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CORDUROY

RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL

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RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL

CORDUROY NARRATIVES IN VERSE JANE JOURNEYS ON PLAY THE GAME

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY New York London

CORDUROY

BY RUTH COMFORT MITCHELL

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK : : LONDON : : 1923

W. S. Y.

WHO HAS PUT ON CORDUROY AND WEARS IT WELL

CORDUROY

FOR the first time in her life--she had been alive twenty-two vivid and zestful years--Virginia Vald?s McVeagh, nicknamed, descriptively, "Ginger," felt something like reverence for a male creature of her own species.

It immediately appeared, however, that her servants did not require summoning; they were already there. The good creatures had merely driven round the turn of the road in the morning, waited until she had ridden off in the rain, and crept back again, hiding themselves discreetly in their quarters. Their idea had been to feed her as the ravens fed the prophet and to keep out of her sight, for they were on intimate terms with her temper and her tongue. When the house party enforced descended upon their mistress they had come boldly forth, rather giving themselves airs; what--they wanted respectfully to know--would she have done without them?

So it fell out that two brisk and cheerful school-teachers and a forlorn widower and his shabby children and a couple of Stanford students and a personage in a limousine made philosophically merry beneath the roof which had fully intended to cover nothing but desolate grief and decent silence, and Ling plied happily between his table and his glowing range, his queue snapping smartly out behind him, and old Manuela built fires and made up beds in the guest rooms, and Estrada rode into San Luis Obispo to send telegrams to distracted families.

She cried out at that. "A letter? He wrote--you've brought me a letter?" She held out her hands, shaking.

He was fumbling at a pocket and his fingers were likewise unsteady. He explained, very humbly, why he had been so long in coming. He had been wounded, too, not an hour later. Shattering wounds ... he moved his thin body uncomfortably as if at a bad memory; shell shock; he had forgotten everything, even to his own name. A month ago, in England, he had started in to remember, and he had been traveling to her ever since. He gave her a worn and soiled bit of paper, folded up like a child's letter. Estrada slipped softly into the house.

So they stayed there, in silence, save for the slight sound of her grief, until old Manuela bustled in and took soothing but competent charge. Manuela was not unaware of her mistress' bare ankles and throat. She cast a scandalized black eye upon them, hurried her off to her own room to dress, flung up a window to the quick morning air, brought a footstool, tucked the Navaho snugly about the young soldier.

Dean Wolcott roused himself with a palpable effort. "I must not stay. My cousin is waiting at San Obispo; he will be anxious--"

"Coffee, then," said the stranger, wearily.

The warm comfort of it went over him like a drug. He leaned his head back acquiescently. "Yes; I will rest for a few moments."

Dean Wolcott shook his head. "Thank you; I do not care to lie down. I will sit here for a few moments...."

She met her mistress at the end of it. The girl had flung herself swiftly into her riding clothes and her eyes were shining. "I must talk to him, Manuela! There are a thousand things to ask!"

"Not yet, my heart," said the old woman. "First he must sleep. He is broken with weariness."

Ginger turned reluctantly. Her house party enforced was at breakfast and her place was with her motley guests. What she wanted to do was to wait outside Aleck's door until Dean Wolcott wakened, but she was feeling amazingly gentle and good, so she went at once to the dining room and presided with her best modern version of the Vald?s tradition.

She kept on being gentle with the wayfarers; she was not annoyed with them any longer for having mired down on her neglected road before her neglected bridge. It seemed almost as if she would never be annoyed with anything or anybody again, now that the black blanket of silence was lifted; now that she had word--warm, human, close-range word--of Aleck, and Aleck's letter.

Her heart lifted when she thought of the messenger. Aleck had sent him to her, and he had come--over the sea and over the land, as Estrada said, fighting his weakness as he had fought the enemy. She summoned up the echo of his tired voice, pushing the words before him slowly, one by one, the memory of him there in the shaft of morning sunlight, the austere beauty of his worn young face. Her guests, filled with lively, kind curiosity, wanted to hear about him, but she let Estrada tell what there was to tell. When she spoke of him it was in a hushed voice--as if he might hear and be disturbed, the length of the rambling old house away; as if he were something to be spoken of in deep respect. It was that way in her own mind; she whispered about him in her thoughts.

BY three o'clock Estrada had mended the road and propped the bridge and gotten the four machines under way. Ginger saw them off very patiently. They were volubly grateful and expressive and she let them take all the time they wanted for the thanks and farewells, and waited to wave them out of sight. The last car to round the curve was the one containing the widower and his children--forlorn no longer but exuding sticky satiety and clutching their new treasures.

Then she hurried into the house. The soldier guest was still sleeping, the housekeeper reported. Ginger went on tiptoe to the door and listened. There were the countless questions to ask him about Aleck; she grudged every missed moment.

"We dare not wake him," said Manuela with authority. "And he must eat before he talks again. Go away, my heart. I will keep watch." She sat down again in a chair in the corridor and folded her hard brown hands on her stomach. "Listen! Some one comes!"

There was the sound of a motor and Ginger went to see who it was--the house party might have found worse going beyond, and turned back. It was a car from the garage at San Luis Obispo, and before it reached the house she saw that it carried one person beside the driver--a young man who held himself singularly erect. He was, he announced, the cousin who had been waiting, waiting all day, at San Luis Obispo, for Mr. Dean Wolcott. He wanted to know where Mr. Wolcott was. His manner rather conveyed that Mr. Wolcott might have met with foul play; that almost anything might occur in a wilderness of this character.

Miss McVeagh explained that Mr. Dean Wolcott was sleeping; he was greatly exhausted and had been asleep since morning.

Ginger, looking levelly at him, saw at once that he had been and always would be unable to understand. She said, very civilly, that she hoped they would both rest for a few days at Dos Pozos before making the return journey.

"Thank you, but that will be quite impossible," said the young man, hastily. "It will be necessary to leave Los Angeles to-morrow. The entire Wolcott connection--" it was as if he had said--"The Allied Nations," or "The Nordic Peoples"--"will postpone the holiday festivities until Mr. Dean Wolcott's return." He desired to be shown where his cousin was sleeping, and he went briskly in to rouse him, past the protesting Manuela.

Ginger went out of the house. Large as it was, there did not seem to be room enough in it for the newcomer and herself. He brought her sharply out of her mood of whispering gentleness, and she walked a little way toward the bridge and planned to begin work at once on the permanent structure of Aleck's intention. A big and beautiful idea came to her; there was no way of marking Aleck's grave, but this bridge should be built in his memory, inscribed to him. It brought the tears to her eyes and she turned, at sound of feet on the path, and saw Dean Wolcott coming toward her, and now, as in the morning, the sun was on him--this time the evening sun, slipping swiftly down behind the hills.

He was faintly flushed with sleep and his voice was stronger and steadier. "I am ashamed," he said. "I have slept away my one day with you. I had concentrated for so long on the single purpose of bringing Aleck's message to you that, once it was done, everything seemed to be done. I sank into that sleep as if it were a bottomless pit. I must go back to-night. My mother--my people--You see, I spent only a day with them."

He passed a hand across his troubled eyes. "There is so much to tell you.... Every day, every hour, things grow clearer; I remember more and more. But I will write to you. I will write you everything."

His tired eyes lighted. "Will you let me share it with you--let me design it? I do that sort of thing, you know. I should love helping you with Aleck's bridge." His voice was kindling to warmth now. "A bridge--there could be nothing better for a memorial." He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a notebook and pencil. "Shall we go a little nearer? I'll make just a rough sketch of the situation." They walked on.

She took his thin fingers into a warm brown grasp. "Please come! Please come and stay!" The other Mr. Wolcott was coming down the path, picking his way neatly through the mud, but she did not let Dean Wolcott's hand go. "And please come--soon!"

The capable cousin took him away at dusk. They would get a train out of San Luis Obispo at midnight and leave Los Angeles for Boston the next forenoon. He had it all compactly figured out. If they made proper connections--and he looked as if trains rarely if ever trifled with him--they would reach home on the day and at the hour when he had planned to reach home.

Ling and Manuela had hastily cooked and served an early supper and Ginger sat across the table from her two guests, looking at them and listening to them, eating nothing herself. It was to be observed that the worn young soldier and his kinsman shared certain characteristics of face and figure--the same established look of race--but they were two distinct variations on the family theme.

For the first time in her assured and unquestioning life Ginger was acutely aware of her table--of the contrast between the fine old silver and glass which her mother, Rosal?a Vald?s, had brought with her to Dos Pozos as a bride and the commonplace and stupid modern china which she herself had bought at San Luis Obispo; of old Manuela's serene crudities of service. The other Mr. Wolcott was carefully civil, but he managed to make her stingingly conscious of the number and variety of miles between Boston and her ranch: he had rather the air of a cautious and tactful explorer among wild tribes. Whenever he looked at her, which was not often, she felt like a picture in a travel magazine--"native belle in holiday attire"--like a young savage princess with strings of wampum and a copper ring in her nose.

But she did feel, at any rate, like a princess: he aroused in her an absurd desire to talk about the McVeaghs in Scotland and the Vald?s family in Spain; to drag out heirlooms and ancient treasures.

Dean Wolcott was very white again and said little. When they were in the machine he rallied himself with a visible effort. "I will send the sketch soon," he said, rather hollowly, "and I will write you--everything." Then he seemed to sink back into his weary weakness; even the glow died out of his eyes.

Ginger watched the machine's little red tail light disappear around the curve. She was certain that, directly they were under way, the other Mr. Wolcott was telling him how very much wiser and more sensible, how much less exhausting and expensive it would have been to mail Aleck's letter to her.

Then she went briskly into her own room and came out into the corridor presently with her arms overflowing with black clothing--black riding things, black waists and skirts, black dresses.

"Manuela," she said, as the old woman came up to her, staring, "these are for you and your daughters. I've done with them."

Ginger was very much pleased with herself. This was the way in which she--Ginger McVeagh--did things. She decided to lay off black, and instantly, with one gesture, she cleansed her wardrobe completely and forever of its somber presence.

It was an oddly feudal life for a twenty-two-year-old girl in the up-to-the-minute days of the twentieth century, the more so, of course, because of her brother's death, but it had been sufficiently so, even before he went to war. Her mother had died when she was a baby, her father when she was a child; Aleck had firmly sent her away to boarding school three times, and three times he had weakly let her come home. He was bleakly lonesome without her; he concurred, in his happy and simple soul, with the ranchers who laughed and said--"Oh, let her alone--she knows twice as much now as most young ones of her age!" Family connections in San Francisco and Los Angeles protested mildly, but they were busy with their own problems and Dos Pozos was a marvelous place to take the children and spend vacations, and Ginger had probably had about all the schooling she needed for that life and that was undoubtedly the life she meant always to lead. Thus, comfortably, they dismissed the matter, and sent her an occasional new novel for cultural purposes and came months later to find half the leaves uncut. Ginger would have read it with a good deal of enjoyment if she could have stayed indoors long enough; evenings she was apt to be sleepy very early.

'Rome Ojeda, who lived thirty miles away, heard the news, came the thirty miles at a Spanish canter in a little over four hours, flung the reins over the head of his lathered horse to the ground, walked with jingling spurs on to her veranda and made hearty love to her.

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