Read Ebook: Corduroy by Mitchell Ruth Comfort

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Ebook has 612 lines and 53213 words, and 13 pages

Ginger got herself promptly out of his arms. She wasn't in the least shocked or resentful but she was disconcertingly cool. "I don't want to marry--anybody, 'Rome," she said.

She considered him calmly. "Generally, yes," she said.

He enveloped her swiftly in a rough, breathtaking hug, and as swiftly let her go again. "All right; I can wait a while longer." He strode, spurs jingling, toward his horse.

Ginger called after him, hospitably: "Don't go now,'Rome! Stay for dinner. Look at Pedro--he's dead tired."

Ginger frowned, looking after him. She did like old 'Rome a lot. She liked everything about him except the way he treated his stock. Still, he was no worse than most of them. But she didn't want to marry him; she didn't want to marry anybody; she was much too busy and happy.

DEAN WOLCOTT sent a dignified and satisfying design for the bridge, and Ginger had it executed in rough stone brought down from the hills. When it was finished it was a sincere and lasting thing, and she never went over it too quickly to rest her eyes on the plate set into the rock which bore Aleck's name and the dates of his birth and death, and, beneath--"From his sister and his friend."

After a little time the letters had begun to come; long, fluent, vivid letters; realistic stories of the life he and Aleck had lived together. Ginger read them with laughter and with tears, and wrote short, shy answers on cheap stationery. Ordinarily, she would have used the official ranch paper, with the name at the top--"Dos Pozos, Virginia Vald?s McVeagh, sole proprietor," and a neat cut of a long-horned steer at one side and a bucking horse at the other--but she had a dim sense of what the other Mr. Wolcott's expression would be when he saw. Therefore, she used tablet paper and envelopes which did not quite match; sometimes she used the regular stamped envelopes. Her writing was unformed and uninteresting; she loathed composing letters and they sounded and looked as if she did. She had never cared about getting them, save Aleck's. The Los Angeles and San Francisco relatives wrote chiefly to ask if they might come and bring the children for a little visit with dear Virginia, and grateful bread-and-butter notes after they had gone home. She liked getting letters now, however; she found Dean Wolcott's many-sheeted ones the most enthralling reading she had ever done. He was steadily gaining weight and strength and poise again, he told her. In the early summer he began to talk about coming, and in July he announced that he would arrive at San Luis Obispo on the twenty-sixth.

Ginger sat a long time with this letter in her hand. Then she went to the telephone and called up her favorite aunt by long distance, in San Francisco, and asked if she might come up to her next day and do some shopping.

Her Aunt Fan was cordial and kind. She was really very fond of Ginger; fond enough to like having her with her for little visits but not quite fond enough to visit her on the ranch. Aunt Fan's idea of the country was a tiresome geographical division through which you passed on your way to a city. Besides, it was a place of beguiling cream and broilers and hot breadstuffs; a place where one invariably and weakly ate too much.

Now she said that Ginger was to come at once and they'd have a wonderful time together; she'd been meaning to send for her, anyway.

Ginger took the day train from San Luis Obispo and reached San Francisco in the evening; this, she knew, was an easier time for her aunt to meet her than in the morning. Aunt Fan had a taxi waiting and bundled her delightedly into it.

It was a one-piece thing in blue serge of ordinary quality, listlessly trimmed with black braid, and the neck line was just too low and a good deal too high.

"In San Luis," said Ginger, meekly. She was always meek with her aunt on the subject of clothes. "It was only twenty-two fifty."

"I bought all these things ages ago," said Ginger, humble still, "before I went into mourning. I've given all the black stuff to Manuela. I didn't think it mattered, just for the train."

It began to strike Mrs. Featherstone that her niece was turning the other cheek with unprecedented docility. "Look here," she cried, catching hold of her and turning her face to the light, "let me look at you. What is it? What's come over you?" She shook her as 'Rome Ojeda had shaken her but with less muscular authority. "What do you want clothes for?"

"Because I have only things like this, and--" she was entirely unflurried and direct about it--"because Dean Wolcott, Aleck's friend, you know, is coming out for a visit."

Aunt Fan studied her thoughtfully. "When's he coming?"

"The twenty-sixth--a week from Saturday."

"But, Aunt Fan, I didn't expect you to come." Ginger was wholly frank about it.

"I don't see why not," said her niece, coolly. "He isn't strange at all; he was Aleck's friend."

"Well, it doesn't matter whether you see or not," said Mrs. Featherstone, crisply. "I'm coming. I suppose I'll gain eighteen pounds as I did before. See here, will you promise not to let Ling make waffles?" Her carefully tinted face broke up suddenly into little wrinkles of smiles. "There, never mind! I love you if you do weigh a hundred and ten and eat everything!"

She was Ginger's father's half sister, and she had been twice married. Her first husband had died and her second had been divorced, but she was still on very kindly and pleasant terms with him. He gave her a generous alimony and she was able to live in a smart apartment with a smart maid and wear the smartest of clothes and she wanted for nothing in the world except food.

"Here's your room, dearie," she said, piloting her niece into a tiny apricot-colored guest chamber. "I suppose it looks small after the ranch; you couldn't rope a steer in it, but it's large enough, if you're not boisterous. You had to sleep on the davenport when I was at the Livingston, didn't you? This is no end nicer; it ought to be, heaven knows, with what I pay for it. Jim voluntarily gave me another hundred a month, did I tell you?" She sighed and winked her blue eyes violently. "He's a prince, if ever there was one. He said it was only fair--H. C. of L., and all that. Now, I'll just slip into something loose and we'll have a chatter. Lucinda," she called the little trim negress, "you make Miss McVeagh a cup of chocolate. You'll see," she turned to her niece again, "I'll watch you drink it without a quiver. I ought to be a martyr or something--you know--hunger strikes--" She went away breathlessly to get out of her armor, and Ginger opened the window and let the keen, foggy night air into the little soft room. She always felt trapped in her Aunt Fan's pretty abiding places. Nevertheless, she stayed a whole week this time, and got snugly into her aunt's good graces by buying everything she suggested.

They went tirelessly, late forenoons and solid afternoons and Ginger had presently a large trunkful of clever clothes--gay ginghams and crisp organdies, boldly plaided sport skirts and sweaters in solid colors to match, and two evening frocks in scarlet and persimmon. "I'm having a color spree," said Aunt Fan. "All the things I'd adore to wear and can't."

They were at Dos Pozos four days before Dean Wolcott was due. Mrs. Featherstone had been watching her niece narrowly. "What's he like, this chap?" she had wanted to know a day or so after Ginger had come to her.

The girl waited an instant before answering. "I--don't know, Aunt Fan."

"You don't know?"

The girl shook her head. "You see, he was only at the ranch one day, and he slept most of that--he was so exhausted. I don't believe I saw him for two hours in all."

This time she waited even longer before answering. She was calling up the memory of the Christmas day--the first meeting in the morning; the look of him as he came toward her in the rich light of the setting sun, his weary speech; the way his eyes had kindled. "I think," she said, wholly unaware that she was speaking with the same whispering gentleness with which she had spoken to him, "he is different from--everybody else in the world."

Aunt Fan said nothing more, and tiptoed hastily away from the subject. She wrote that night to her former husband--she always wrote to thank him for the alimony--"Jim, I'm keeping my fingers crossed! She's simply bowled over by this chap, and he certainly must be interested, to cross the continent in July. Heavens, but I'd be glad to see her settled--married to somebody beside a cow-puncher--living in civilization! I wish you'd slip down to Boston and look him up, will you? That's a lamb! His name is Dean Wolcott and he's a Harvard man, and a sort of architect. When I think what it would mean to me, to be sure I'd never have to visit her on the ranch again! Be careful not to rush around in the heat, Jim; Boston air is like pudding sauce and you know you never had any sense of taking care of yourself. Let me hear immediately what you find out."

Ginger had been honest with her aunt. She didn't know what Dean Wolcott was like, but she would know on Friday! She was not analytical or introspective enough to know what he stood for; to realize that he was--up to that time--not a person to her, but a quality, a substance; he was all the heroes of all the books she had never read; he was the music she had never heard; the far places she had never seen. And he was silvered and hallowed by his association with her beloved dead brother.

Nevertheless, passing up many pleasant summer plans made by his family and his friends, making his little explanation over and over again, he felt rather foolish, and the Wolcott connection, as the cousin would have said, did not enjoy feeling foolish. The trip across the sweltering states was unendurably hot; while they were going through Kansas he thought several times of wiring to Dos Pozos that he was ill again, and must turn back. He was still wondering, in Los Angeles, just why he had come, and he wondered from eight to three, in the parlor car of the coast-line day train, rumbling through scenery that was brown and dry and hot, but when he got out at San Luis Obispo he stopped wondering. He knew, at once and definitely, why he had come.

The reason was waiting for him on the platform. She wore a white flannel sport skirt and a scarlet coat of jersey and a black hat with scarlet poppies on it, and she glowed like a poppy herself in heat which wilted other people and made them look faded and drained.

She was driving Aleck's car, a seasoned and dependable old vehicle, and they said very little, after the necessities of luggage had been seen to, until they had left the town behind and were mounting into the hills. It was hot; Dean Wolcott thought he had never known such heat, but it had a fine, dry, shimmering quality; the breeze, though it might have blown out of an oven, was electric, bracing. He took off his hat and let the sun shine on his head and the wind muss up the precision of his hair. Ginger did not look at him; she never took her eyes from the road when she was driving--a promise she had made Aleck--but she could feel that he was looking at her. She felt very silent and shy and a good deal frightened.

Dean, on the other hand, was feeling, with every minute and every mile, more serene confidence; a greater sense of glad decision. This was why he had come; he must always have known, secretly, in his depths.

"I want to see the bridge," he said, after the longest of their pauses.

"Yes. I'll tell you when to begin looking. You can see it a long way." Eyes rigidly front, even though they had left the worst of the grade now.

He knew that she was frightened and it made him feel tremendously triumphant; surer of himself than he had been since he went down on the last day of fighting.

"Now you can see the bridge," said Ginger, lifting one hand from the wheel to point it out to him.

"No; I want you to see it first--alone."

He went over it, beyond it; stood well away from it and studied it. Then he came on to it again, halting half-way, looking at her. "Now will you come?"

And, just as he had stopped wondering, Ginger stopped being afraid. She went to him steadily, her head high.

He was bareheaded still, and she noticed now for the first time that his hair was very fair and very fine, brushed sleekly back from his forehead, shining; that he was taller than she had realized; that there was a look of power about him for all his slimness and his cool coloring. Then she stopped noticing altogether, because he had come swiftly to her and caught her in his arms.

"Here, on Aleck's bridge," he said, happily. "We've come to each other across Aleck's bridge; it was Aleck who brought us together." Then he ceased talking about Aleck and kissed her. "Scotch granite and Spanish flame; that is what you are," he told her, holding her away from him for an instant to consider her. "There was never any one like you; you have a stern Scotch chin and a soft Spanish mouth; you are--" then, aware of the way he was wasting time, he left off making phrases and kissed her Spanish mouth, and Estrada, riding in from the range, reined in his horse and stared, wide-eyed, and Aunt Fan, coming out on to the veranda, looked down at them and gasped, and wondered when the result of Jim's investigations would come, and old Manuela, watching from a window, crossed herself and called fervently upon her favorite saint.

But for the two on Aleck's bridge there was, for that slender, golden, perishable moment, no one else in the glowing world.

THE world continued to be otherwise uninhabited and to glow rosily for almost a fortnight. Ginger's Aunt Fan received a very satisfactory letter from Jim Featherstone; the Wolcott Family was as solid as Plymouth Rock, and contemporaneous with it. Dean Wolcott was a young man of excellent lineage, character, and achievement--known already, at twenty-eight, for unusual and original work in his line. He had gone in mildly for athletics at Harvard, topped his classes, made two of the best clubs. He had been popular in a quiet and discriminating fashion.

At the end of his letter Aunt Fan's ex-husband allowed himself a bit of facetiousness. "I've sleuthed the lad down very thoroughly. But--Tremont Street and Dos Pozos! Well, it may work out, if he likes paprika on his Boston beans!"

Mrs. Featherstone was extremely pleased with this report, but she was likewise thorough, so she sent out a hurry call for her good friend, Doctor Gurney Mayfield. This was the doctor with whom they should have supped at Tait's on the night of Ginger's shabby arrival in San Francisco, and he had known Aunt Fan since she was nineteen years old and weighed ninety-eight pounds and she would always be Miss Fanny to him. He had taken care of her first husband through his last illness, the more zealously and devotedly because he had always considered him a rival, and he had thought then, after a decent interval, to renew his suit but his Miss Fanny, some time before his idea of that interval had elapsed, met and married Jim Featherstone and went with him to New York and lived unhappily ever after. He was honestly regretful and soberly elated to have her back in California again, and calling on him as always for escort and counsel, and now he came at once at her summons, driving down from the prosperous ranch where he spent his time after retiring from a beloved and almost boundless practice.

Ginger was a great favorite with him; he was keenly concerned about her choice. The thought of her marriage had always made him a little anxious; she was her father and her mother--truly, as her lover had said in his rhapsodic moment, Scotch granite and Spanish flame. The doctor had seen something of the home life of Rosal?a Vald?s and Alexander McVeagh; it had been quite lyrically perfect, but very high keyed, and he had wondered if it would--or could--last down the years. The Spanish woman had a small velvet voice, convent-trained, and she sat often at the rosewood spinnet which had belonged to her mother before her and sang the songs of the period. They were very sweet and very sentimental and packed with pathos, and some one invariably died in the second verse. He remembered that she had loved best one which ran something after this fashion--

and always turned away from the spinnet with her dark eyes wet.

That was exactly what she had done, herself, and Alexander McVeagh had followed her, ten years later, contentedly, for all his devotion to his son and daughter. He wasn't at all sure, in his rugged and unadorned version of his forbears' belief, that he should find her again in the world to come, but he was very sure that the world he was leaving was not much of a world without her. Aleck, the son, had been a simple and uncomplex creature; all McVeagh. It was the girl who combined her father and her mother in a baffling and intricate fashion. The doctor wondered; it would have been simpler and safer, he considered, for Virginia Vald?s McVeagh to marry a neighboring rancher--even Jerome Ojeda--though he lacked a little of the fineness the doctor wanted for her--than a Wolcott of Boston.

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