Читать книгу Dan Barry's Daughter - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 3

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Sometimes it sounded like the barking of dogs rushing down a trail and closing on their quarry; and again there was a shower of calls like no other sound on earth; and sometimes single voices came dropping, telling wonderfully of distance. So the wild geese came out of darkness, dipping toward the earth, and were lost again in the northern night.

Joan closed her book. Over her shoulder had slipped a heavy braid of dark, metal-gold hair; she put it back with an involuntary gesture, and raised her face, but all she saw were the hewn beams which supported the upper floor of the ranch-house. Darkened by the smoke that had rolled out of the stove on many a winter evening, they still showed every stroke of the ax which had formed them.

If she heard the rustling of the newspaper which Buck Daniels lowered to look at her, she paid no attention to him, not even when he sat up and watched her with a frown of alarm. For she laid aside her book and went to the window. By pressing close to the pane she could look past the reflection of the room and the high light which the lamp threw in the glass; she could look past this to the shadow of the desert—and she saw, like ghosts, the shining of the stars.

She went outside to the night. She could see far more, now—from the line of cottonwoods by the creek bed to the black rolling of the hills toward the west beyond the house—and it seemed to Joan as though the walls of her mind were pushed back, also.

The stars which she had seen from the window were bright and cold, and still the honking of the wild geese dropped in hurried choruses or lonely single notes. The calling died off toward the north, and she waited through a silence as if for an answer from the earth to those voices from the sky. When it came it was from the cottonwoods, perhaps, but it appeared to be blowing from any corner of the compass—the wailing of a coyote. It quavered and rose.

The back door of the house closed, the screen jingling softly.

“Joan!” called Buck Daniels.

She could not answer at once. It was as though a hand were drawing her back from something beautiful and strange, back to the old, familiar commonplaces of the ranch.

“Joan!” he called again; and this time the sharp note of alarm made her turn quickly.

“Yes, dad,” she answered.

He came half running toward her. He caught her by the arm.

“Why didn’t you answer up when I called?” he demanded, panting. But he did not wait for an excuse. “Come back into the house,” he went on. “Come back out of this darkness—this—”

She went back obediently beside him, but his hand did not loose her arm even while he was opening and closing the door. He did not even free her when they were back in the kitchen-living room of the house; but holding her at arm’s length, he studied her as if her face were a page on which strange things might have been written in the last few moments.

“Why didn’t you answer when I called you the first time?” he asked again. “Why did you stop? What were you thinking about? Why did you go outside, Joan?”

She looked upon him with a frank wonder. Time and many sorrows had so seamed and weatherbeaten his face that every strong emotion looked like anger; but although his brows beetled and his eyes glared and his lips compressed, she knew that it was fear which had touched him.

Fear of what?

She had no time to ask or to answer, for he went on again:

“You go back to your book. You go right back and sit down there!”

He actually led her to the chair. He drew it closer to the lamp on the table.

“Now, honey,” he said, when she was seated with the book in her lap, “ain’t you comfortable here? Is the light where you want it?”

She smiled up to him and saw him turn away to his own place. And so a silence came into the room once more, but was no longer like the silence which had preceded it, sleepy, dull, a long drawn period at the end of the day and the beginning of the night. There was a pulse in this quiet, and Joan began to grow aware of tingling nerves to the tips of her fingers.

Buck Daniels spoke again. “Joan—”

She turned toward him and smiled.

“Joan, you ain’t happy?”

He was deeply moved by something, for she could see that he had locked his hands together as if to keep the fingers from showing any unsteadiness. And indeed there had been something most unusual about his manner of bringing her into the house and his hurried and broken sentences. It could not come from anything she had done.

While she mused over an answer she heard the rattling of wheels and the rapid beat of horses’ hoofs on the road which passed their house not many rods away; and as the noise passed there was a sudden break of laughter—deep laughter of men, and the sweet, singing laughter of girls.

Every voice was like a song to Joan.

“Why do you say that?” she asked. “Why do you say I’m not happy?”

“I’m asking questions, Joan—I ain’t stating facts. But tell me true. What you got on your mind, honey?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

He pointed at her a forefinger like the pointing of a gun.

She studied the worn face behind the hand with wonder and tenderness and pity.

“I seen you sitting over your book for fifteen minutes and never turning a page. Does that mean that you ain’t got nothing on your mind, Joan?”

“I was just thinking,” she said.

“Of what?”

“Of nothing,” said Joan, truly feminine.

A flush of anger rose to his cheeks. And she marked the jump of his passions by the quick and hard gripping of his fingers.

“What made you get up and leave the room a while back?” he cross-examined her.

“It was a little warm in here,” said Joan.

“Joan, it was so plumb chilly that you wondered if it wouldn’t be a good idea to start a fire a while back, and you put on a coat instead.”

It was an attack so direct that she changed color a little, and she could only avoid him by suddenly smiling straight in his eyes.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve forgotten why I wanted to leave the room. There was no reason.”

Buck Daniels sighed.

“Have you started in to cover up things from me, Joan? I suppose such things have got to come to every man. The time comes along when his children don’t trust him no more. But it’s a mighty hard thing to face, honey!”

She was instantly driven to retreat.

“Listen!” she exclaimed.

And far away they heard another faint and dying burst of laughter down the road.

“I never go where other girls go,” she said.

“You mean to dances and such like?”

“Yes.”

“Wait till you’ve growed up, Joan.”

“I’m eighteen, dad.”

He blinked. “What’s eighteen? Nothing but a baby!”

She said nothing, but looked him quietly in the face. It was a habit of hers, and the result was that he was invariably upset. After a moment he could not meet her eyes. She herself looked down for she was rather ashamed of her power over him.

“It’s what your mother wanted, Joan. She wanted you to live quiet till you were growed up.”

“But when will that be?”

“Maybe when you’re twenty.”

“Four years ago you said it would be when I was eighteen.”

Instead of answering, he changed the subject.

“When you went outside what were you listening to?”

“The wild geese,” she answered.

There was something in that answer which lifted him from his chair. He walked hastily across the room, pretended that he had gone to find his pipe, and came back frowning and idling with it.

“And when you heard ’em, Joan—when you heard ’em, what went on inside of you?”

It was her turn to be startled.

“How did you know that?” she breathed.

“Ah, honey,” he said with an air of indescribable sadness, “I know more about you than you’d guess at. I know more about you than you know about yourself!”

“Then tell me why I went out to listen to the wild geese!”

He shook his head, and then, drawing his chair closer, he took her hand. She felt the rough, calloused palm stroking her soft skin.

“When folks take their thoughts and lock ’em up inside of their heads,” he said gently, “them thoughts begin to get heavier and heavier. Too much silence is a sort of a poison, Joan. What did God give us tongues and throats for except to talk out the things that are bothering us? It won’t do no good for me to tell you what’s wrong. You got to find your own words and say it in your own way. And once you’ve said it, you’ll find that you feel a pile easier. Try to tell me, Joan.”

Behind that quiet voice she could feel the fear working. What that fear could be of was beyond her guessing. And after a while she said:

“Of course, the geese are nothing. But they’re like milestones along a road; they point out a way, you know.”

“A way to what—a way to what, Joan?”

“Dad, why are you so excited?”

“Excited? I ain’t excited. Only—my God, who ever heard of wild geese as milestones? But go on, Joan.”

“I mean that when I hear them crying in the middle of the sky and know that they’re going north—”

“Well?” he murmured, as she paused.

“I don’t know how it is, but pictures simply tumble into my mind.”

“Of what, dear?”

“Of happiness—of a queer, sad happiness—a wonderful, lonely, free happiness.”

He passed a hand hurriedly across his face. Then he peered at her again, anxiously, eagerly.

“Pictures of happiness? What sort of pictures, Joan?”

“Why—just what every one thinks about—of mountains, and the big trees, and the wind everywhere, and noises coming down it of all sorts of hunting creatures and creatures that are being hunted—”

“You think of all that?”

“Of course—and a thousand things more. Sometimes, when I listen, I feel as though I were trying to remember something that I’d known before. I don’t know just what it is—but I begin to ache with longing, dad. My whole heart begins to ache, you know, to get north and find the place—”

“What place?”

“I don’t exactly know. But if I found it I’d recognize it. A place where one would be wonderfully happy. That would be the end of the journey, until—”

“Until what?”

“But in the fall when they fly south—”

He had dropped his face upon his hand, but she was so deep in her thoughts that she did not see. For she was feeling her way forward through an undiscovered country in her mind.

“But in the fall when the days begin to grow shorter and the wild geese fly south, of course, they’re pointing to much different things. One can’t help thinking of warm winds, and great blue bayous, and reeds as high as one’s head around the shores, and flowers even in winter.”

“Joan, what put this into your head?”

She looked closely at him now, and she saw enough in his face to make her cry out:

“Why, dad! You’re as pale as a ghost! Are you sick?”

“No, no!”

“Is there anything so very wrong in what I’ve said?”

“No—but—” He paused again, struggling with his explanation. “I once knew a man who found all those things in his head when the wild geese flew over.”

“Oh,” cried Joan, “tell me about him!”

But he drew himself back from her and exclaimed sharply:

“Never! Never ask me about him!”

“Oh, he was an enemy of yours?” asked Joan.

“He was my dearest friend.”

And to the utter wonder of Joan, she saw that tears were in the eyes of Buck Daniels. It was the more mysterious because, so far as she knew, he had no friends. And if he insisted that she lead the life of a hermit on the ranch, seeing no young company, meeting no one indeed, old or young, he led the same life himself, driving to town only for supplies and coming hastily home again.

She had thought of him as a recluse always. Indeed, how he could have met and managed to win the love of her mother she could never imagine. This was opening the book to an unexpected place. This was to find poetry instead of prose.

“But surely,” said Joan, “you can tell me about him?”

“You?” cried Buck Daniels, starting from his chair beside her. “Not for the whole world. And—it’s time for you to turn in, Joan. It’s your bedtime. Run along.”

She hesitated. There was a storm of questions lying locked behind her teeth. But she let them remain unspoken. When this man chose to be silent there was no winning him to speech.

And, besides, he had said enough to make her wish to be alone, so that she could turn all that had happened over and over in her mind. So, after that thoughtful instant, she kissed the bronzed cheek of the big man and went slowly up the stairway, which creaked and groaned beneath her footfalls.

Buck Daniels watched her going with an anguished face, and when she had disappeared he swiftly packed a pipe, lighted it, and went outside to walk up and down, up and down, for a long time. It was the beginning of the end, he felt. And he was filled with a cold and helpless sense of doom.

The tobacco had been long burned to an ash before he finally went inside again. Up the stairs he climbed and paused at the door of the girl.

“Joan!” he called very gently.

There was no answer, and, confident that she was asleep, he went on to his own room. But Joan only waited until his footfall had gone down the hall; then she slipped from her bed.