Читать книгу Dan Barry's Daughter - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 8

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It made no difference that she did not understand the words; that did not lessen her enjoyment of the rhythm.

“Que viva la rumba;

Que viva, que viva placer;

Que vivan las niñas, chulitas, bonitas,

Y guapas que saben querer!”

She ended with laughter in her throat.

“Hello!” called a man’s voice, approaching the thicket. “Who’s yonder?”

Joan gathered the reins with a jerk that tensed Peter for a start. But instead of fleeing at once she looked back and saw the figure of a big man striding across the clearing.

Between the heads of two scrub cedars she could see him, and now he crossed a shaft of light which spilled out from a window, and she saw that it was the man of the tawny hair. Indeed, since he was carrying his sombrero in his hand, the light tangled and kindled for an instant in his hair before he stepped on into the next shadow.

“Now, Peter,” breathed Joan, “faster than you’ve ever run before!”

And yet she did not relax her pull on the reins. It was as if her conscious will strove to carry her away and a stronger subconscious power kept her there and made her glance hastily around her.

There was a labyrinth of passages twisting among the shrubs, made doubly baffling by the white light and the black shadows cast by the moon.

And, instead of fleeing, she reined Peter backward into a thick circle of the cedars, sprang to the ground, and took shelter behind a big cactus.

“Hello!” called the voice of the man again. “Who’s there?”

“Why are you coming?” asked Joan, and her voice shook with excitement.

“Because I’d walk ten miles and swim a river to see the girl that was singing that old song,” he answered. “Just a minute until I get through this cactus—the stuff is like a lot of fish-hooks.”

She slipped to the side. He must not come too close to Peter. And from a fresh covert she called softly:

“Who are you?”

“My name is Harry Gloster. What is yours? Hello—where have you gone?”

He had come out on the farther side of the thicket.

“Not far from you,” she answered.

He hurried toward her. And in the moonshine he appeared a giant. Back among the cedars she stole, and that same ability to move like a soundless shadow which had been hers when she was leaving the ranch-house was with her again.

Then she stood fast in the deep shadow of a tall shrub, and saw Gloster blunder past her, sweeping the very spot where she stood, but seeing nothing. It was as if she were wrapped in some fabled cloak of darkness.

And in her heart she wished that she could step out before him. If clever Nell were there, that was what she would have done. But Nell was dressed like a bit of sunset cloud, and Joan was clad in khaki. How could she let him see her, drab as that shadow in which she stood?

And yet, it was hard to leave him, also!

She stepped to the other side of the cedar, peering through its branches, and saw him come running back, then stop in an open space. The moon struck full upon him. He was half laughing and half frowning, and such was his excitement that he still carried his hat in his hand, crushed to a shapeless mass in his fingers.

“Where are you?” he cried again, guarding his voice that it might not penetrate farther than the little copse and to the ears of some strolling couples in the clearing beside the school.

The wind increased at that moment, with a rustling and rushing among the branches, and Joan, pitching her voice far and thin, answered him.

“Here!” she called.

He turned about face.

“The devil,” she heard him mutter, “she has wings!” He added aloud: “I won’t hunt for you if you don’t want me to.”

“Do you promise that?” asked Joan.

He faced sharply toward her again, appeared about to make a step in her direction, and checked himself.

“I’ll promise if I have to,” said Harry Gloster gloomily.

“Then I’ll stay a while,” she answered. “But why have you come running in here?”

“You know better than I do.”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

“Why do birds sing in the spring?”

“To call a—” She checked herself in confusion.

“That’s right!” he laughed. “To call a mate. And when you said in that song that you understood love—”

“The song may have said it. I did not.”

“Your whole voice was full of it.”

“I know nothing about the tricks my voice may have been playing.”

He moved a half step closer.

“Your promise!” she cried.

He retreated again with a sort of groan, and Joan wondered at him. If she had been in his place, strong as a giant and free as the wind, would a single promise have held her back? She decided with a little shudder that it would not.

And, in the meantime, she was studying him intently. She knew little about men. She had seen cow-punchers on the ranch, of course, but Buck Daniels appeared to have a penchant for old and withered fellows who had lost interest in everything except their cigarettes and their stories of their youth. And every one else she had met, with hardly an exception, had been merely in passing.

A thousand times, by hints and direct commands, Buck Daniels had ordered her to pay no attention to men—to young men. And she had obeyed. Sometimes, when it was necessary for her to go into the town, she had felt eyes taking hold on her, but she had never looked back to meet those glances.

It seemed to her now that she was seeing a man for the first time. And what a man he was! How he had stood forth in the schoolhouse dance hall among the crowd! There was power in a simple gesture to have crushed an ordinary man, she felt. And yet at the same time there was a gentleness in him so that his promise could tie up all his strength.

“I’ll keep my promise,” he was saying, “if you want to hold me to it. But it’s sort of hard to talk to a tree, this way.”

“I don’t see why,” Joan murmured. “You can hear me—I can hear you.”

“It ain’t the words that I mean,” he insisted. “They’re the least part of a talk.”

“What is it made up of, then?”

“The way you turn your head, the way you lift your eyes, the way you smile or you frown, and the color of your hair, is a pile more important than a hundred words, the best words that ever come out of any one’s mouth.”

“What color, then, is it?” she asked.

He considered a moment.

“The chief light that I got to see you by,” he confessed, “is that song that I heard you singing. And out of that I’d say that your hair is black, and your eyes are black, and your skin is sort of olive with the color under it. Am I right?”

She paused before she could answer. It had been a grievous blow, for some foolish reason, to hear him. Every stroke in the picture had been so utterly unlike the truth that it lay like a weight upon her. What she wanted to do was to step out and show him the truth—but something held her back. For if she showed him the truth, would he not turn his back on her? But if she left him with his illusion, he might carry away his false picture linked up with her real voice, and so for a time she would live in his memory—a sort of ghostly travesty of what she really was.

“Am I right?” he was repeating.

“Yes,” she answered, “you’re right—that is, in general.”

“What does that mean? But I don’t care about that. What I want to hear is your name and what I want to see is your face.”

She was silent.

“Are you afraid even to tell me your name?” he asked.

Still she did not speak, and she saw him drop his head a little and close his hands.

“Listen to me,” he said almost sternly. “If you’ve run away from your husband and gone gadding to-night—no matter what it is that makes you want to keep it secret, I’ll keep that secret on my honor. But let me know enough so that I can find you again!”

She saw the picture in vivid colors—this big fellow coming home to call on her, and Buck Daniels meeting him at the door; terrible Buck Daniels, in whose hands the metal and wood of a revolver became a living thing which could not fail to kill. She had seen him tear to pieces with a bullet a little squirrel sitting up on a limb like a tiny peg. She had seen him do this from a galloping horse. She had seen him casually clip high twigs from trees in order to cut loose and float down to her a nest which she wished to have.

And with that artistry of destruction arrayed against him, all the strength of Harry Gloster would be of no avail. She knew more than this—that sooner than see her become acquainted with a young man, Buck Daniels would pick the quarrel and force the fight. And while all her heart was knocking in her throat, choking her with the desire to speak the truth, she found that fear of Buck was even greater, and she could not say a word.

“I can’t tell you,” she said.

“But, if you don’t, I’ll never be able to find you. Yet I shall find you, if I have to spend ten years hunting. But, good God—with only your voice to go on! Will you change your mind?”

“I cannot,” she cried, half sobbing.

“But you want to! By the Lord, I can feel it in your voice.”

“No, no!”

“Will you do one thing for me?”

“All I can, with all my heart.”

“My God,” cried the big man, “I’d give ten years of my life for one look at you; but if I can’t have that, will you sing the song again for me?”

“Why?”

“It’s the only clew that I’m going to have. And it ain’t much to give away.”

“I’ll sing it, then.”

Twice she tried the opening note, and twice her voice shook away to nothingness and failed her. But then the sound arose very soft and yet clear as a bell ringing:

“Que viva la rumba;

Que viva, que viva placer;

Que vivan las niñas, chulitas, bonitas,

Y guapas que saben querer!”

And as she sang she began to move slowly back from behind the shrub, raising her voice in volume a little as she stole away so that he might not guess her maneuver. Why she should run away so suddenly she was not sure, but she felt a storm of emotions racking her. She was no longer sure of herself. It was not Harry Gloster she feared so much as she feared herself.

And when the last note died away she was only a step from Peter. It was not until that moment that Harry Gloster seemed to realize that she was deserting him.

She heard his voice crying out after her, and then she was lost in a blind panic which made her rush for Peter and then sent her flying away on his back. The sound of his feet over rocks and sand and the panting breath he drew drowned any calling from behind.

A moment later she was out of earshot and, looking back, she saw that she was unpursued.