Читать книгу Pícaro - Charles Bernard Nordhoff - Страница 3

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The horizon was cloudless that evening, and over the ocean, beyond the ridge of Toros Point, a glimmer of daylight lingered in the sky. The gorges of the San Benito Hills were filled with a purplish haze; little by little, with a change relentless and imperceptible as the approach of age, purple shadows turned gray and gray turned black, while the afterglow illuminating the summits of the range faded and was swallowed up in the dusk.

The valley leading inland from the bay was odorous with the moist, subtle perfume of bottom land; the air trembled faintly as the thunder of the breakers drifted in from the beach beyond the marshes of La Balsa. Scattered cows and calves, lying under the cottonwoods along the creek, lifted their heads when a night breeze stole down from the hills, rustling the leaves of the old trees and bringing from the uplands the sweet mingling scents of tarweed and black sage. A planet glimmered in the west, paling as the sky line of the range hardened against a growing radiance. Presently the moon rose, revealing in the glamour of its deceptive light the sheltering point, the calm waters of the bay, the gleaming salt pools of the marsh, the broad valley with its pasture land and groves of cottonwood, and the old Spanish house of the Rancho Guadalupe.

Even by day the square and massive house was beautiful; in the moonlight, which softened its severity of line and veiled the symptoms of ruin in a cracked wall or an area of plaster fallen away, it had an air of singular accord and dignity, akin to the beauty of the hills, of the valley, of the sleeping bay. It was a relic of a forgotten age, when men built slowly with the materials which lay at hand—building for their own lifetimes and to shelter their children after them.

At the far end of the gallery, beyond the carved doors giving on the entrance hall and the court, a bench stood with its back to the wall. The servants of the household were gathered there in the shadows, whispering with a kind of subdued excitement among themselves. There were no lights in the reception room, but the glimmer of a lamp behind thick silken hangings outlined the windows of Doña Margarita’s room beyond. The night was warm and the double doors of her husband’s study were thrown back to admit the air. A student lamp with a green shade burned on the major’s table, and its light, shining out through the doorway, illuminated a floor of smooth flagstones, a pair of short square columns, and the round arch above.

Close to the table, in the circle of lamplight, an old man lay stretched in an easy-chair. He wore a smoking-jacket over a soft white shirt with a flowing tie. His face was tanned by a lifetime in the open; his blue eyes, under heavy brows, had the veiled gaze which tells of years in the saddle or at sea. The high-bridged nose fitted the firm mouth and chin; the thick hair, allowed to grow long in the fashion of an earlier day, was white as his mustache or the wisp of goatee beneath his lower lip. In spite of his hollow temples and the veins in the thin brown hand holding an unlighted cigar, Major Blaise Langhorne seemed to have escaped the senility which comes to most men of his age. A remarkably handsome old man, you would have said, a man of decision still—kindly, resolute, and conservative to the last drop of his blood.

There was a knock on the door of the dressing-room which separated the study from Mrs. Langhorne’s apartment. The major rose from his chair with a look of anxiety, sudden and sharp.

“Come in, Robert,” he said.

The door opened and Doctor Tisdale entered the room—a young man with rimless pince-nez and a worn, clever face. He felt a certain awe in the presence of Langhorne, his father’s ancient friend, who seemed precisely the same courtly old gentleman he remembered in the days of visits to the Langhorne boys, many years before.

“I might as well be frank, sir,” he said in a dull voice, after a moment of hesitation. “There is no more hope.”

The old man drew in his breath; he had been preparing for the doctor’s words, but all the day’s happenings had seemed unreal: the sudden crisis of his wife’s illness, the scarlet stains on the handkerchief she had striven to hide, the doctor summoned by telegram ... an unpleasant dream from which he must presently awake to the tranquillity of yesterday. An instant later, when he spoke, his voice was even and firm.

“Sit down, my boy,” he suggested kindly; “you must be tired. You’re quite sure there is no hope?”

The doctor did not raise his eyes. The old man’s self-control had almost broken his own—worn thin at the bedside of the woman who had been his mother’s friend. His sensitive lips twitched with the effort to speak.

“She may live till daylight,” he replied, “but this is her last night of life. The priest is with her, though she’s unconscious now. I think, as I told you before, that it would be best if none of you came in until the end. I’m glad we sent Rita off with Pícaro in the car. I must go back. Please believe me, sir—I know how hard this is for you! If Mrs. Langhorne regains consciousness, I’ll come for you at once.” The door closed softly behind the doctor’s back.

Without seeming aware of what he did, the major took up a knife from the table, cut the end of a fresh cigar, and struck a match. Then, clasping his hands behind him, he walked slowly to the door and across the gallery till he stood under the arch in the warm light of the lamp—gazing with unseeing eyes down the valley and out beyond the marshes and the bay to the Pacific, slumbering in the moonlight.

At the other end of the gallery an old negro rose from the bench where the servants were whispering, and moved toward his master at a shuffling walk. His eyes were dim; his head was fringed with kinks of snowy wool; his body was bent with age and twisted with rheumatic pains. As he advanced he tapped the floor with a heavy gold-headed cane. Langhorne heard the sound and turned when his old body servant halted behind him, wheezing and short of breath.

“Good evening, Julius,” he said in his kindly way.

“Yes sir, Major—good evenin’. ’Scuse me sir. We-all was hopin’ Mrs. Langhorne might be easier now.”

“Doctor Tisdale says there is no more hope.”

“Oh, Major!” The exclamation of sorrow wrung from this humble friend seemed to escape against his will, against a life-long schooling in respect. For a moment the wrinkled black face worked spasmodically; then, with an effort, old Julius composed his features, bowed in a quaint, jerky manner from the hips, bade his master good night, and shuffled back, tapping the flagstones with his cane, to where the other servants awaited him. Fat Concha, Mrs. Langhorne’s housekeeper, heaved herself upright as he approached. There was an old feud between them, but to-night, sharing the same sorrow, they had agreed upon a kind of armistice, though Julius, for one, had not forgotten the past. Disregarding the woman’s anxiety for news, he settled himself comfortably on the bench and gave the others time to gather about him before he spoke. He cleared his throat.

“Doctor says they ain’t no more hope,” he informed them at last.

A faint wail went up from the women: “Ay! Ay!” for they were all of Spanish blood.

“Are you sure, old man?” asked Concha, almost fiercely, standing before him with hands on her hips. “Is the doctor sure that Doña Margarita cannot live?”

He nodded solemnly, blinking dim eyes which had filled with the easy tears of his race. “They ain’t no hope, I tell you,” he muttered, with a kind of mournful relish; “she’s a-goin’ to die! Times is changin’—me and the major’s gettin’ old!”

The night was very still. The clock in the study whirred for an instant before it struck eight times, slowly and musically. A girl rose from the bench and went to the dining room at the back of the house, to clear the table where her master’s dinner lay untasted and cold.

The sound roused Langhorne from his revery. He turned as the hour struck, entered the room, took a silver key from the mantel, and wound the clock his wife had given him on their wedding day. Then from a drawer of his desk he took a leather-bound diary and opened it at the entry of yesterday. There were other books like it—a little row of them on the shelf above the desk—dated in neat numerals. He walked to the back of the room and peered through the window at the instruments in their box outside, illuminated by a beam of lamplight. Nearly every night for thirty years the major had noted in his diary the temperature and the reading of the barometer—entries of a certain statistical value in his eyes. His weather forecasts were locally regarded as infallible; in ’93 he had given his neighbors a week’s warning of the flood. He enjoyed the sudden vivid flashes of memory recalled by glancing over the entries of past years: brief notes on the weather, on the rainfall registered in the old brass gauge behind the house, on the stock, on family affairs ... laconic paragraphs in the clear, old-fashioned handwriting he had learned as a boy in Charleston, long before the war.

He blotted the fresh entry, closed his diary, turned down the lamp, and walked out into the shadows of the gallery. It was his custom, on sleepless nights, or when there was some problem that needed thinking out, to pace back and forth before his study, stopping from time to time to gaze out at the darkened world of valley and hills and sea from which he seemed to draw reinforcements of spiritual strength. He had always been closer to nature than to mankind. But to-night, even the familiar outlines of the hills seemed unreal. Rita was ill—dying, the young doctor had said in his authoritative way ... he must accustom himself to the thought of living without her. All his life he had kept a firm grip on realities, but now, for the first time, they eluded him. Rita dying, dead, gone forever from the house, out of his life. It was preposterous, and yet young Robert ought to know his business. If only the elder Doctor Tisdale were alive, such a pronouncement, in his curt voice, would bring a conviction of reality. ... Langhorne strove to focus his mind on the young doctor, with his pince-nez and manner of authoritative deference, but he seemed remote and shadowy as the major’s own boys, Enrique and Blaise. They were not like Rita. He glanced up, half expecting to see her standing in the light of the doorway, her lips parted in a grave smile, and a hand raised in the downward Spanish gesture of beckoning. He could almost hear the soft, clear voice of this silent woman who never wasted words, “Come, querido mio; it is late.”

She was a De la Torre, the last of the name. In her father, Don Enrique, Langhorne had found a friend after his own heart: a man who never descended to familiarity, who could be cordial without offering or demanding confidences. In these respects, Rita was her father over again, but she possessed, in addition, an inheritance of Latin womanhood; perhaps the fact that Langhorne never wholly understood her moods, never could foretell with accuracy her reactions to circumstance, had kept him her lover during thirty years of married life.

Thirty years. It seemed only last week that he had paced up and down the gallery on the night when Blaise was born. He had nearly lost her that night. He remembered, with a catch of his breath, how he had halted as the gray-haired doctor stepped out of the study door. It was the first and last time that Tisdale had addressed him by his Christian name; he had even laid a hand on his shoulder. He remembered each word the doctor had spoken: “I oughtn’t to ask you this, Blaise.... If it comes to a pinch, which shall I save?” “Good God!” he had answered, fiercely, his reserve scattered to the winds. “The child’s of no importance!” And he remembered his shame next day—thinking of this utterance blurted out in pain—as he sat beside her in the darkened room, with Enrique, their three-year-old son, on his knee. Lying there pale and worn after her return from the shadows, she had pulled aside the coverlet with a weak hand, and smiled at him as he leaned over to peer at the downy head of his second son. Young Enrique, forgotten for the moment, was struggling to climb on to the bed. “Help him up, Blaise,” his wife had said, happily, and Enrique, allowed to touch the new-born child, who waved tiny fists and gazed at the ceiling with dark, unwinking eyes, shouted with delight. Little Blaise’s hair fascinated his brother most of all; he began by stroking it wonderingly, and ended with a tentative pull. “Que pícaro!” Rita had remarked. “What a rascal! Take him away!” And next morning, when the small boy trotted in to see his mother, she had greeted him with a new name—a name destined to follow him all his days. “Ah, el Pícaro! Come and give thy mother a kiss!”

There were no women like Rita nowadays. Old Langhorne thought of his mother, and suddenly his memory skipped back sixty years into the past—to Deux Sevres Plantation, to Charleston, to the flat coast lands of South Carolina. Scenes from the life of his boyhood, from an American past long dead and already more than half forgotten, flashed into his mind: the winters in Charleston, at the old house on Meeting Street, when he walked to school each morning with his Huguenot cousins, the Du Quesnes; Sunday mornings at church, when carriage after carriage, piloted by black coachmen, drew up to unload his schoolmates and their parents, and the ladies came in with rustling silks and a faint perfume of lavender to take their places in the pews; evenings when his father was expected back from Deux Sevres, when the lamps were lit at five o’clock, when he listened for the crunch of carriage wheels on the drive, and ran to fling open the door to welcome his tall father, carrying a gun case and followed by a slave who staggered under a load of wild duck. The figure of his mother moved through his memories—in satin and furs on her way to the Saint Cecilia Society; sitting at his bedside with tired eyes when he lay ill of scarlet fever; in the long kitchen at Deux Sevres, sleeves rolled up and her skirt protected by a fresh gingham apron as she superintended the black girls at their work. He remembered how eagerly he had awaited the end of school and the beginning of the happy summer on the plantation, when he was free to fish and swim and go boating with his cousins and his boy, Julius. Scene after scene came back to him: the rambling, half-ruined house, with its veranda smothered in honeysuckle; the moonlit nights when he lay awake in his room to hear the mockingbird singing in the magnolia; the pale green of the rice fields; the visits to town in his father’s boat manned by slaves—calm summer mornings when he sat beside his mother in the stern and watched the spires and rich foliage of Charleston rise out of the sea. He thought of the hurricane, of the night when his mother had died in childbirth to the wild requiem of the elements; of his young-manhood, the war, his father killed at the head of his regiment, the bitterness of the slow, losing fight. He remembered his last sight of Deux Sevres when Sherman’s bummers had laid the country waste and the cause of the South was lost; the rush of sadness, almost of despair, as he realized for the first time the loneliness of human life. All at once the place had become hateful to him—then Blumenthal, the Jew grown rich at running the blockade, had offered to take it off his hands....

For the white-haired man pacing back and forth on the gallery, the present, with its sorrow and anxiety, had ceased to exist. Eagerly, with the half-painful happiness of one revisiting old scenes, he was traveling again over the long road of his life. He saw once more the streets of post-war St. Louis; the new world of the plains, an undulating and limitless ocean of grass, where the sun rose over a horizon scarcely more broken than the line where sea meets sky; the dust of the buffalo herds; the first glimpse of the Rockies, lying like faint blue clouds low in the west. He smelled again the aroma of piñon and scrub-cedar in the broken lands beyond the ranges of the buffalo; felt once more the burning Arizona sun and the thrill of shots exchanged with the Apaches. Ever faster and more vividly old memories came crowding back—the crossing of the Colorado; the scorched desolation to the west; his words with their self-styled guide, and election to the party’s leadership; the thirst madness of Julius, and the night when they reached water at Carrizo Creek.

He had sent funds ahead to a bank in San Francisco, and found himself well received by the Southern families already established on the coast. Don Enrique he had met at a ball in one of the Spanish houses, but long before the meeting Langhorne had heard the name of De la Torre—usually mentioned with cordiality, always pronounced with respect. The Spaniard took to the young Confederate officer from the first, and the friendship resulted in Langhorne’s purchase of a partnership in the Guadalupe Grant. At that time Rita had been a shy, serious child with dreams of becoming a nun, but as the years went by the American began to realize that love for a woman was replacing affection for a child. And so the lonely man had made new ties, had taken root in a new and alien soil.

The years after Don Enrique’s death had passed happily and tranquilly for Langhorne—the affairs of the ranch prospered, and politics never troubled a man for whom politics had ceased to exist on the day of General Lee’s surrender. Only once, when a distant Du Quesne cousin had died destitute, leaving a request that Langhorne look after his orphaned daughter Margaret, had there been any echo from the past. Now she was a tall young girl, almost a woman—and the other Rita, his Rita, lay dying in the room from which the doctor had ordered him. Once again, as on that day so many years ago, he felt the light going from his life, felt that his days of happiness were at an end. Well, the years had taught him one thing: happiness must be paid for with pain, which came inexorably as darkness followed day. Religion was a comfort to women; its teachings were agreeable if one could believe in them, but at bottom the world was a bleak place, with peace neither in this life nor in a rather doubtful life to come. What was that sad French proverb that had stuck in his mind? Ah, yes: “Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe.” ... That was it—the lives of all the men who had lived since time began, summed up in six short words....

Major Langhorne halted suddenly and stood listening. His ears were undulled by age; he had heard the distant hoarse mutter of Blaise’s racing car. He stepped under an arch to gaze down the valley; presently a pair of headlights darted around the turn from the state road, a mile away. The rumble of the exhaust ceased as the car swept up the valley at a pace that proved Blaise’s presence at the wheel. The boy was a superb driver—cool, daring, and imbued with his generation’s love of speed. A moment later the machine drew up before the gallery and Langhorne was shaking the hand of his younger son, summoned by wire from San Francisco.

Cautioning the two men and the girl to be silent, Major Langhorne led the way past his wife’s windows and into the study, ushering them through the door in his courteous, old-fashioned way. When they were seated and Rita had turned up the lamp, he spoke to Blaise.

“I’m glad our wire caught you,” he said in a low voice: “Robert is here and he says your mother cannot live another day. She is unconscious now—we must wait until he comes for us.”

While the others gazed at the old man with startled eyes, Blaise rose from his chair to light a cigarette. “It was lucky the boy caught me at the hotel!” he remarked. “I was leaving for Tahoe with the Fergusons.”

Surprised and displeased, Pícaro looked up at his brother. Major Langhorne’s sons had little in common. Blaise was all Spaniard. He had had more success with women than is good for a boy of twenty-four, but men were apt to distrust him without knowing precisely why. In person he was slender and small boned. His brown hair grew in curls; his features were at once virile and delicate, and the sun had no power to mar the clear olive of his skin. His eyes were not easily forgotten: dark eyes—flecked with gold in certain lights—which seemed unable to focus on objects near at hand. The keenness of his sight was a tradition of the ranch. On horseback or at the end of a dusty motor trip, Blaise always seemed immaculate. He never hurried, never bustled, never fussed; and his manner, languid and tinged with indifference, was irritating to older men.

Pícaro (his friends had nearly forgotten Enrique’s Christian name) was of a different type. He had his father’s high-bridged nose and strongly marked face; the same steady blue eyes; the same wide shoulders and lean horseman’s frame. He was a lover of nature; and a taste for mechanical things fitted the impersonality of his character. The major had sent him to a technical school, where he remained to take his master’s degree and where the instructors still spoke of Langhorne’s brilliant work. During his summer vacations at home, Rita Du Quesne had been his companion day by day. He had taught the sunburnt little girl to ride, to swim, to sail his boat. One summer had been spent in the east, laboring on the thesis which brought him his degree, and when he came home, with the privilege of writing Master of Science after his name, he found a tall girl of seventeen in place of the small companion he remembered so well. She was almost a woman now—slender and still a little immature, but more desirable than any young girl he had known. Other men must have seen this new Rita ... he wondered if some callow boy were not already in love with her. A year had passed since that day of home-coming.

Rita was sitting upright in a straight chair—a tall girl with a slender body, delicately and strongly made. Her thick brown hair was tumbled by the wind, and emotion had driven the flush from her face, leaving only the faint bloom of the sun. Her eyes, under dark lashes, were brown and very clear.

The door of the dressing room opened softly and Doctor Tisdale came in. He glanced at Blaise and nodded without smiling. “She is conscious, sir,” he said to Major Langhorne as they rose: “I’m afraid this is the end. She’s asking for you; the others may come in for a moment.”

The lamp was turned low in Doña Margarita’s room. A trained nurse stood by the foot of the bed, and a priest with a kindly ruddy face rose from his knees as Major Langhorne appeared. The night was warm, but the last chill was creeping over Mrs. Langhorne, and the nurse had covered her with a tufted quilt of eiderdown. She lay quietly, beyond anxiety or pain. Her dark eyes and the magnificent hair tumbled loosely on the pillow were all that remained of Margarita de la Torre’s beauty. The pallor, the hollow cheeks, the wasted throat, told of the ravages of consumption. The doctor was whispering to her husband. He looked up and made a sign to Blaise.

The younger son walked softly to the bedside, bent over his mother gracefully, smoothed her hair as she smiled up into his eyes, and kissed her for the last time. Pícaro had a fancy that Blaise’s shoulders were shaking as he left the room. Rita was next. Her self-control left her as she kissed Doña Margarita’s forehead tenderly. Pícaro’s own eyes were swimming as he leaned over his mother’s wasted form. She turned her head a little to gaze up at him. “My dear son!” she murmured, weakly, in Spanish. “May God keep thee....”

The doctor beckoned to the nurse, took Pícaro’s arm, and led him from the room. The priest stood by the bed, and Major Langhorne, blinded by an old man’s tears, knelt at his wife’s side—face hidden in his arms. The dying woman raised a weak hand to touch her husband’s hair. Faintly, beyond the closed door, the clock in the study struck the hour ... eight—nine—ten—eleven.