chance. Let's get our conscience clear and know we're playing the game."

I was dreadfully afraid he was going to laugh at me, it sounded so much like pulpiteering. But I was in earnest, pa.s.sionately in earnest, and my lord and master seemed to realize it.

"Have you thought about the kiddies?" he asked me, for the second time.

"I'm always thinking about the kiddies," I told him, a trifle puzzled by the wince which so simple a statement could bring to his face. His wondering eye, staring through the open French doors of the living-room, rested on my baby grand.

"How about _that_?" he demanded, with a grim head-nod toward the piano.

"That may help to amuse Lady Alicia," I just as grimly retorted.

He stared about that comfortable home which we had builded up out of our toil, stared about at it as I've seen emigrants stare back at the receding sh.o.r.es of the land they loved. Then he sat studying my face.

"How long is it since you've seen the inside of the Harris shack?" he suddenly asked me.

"Last Friday when I took the bacon and oatmeal over to Soapy and Francois and Whinstane Sandy," I told him.

"And what did you think of that shack?"

"It impressed me as being sadly in need of soap and water," I calmly admitted. "It's like any other shack where two or three men have been batching--no better and no worse than the wickiup I came to here on my honeymoon."

d.i.n.ky-Dunk looked about at me quickly, as though in search of some touch of malice in that statement. He seemed bewildered, in fact, to find that I was able to smile at him.

"But that, Chaddie, was nearly four long years ago," he reminded me, with a morose and meditative clouding of the brow. And I knew exactly what he was thinking about.

"I'll know better how to go about it this time," I announced with my stubbornest Doctor Pangless grin.

"But there are two things you haven't taken into consideration,"

d.i.n.ky-Dunk reminded me.

"What are they?" I demanded.

"One is the matter of ready money."

"I've that six hundred dollars from my Chilean nitrate shares," I proudly announced. "And Uncle Carlton said that if the Company ever gets reorganized it ought to be a paying concern."

d.i.n.ky-Dunk, however, didn't seem greatly impressed with either the parade of my secret nest-egg or the promise of my solitary plunge into finance. "What's the other?" I asked as he still sat frowning over his empty pipe.

"The other is Lady Alicia herself," he finally explained.

"What can she do?"

"She may cause complications."

"What kind of complications?"

"I can't tell until I've seen her," was d.i.n.ky-Dunk's none too definite reply.

"Then we needn't cross that bridge until we come to it," I announced as I sat watching d.i.n.ky-Dunk pack the bowl of his pipe and strike a match. It seemed a trivial enough movement. Yet it was monumental in its homeliness. It was poignant with a power to transport me back to earlier and happier days, to the days when one never thought of feathering the nest of existence with the illusions of old age. A vague loneliness ate at my heart, the same as a rat eats at a cellar beam.

I crossed over to my husband's side and stood with one hand on his shoulder as he sat there smoking. I waited for him to reach out for my other hand. But the burden of his troubles seemed too heavy to let him remember. He smoked morosely on. He sat in a sort of self-immuring torpor, staring out over what he still regarded as the wreck of his career. So I stooped down and helped myself to a very smoky kiss before I went off up-stairs to bed. For the children, I knew, would have me awake early enough--and nursing mothers needs must sleep!

_Thursday the Second_

I have won my point. d.i.n.ky-Dunk has succ.u.mbed. The migration is under way. The great trek has begun. In plain English, we're moving.