Read Ebook: The Port of Adventure by Williamson A M Alice Muriel Williamson C N Charles Norris

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Ebook has 1750 lines and 112244 words, and 35 pages

"You're quite poetical!" retorted Carmen, piqued. "But other men have told me my eyes are stars."

He looked straight into them, and at the hot pomegranate colour which blazed up in her olive cheeks, like a reflection of the sunset. And Carmen looked back at him with her big, splendid eyes.

It was a man's look he gave her, a man's look at a woman; but not a man's look at the woman he wants.

"No," he answered. "They're not stars. They're more like the sun at noon in midsummer, when so many flowers are pourin' out perfume you can hardly keep your senses."

Carmen was no longer hurt. "That's the best compliment I ever had, and I've had a good many," she laughed. "Besides--coming from you, Nick! I believe it's the first you ever paid me right out in so many words."

"Was it a compliment?" Nick asked doubtfully and boyishly. "Well, I'm real glad I was smart enough to bring one off. I spoke out just what came into my mind, and I'd have felt mighty bad if you'd been cross."

"I'm not cross!" she assured him. "I'd rather be a woman--for you--than an angel. Angels are cold, far-off, impossible things that men can't grasp. Besides, their wings would probably moult."

Nick laughed, a pleasant, soft laugh, half under his breath. "Say, I don't picture angels with wings! The sort that flits into my mind when I'm tired out after a right hard day and feel kind of lonesome for something beautiful, I don't know hardly what--only something I've never had--that sort of angel is a woman, too, and not cold, though far above me, of course. She has starry eyes and moonlight hair--lots of it, hanging down in waves that could almost drown her. But I guess, after all--as you say--that sort's not my line. I'll never come in the light she makes with her shining, and if I should by accident, she wouldn't go shooting any of her starry glances my way."

Carmen was vexed again. "I didn't know you were so sentimental, Nick!"

He looked half ashamed.

"I don't know. I dare say I read some of it when I was a little girl," replied Carmen, wondering what Nick was leading up to. "It's for children, isn't it?"

"Your birthday!" Carmen broke in, tired of this book talk, but not tired of anything that concerned him. "You never told me. That was bad of you. How old, Nick? I'm not sure to a year or so."

"Twenty-nine. Quite some age, isn't it? But there's lots I want to do before I'm old. I don't know, though, as I mean ever to be old."

"Of course, you never will be." Carmen agreed with him aloud, but she was thinking in an undertone: "Only twenty-nine, and I'm thirty-three. He won't be old ever, or for a long time, but I will. I'm that kind, I'm afraid. My mother was. I've got no time to lose; but to-day's mine. Nick must love me really, though maybe he's too used to me to know it, without being stirred up by something unusual. But I'll try my hardest to make him know it to-night."

"Go on about your 'Arabian Nights,'" she said, to give herself time for the arranging of her tactics.

"I wanted to keep you as near as possible, Nick, when people began to be silly and say I oughtn't to have a young man like you on the place as foreman, with me alone, and Eld gone. I needed you badly, and I'd have been glad to give you land for nothing if you'd have taken it. Gracious! I've got so much left I don't know what to do with it, or wouldn't if you weren't where you can advise me."

"But you insisted on mortgaging every acre you bought--your cattle and everything you had, to me; so that took away the credit," cried Carmen, touched by his gratitude, and happy in the renewed assurance that this man was hers. "Besides, all you did and spent seemed likely to harm more than help, when everybody said you wouldn't get enough oil to pay for sinking your wells. It was only when the gusher burst out by accident and took every one by surprise that your troubles were over."

"If there's any such thing as accident," Nick mumbled, his eyes far away from Carmen. "The longer I live, the more I think there isn't. It's all arranged by Something Big up there beyond where the sun's sinking and the moon's rising. But maybe you'll say that's sentimental, like the angel-thought. I don't mean it that way, though I've got an almighty lot to thank the Something for--as well as to thank you."

"It wasn't I who took the gusher off your hands, anyhow, and saved you the expense of coping with it," said Carmen. "So I suppose you think it was Heaven sent you those men to buy what oil land you wanted to sell, and start Lucky Star City."

"I guess that's Who it was. Not that I deserve any special kindness from that quarter," Nick laughed. "My mother used to talk a lot about those things, you know, and though I was only a little shaver when she died, I've remembered most all that was connected with her."

Carmen did not speak. She knew the history of Nick's terrible childhood and early youth. Long ago he had told her how his grandfather, a California pioneer of good Southern family, a successful judge, had turned an only son away, penniless, because the boy of twenty chose to take for a wife a pretty little dressmaker, of no family at all; how the couple had gone East, to live on a few hundred dollars left to the boy by an aunt; how he had hoped and expected to succeed in New York as a journalist and writer; how he had failed and starved with his bride; how he had faded out of life while Nick was a baby; how the girl-widow had taken in sewing to support her child, and when she couldn't get that, had washed or scrubbed; and how, as Nick became a wise, worried old man of four or five years, he had been able to help earn the family living by selling the newspapers which had refused his dead father's contributions. Nick had not enlarged upon his adventures after this stage of his youthful career, merely sketching them in the baldest manner, when it had been necessary to present his credentials to the "boss"--"old Grizzly Gaylor." But in one way or other it had leaked out that the boy had learned to read and write and cipher at a night school in New York, not having time for such "frills" as schooling by day. And Carmen could not help knowing that he had gone on studying, and thinking out his own rather queer ideas about heaven and earth, ever since, in spite of the most strenuous interruptions--for she had been ashamed occasionally by happening to discover how much Nick knew. He had read everybody and everything from Plato to Schopenhauer, whereas it bored Carmen unspeakably to read anything except novels, and verses which she liked sometimes in magazines, because their pathos or passion might have been written round her.

She knew how Nick, as a little boy, had swept shops and found all sorts of odd jobs; how he had been errand boy, and district messenger in a uniform of which he had been proud because it made him feel "almost like a soldier"; how after his mother's death he had got his long-cherished wish to "go West," by working on the railway and eventually becoming a brakesman. After that short experience "cowpunching" days had come, and after several years in a subordinate position on Eldridge Gaylor's ranch he had at twenty-five been made foreman. But by this time he was already a familiar figure in her life--the life which she had chosen, and hated after it was chosen, except for Nick Hilliard, who had always loomed large in it, though she saw little of him until a year ago.

Except perhaps with the old man she had married for his money and hated for his brutality, Carmen believed that Nick Hilliard's "ways" and good looks had helped, even more than his courage and cleverness, to win him success and recognition. With Eldridge Gaylor it had been different. He thought of no man's pleasant looks or ways, though even upon the corrugated iron of his nature, a woman's beauty had had influence, and he had married Carmen off the comic opera stage, in the City of Mexico, where he had gone to see a great bullfight ten years ago. When he had brought her home to his famous ranch, willing for a while to be her slave and give her everything she wanted, she had found Nick a cowpuncher among other cowpunchers. And she had seen how he made "old Grizzly" respect him. But his promotion had come through a row and an attempt at murdering the "boss" by a drunken foreman driven mad by a blow from the short whip Gaylor carried about the ranch. Nick had saved his employer's life, risking his own--for he was unarmed at the moment; and to his surprise the reward had been the discharged foreman's place. Carmen shivered a little even now, remembering that night, and how she had worshipped Nick for his bravery. She had never since ceased to worship him, though he had done a great many things which irritated her extremely, such as saving "old Grizzly's" life once again: but those years were past.

As she wondered whether Nick would like her to talk with him about his mother, or whether that subject was too delicate to pursue, a musical Japanese gong sounded from a side gallery.

"Oh, it must be half-past seven," she said. "I ordered dinner early, so we could talk afterward by moonlight before the time for you to go. You can give me your arm, if you like, Nick."

Of course, Nick "liked," though he had never taken a lady to dinner in that way before, and he felt proud, if a little awkward, as a bare, creamy arm laid itself on his coat-sleeve.

Slowly and without speaking, they walked along a flower-bordered path that skirted the lawn on one side, and on the other a canal full to the brim of glittering water, which reflected the sky and the two figures.

It was a place and an hour made for love.

THE ANNIVERSARY

They did not dine in the house, though one of the show rooms was a huge dining-hall like a glorified refectory in an old Spanish mission. After the beginning of April, and sometimes long before, Carmen seldom took a meal indoors, unless she was attacked by one of her fierce fits of depression, and had a whim to hate the sun.

She and Nick mounted the steps, passed the fountain which spouted diamond spray through a round head made of some flowering water-plant, went on round a corner, Carmen's dress brushing fallen camellia petals or pink shells of broken roses, and so came to another veranda. This was pergola as well. It had no roof but beams of old Spanish chestnut, so draped with wistaria and roses that the whole out-of-doors room was canopied with leaves and hanging clusters of flowers. Only a faint filtering of sun or moonshine could steal through, and such rays as penetrated seemed to be dyed pink and purple by draining through the flowers.

Suspended from the beams were big iridescent pearl-shells, known in southern California as "abalone," and in the rainbow-tinted half-globes gleamed electric lights, subdued by dull gold glass; but neither these nor the tall shaded lamps on the low wall of the terrace, nor the hidden electric bulbs in the fountain basin, were allowed to shine out yet. As Carmen said, she liked to talk by moonlight; and now, over in the east, behind magnolia and palm trees, the moon had been born while the sun died in the west.

The air was sweet with the fragrance of orange-blossoms, and the deep-red velvet roses which were Carmen's own flowers. Nick was a water drinker by preference and because he was an open-air man, also because it had been necessary for him to set an example; but to-night Carmen made him sip a little iced champagne, and she drank to the success of his first visit East since boyhood--to his safe and speedy home-coming.

"Because this is home, Nick; your home," she said. "It would kill me if you saw any place you liked better, and if you made up your mind that you wanted to sell out and live in New York."

"No fear," said Nick. "No man ever left paradise unless he was driven out by flaming swords."

"Then you won't be gone long?" she asked, playing with the abalone chowder on her plate.

"Not more than a month anyhow; maybe a few days less if I get homesick; though it would hardly be worth while to go so far for a shorter time, after staying West so many years without a single break. First, I count on poking round in some of our old haunts--poor mother's and mine--and then, when I am way down in the dumps I'll yank myself up again with a little fun--theatres and roof-gardens and such-like."

"You've seen good plays in San Francisco," said Carmen.

"Yes, San Franciso's a great place. Only I haven't had time to go there once in a blue moon. And just now it's those old associations pulling--something seems drawing and drawing me to the East. It's like a voice calling my name--'Nick--Nick, I want you. Come!' Funny, isn't it?"

Carmen was not sure that it was funny. For she was superstitious beyond all things; and at that moment it happened that she could hear the moaning note of doves--a sound which she believed always brought her bad luck.

"What kind of a voice is it?" she asked, laughing rather shrilly. "Not a woman's, I hope?"

"I guess it's that angel's I was telling you about." Nick smiled.

Carmen motioned the Chinese butler to fill her guest's glass, which he had hardly touched.

"Don't let's talk any more of angels," she said. "Let's talk of me, and you. Nick, do you know what to-night is? A year since I was free. 'At the end of a year' I always said to myself. 'Twelve long months of hypocritical respect paid to the memory of a person who was more brute than man. But not a day more, when the twelve months are over. Then--happiness--new life!' Don't you consider I'm justified in feeling like that?"

Nick thought for a moment, not looking at Carmen. He gazed out through the torn curtain of roses into the silver of the moonlight, over the wide lawn with its fountains, toward the walls of trees which screened from sight the rolling billows of the ranch-meadows with their cattle, their shining, canal-like irrigation-ditches, their golden grain, their alfalfa, their fruit and flowers. All this wealth and much more old Grizzly Gaylor had given the pretty young singer in exchange for her beauty and the pleasure of snatching her away from other men. Despite the "boss's" notorious failings, it grated on Hilliard to hear Carmen rejoice aloud because her husband was underground, and she was free of him now that his back was turned forever.

"Probably you're right," Nick said. "Yet--it kind of rubs me up the wrong way to listen to you talkin' like that, in particular just this very night."

"Why in particular this very night?" she asked sharply.

"Well--I guess it's only conventional, because, why are twelve months more important than fourteen or any other number? But it's the feeling of an anniversary, I suppose. A year ago to-day he breathed his last--and he didn't want to die. It sort of seems as if to-day ought to be sacred to him, no matter what he was. And--maybe I'm a dashed hypocrite and don't know it, but it doesn't suit my ideas of you to get the feeling that you set up to-night as festival. I expect I'm wrong, though, and you ought to be lecturin' me instead of me you."

"I don't want to lecture you, Nick, whether you understand me or not," said Carmen. But the dinner and the meaning of the feast were spoilt for her in an instant. She could have bitten her tongue out because it had spoken the wrong words--words which jarred on Nick at the very moment when she most wished to charm him. She knew, with a heavy weight of premonition, that this moonlight talk she had planned would give her nothing worth having now. To try to make Nick feel her power would do more harm than good, because the night had suddenly become haunted by the spirit of the dead man. "I'm punished," she thought, superstitiously. But she exerted herself to be cheerful, lest Nick should go East disgusted with her. And that would be the end of all.

A GIRL IN MOURNING

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