Читать книгу A Girl of the Plains Country - MacGowan Alice - Страница 6

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In two weeks after that Hilda’s father went to Fort Worth. Hank drove Charley to Mesquite. His last words, as he handed the valise up to his employer in the El Centro stage, were:

“And once more, Charley, whatever else you do, or don’t do, for the love of mercy, don’t forget to fetch a first-class doll for Pettie. I’d ruther see you fail to close the trade with the J. R. Company—I’d ruther you forgot the whole everlastin’ outfit of supplies—than to have you come back without that there doll-baby. It’s a dirty shame that we big, two-fisted, long-legged men haven’t got the child a doll before this.”

“All right, Pearsall; I’ll not forget.” Van Brunt shook the old man’s hand, and the stage drove away.

Surely, now the beautiful doll was certain to come home! The evening Hank got back—and every evening afterward—Hilda crept up into his lap to explain to him, over and over, how golden its hair should be, and what pretty tan shoes and white kid hands it should have. Now that—to her mind—the homecoming of the doll was made certain, the tide of feeling which had been so long repressed was loosened. The little tongue ran freely, the great dark eyes glowed as she repeated to him:

“This long, Uncle Hank—just this long—bigger than any Maybelle had—see?” The small hands measured about fifteen inches of stature. “And blue eyes, I told him—like yours, Uncle Hank; not black, like mine and papa’s.”

Uncle Hank’s admired blue eyes would dwell upon her with troubled gaze. He had done his best. He recalled that last admonition to Charley. But now, shrinking in mind at thought of the possibility of another disappointment for Hilda, but shirking the cruelty of hinting his dread to the child, he would say slowly:

“Um—honey—why, Fort Worth, you know—Fort Worth ain’t New York. This here doll’s liable to be not much of a looker—no such doll-baby as you had before you come out here to Texas. It might not even be as good as some of the Marchbanks girl’s—”

She would interrupt him, declaring earnestly, “Oh, Uncle Hank, it’s going to be very beautiful!”

But there came no word from Charley Van Brunt; it was as though Fort Worth had swallowed him up. He was to have been gone a week; it was two, and he had not returned. The ranch boss wrote again and again to the hotel where his employer was to stop; even Hilda, with Uncle Hank guiding her little brown fingers, struggled through a small, smudged sheet of hieroglyphics. And when it was well into the third week and there was no answer, the manager sent Shorty to Mesquite with a telegram prepared entreating an immediate reply. But he got none—no message of any kind returned to him from Fort Worth. Old Hank, smiling and cheerful, carried a very anxious heart.

At the end of four weeks Van Brunt came home; a gentleman—oh, most certainly a gentleman, always; never less than that—but looking strangely ill and out of countenance. He was much thinner than when he went away, and much less sunburnt, and he had forgotten most of the matters which had taken him to Fort Worth.

The child, who for days back had scouted continually the long box-elder avenue leading up from the main trail, met the buckboard far down below the big gate. Charley stopped the galloping ponies with an arm thrown out across the driver’s hands, lifted the small courier and hugged her to his heart and kissed her.

“Did she think Daddy had just run away and left them all? Well, Daddy was very busy; he—he had such a lot of tiresome business.” And, reaching down into his vest pocket, Van Brunt brought out and gave to Hilda a five-dollar gold piece.

In silence and in some apprehension she looked at the coin lying in her palm—as unavailable to her, as valueless in her eyes, as a yellow button. He had given it as though it were a precious thing, and Hilda just glimpsed the terrible suggestion that it might have been offered instead of a doll. No, no—that could not be—that was intolerable! She pushed the idea away from her as she sat so quiet-seeming to the careless eye, but in truth in such a tumult of choking emotion, upon her father’s knee.

Shyly and unobserved, her glance explored the buckboard. There was nothing whatever in it but her father’s valise; not a big valise, either; and her hopes and expectations dwindled. It would be a small doll; she saw that she must bring her desires down to that—and she did so. But she asserted passionately to herself that it was there—it was in the valise. No doll at all!—oh, it was impossible—it was not conceivable! She shrank in panic from the thought. Heaven would not permit such a cruel thing as that.

The house reached, the child stood about, in one obscure corner and another, watching, longing for the moment when the valise should be opened; amazed at the waste of time and talk, when the Important Things of Life were waiting in that mysterious casket. During an embarrassed pause, her father’s troubled eye caught sight of the little figure lingering in the doorway. He picked her up and lifted her high, demanding:

“What is it now, my small daughter? Is there something you want to know of father?”

This was a strange, an ominous sort of inquiry, and Hilda could barely choke out the words, “The doll,” in such a whispering, flattened voice as failed to make its way across the short distance from her trembling lips to her father’s ear, and he had to ask her over more than once.

His face fell, almost comically. A look of pain and shame flashed over it. It was plain (at least to everybody there except poor Hildegarde, who still clutched tightly a tiny shred of hope) that he had never thought of the matter since the moment of uttering his careless promise.

“Run away, Hilda,” Miss Val began, peevishly. “Why do you bother about such a thing now—?” But Charley cut her short:

“Why, dear,” his voice was husky as he set Hilda gently down, “I completely for—”

Hank Pearsall’s eyes were watching her in deep concern. This was what he had dreaded. Now he shook his head warningly at his employer, over the little girl’s, and interrupted in a significant tone:

“It’s all right, honey, it’ll be a-comin’ along with the freight stuff, when—”

“No, Pearsall,” broke in young Van Brunt, in fresh distress. “No, Pearsall, there aren’t any things coming by freight. I—forgot ’em all completely. I’ll get—”

It was too late. Hank could cover nothing now; the bitter truth was evident, even to Hilda’s incredulity, that there was no doll. Her father drew her to him, saying:

“There, there, dear, don’t cry! Oh, Hildegarde, love, don’t cry! I can’t—” His face was white; he looked almost as though he were near to tears himself.

“No, papa—no, papa,” she whispered, “no, papa, I won’t cry”; then crept away to have her agony alone, in her own private nook, an unused room upstairs, where there finally fell upon her the kind sleep of exhaustion.

The affairs of the house went on; supper was served and passed. Charley asked uneasily of the child’s whereabouts, and was diplomatically diverted by Uncle Hank.

Hilda suddenly opened her eyes upon the darkness. She slowly realized that it was night, and that she was lying dressed upon the lounge in the sitting-room. Somebody had taken off her shoes and tucked some covering over her. The strange feeling was upon her which people have when they go to sleep irregularly, at some unusual time and place, not dressed for bed.

At first she was dazed and remembered nothing of the afternoon’s happenings; then her sorrow came rushing back upon her in a flood. But the aftermath of grief was tearless. Poor baby—she had wept the fountain dry.

Now, as she lay, inert, she could hear the murmur of voices. They were men’s voices. Rising, strangely stiff and weary, she crawled across the dark hall and peered through the chink of an imperfectly closed door. The room into which she looked was the office, and the scene which met her wondering eyes was a curious one. There was that sewing-machine which the child’s mother had purchased and prepared to take with her household supplies to the Texas ranch. Sitting before it, and beneath the strong light of the hanging lamp, was Uncle Hank, in full cowpuncher regalia, just as he had come in from some urgent outside errand. The broad brim of his sombrero was swept directly off his face, to be out of the way; the grizzled curls lay on the collar of his rough blue flannel shirt, and his trousers were tucked into the tops of cowboy boots, whose high heels, armed with long-shanked spurs, clicked upon the treadles. His sinewy brown fingers were twisting a thread to induce it to go through the eye of the needle. Bending anxiously over him was her father, in smoking jacket and slippers. It was some moments before Hilda could view this scene with anything but incredulity, or believe it other than a dream.

About the feet of the men was a tremendous litter of things very strange to see in that place. There were yards of white muslin, and sheets of newspaper cut into queer shapes; on the floor a comforter—the pink silk one off the big front-room bed—ripped open and with its snowy cotton bulging out; a long-fleeced Angora goatskin that commonly lay in front of that same bed. As, wide-eyed and wondering, the child crouched silently at the door, the men were talking in low, guarded tones. Her father spoke first:

“Can you make it work, Pearsall? I don’t know what I did that was wrong, but it ran crooked and puckered, even before it broke the thread.”

“Uh-huh!” returned the old man softly. “She’s liable to buck a little at first; but if ye don’t spur her in the shoulder or fight her in the face, she’ll soon travel your gait. See?” For the machine had settled down to a steady purr. “Gimme somethin’ to sew—anything, to try it on.”

The child saw her father duck his sleek black head to pick up a scrap from the floor. Then she heard his laughing voice:

“Pearsall, I believe those long-shanked spurs of yours are what tamed down this bucking sewing-machine. I didn’t have mine on.”

“Shucks!” murmured Hank deprecatingly, bending to unbuckle. “That beats my time! I plumb forgot them spurs. Don’t blame ye a mite for laughing. That’s an old cowpunch, every time. It’s a wonder I didn’t try to ride in here on a cutting pony, with my guns on, and what you call a ‘lariat’ swinging! Shucks!”

He removed his big hat, dropped the jingling spurs into its crown, and reaching far over laid it back on the desk.

“If I was in your place, Charley,” he said over his shoulder, “or ruther, if I was a nice, polite gentleman like you, and owned a ranch—I wouldn’t keep an old galoot for my ranch boss that didn’t have manners enough to remember to take his spurs and sombrero off when he came into my office.”

Charley’s reply was only a smile and an expressive look.

The small watcher at the door gazed, still unable to entirely convince herself that she was really awake. Her father said presently, in a rather depressed voice:

“No, this wouldn’t do—not near. We’ll have to make a long improvement over it.”

He took up something from the floor. Alas, this must indeed be a brownie dream—but what a dreadful version of it! That which her father held and looked dolefully at was an atomy—a thing in human form—of a livid, blue-white, like a leper, and of ghastly outline, warped where the ill-guided sewing machine had wavered in its line of stitching. The being had a small, narrow, cone of a head, a neck like a pipe-stem, and limbs, long, attenuated, and lumpy where they had been stuffed hard with cotton rammed home by the help of penhandles, in an attempt to round out the starved proportions.

The child looked at this specter in dismay. Truly, it did fall short of grace—even of decent seemliness. She was glad her father thought so. She should never be able to produce a grateful countenance or bring forth any satisfactory thanks for a scarecrow like that. He spoke now:

“If we fall down on this doll factory business—well, when we fall down, for I see that is what’s coming; I’ve already made a mess of mine, and I bet anything you like that you’re not going to do any better—when we’ve tried it out and find we can’t fetch it, what I want of you, Hank, is to tell her—promise her—”

“No more promises, Charley,” Uncle Hank said, stuffing away at something he held out of Hilda’s sight. “If you’re leaving it to me, I say either dance up with the doll for her birthday or don’t hurt the poor baby any worse than she’s been already hurt with promises.”

“Her birthday!” Hilda swallowed a sob at her father’s startled tone. “Hank—do you know I’d forgotten absolutely that to-morrow is the child’s birthday!”

Something warm came to the little watcher from the glance of Uncle Hank’s blue eyes as he looked up. He hadn’t forgotten it. She guessed now that when he was in the kitchen there with Missou’ so long, and she wasn’t allowed to come in, it must have been a birthday cake that was being baked. She tried to tell herself that this would make up for the lack of a doll. She wished Uncle Hank wouldn’t say that about promises—they were better than nothing—better, anyhow, than having some such frightful thing as that which dangled from her father’s hand offered to her as a doll. She was glad when he insisted rather desperately:

“But I say, Pearsall, you’ll have to promise her one. She’ll believe you. We can’t get anything out of this that will fill the bill.”

“Can’t? Why, we’ve got everything to do it with, Charley. I’ve gentled this sewing-machine; here’s white domestic, and cotton to stuff with, and all the need-cessary materials. As for a pattern, why, you’ve got me to go by, and I’ve got you, in the mere number and placing on of arms and legs and such.”

He glanced at the object in Van Brunt’s hands.

“I reckon you went mostly by me—in the—the—geography of that critter. Gosh! Charley, it’s a plumb straddle-bug, and whopper-jawed at that! Now—here”—the sentences came out in sections, irregular fragments, through many pins and needles and other implements which Hank held in his mouth—“here—I have went by you. We’ve got to cut ’em tolerable fat, or they stuff too slim; I see that. That’n”—he chuckled softly—“that lean lizard’s a Pearsall—and a Pearsall I don’t want to acknowledge. But this is a pretty fair Van Brunt. She’s most ready for clothes now.”

“I’ll bring some of my things,” Van Brunt suggested, turning toward the door to his own room.

Hank looked dubious. “It’s lady fixin’s—flub-dubs—we want—fancy ke-didoes, ye know. Course, we can’t wake up Miss Valeria to get ’em—but I don’t suppose a man’s riggin’s would—”

“A man’s riggin’s!” echoed Van Brunt, laughing under his breath. “You don’t know much, Hank. Just wait a minute!” and he was gone.

Hilda’s already overburdened heart sank at the thought of the morrow. That she should fail to offer some sort of gratitude for these well-meant efforts on her behalf never occurred to her. The awful gulf which yawns between a child’s point of view and that of the grown-up gaped black at the seven-year-old’s feet; yet she was loyally resolved to bridge it, when the time came, with such show of enthusiasm as she could muster.

Her father had gone through the further door. Uncle Hank had quit the motion of his elbow that she knew meant stuffing, and was threading a needle. He spoke softly to himself; he had a way of doing that; Hilda loved it.

“H’m—promises! Pettie got promised every time he went to Mesquite that she’d be brung such a doll as could be got there. It was forgot. It’s been forgot this time. Any feller that promises her any more dolls from anywheres is bound to look to her like somebody that promises to brings dolls—and then forgets.”

Poor Charley Van Brunt! The old man had another listener. He had come back, his hands full of stuff he was bringing to dress the doll, and he stopped in the door.

“You’re right, Pearsall,” he said soberly and Hilda didn’t understand till she was older that queer thing he said afterward. “I’ve all my life been promising to bring home dolls to the people I love and who love me and depend on me—and forgetting. You know what I mean. If it wasn’t dolls of some sort, then it would be dolls of another—repentance, reformation, amendment—all dressed up and shining. But I’ve always brought the valise home empty, haven’t I?”

“Well—and if so, Charley—if so? No reason you shouldn’t fly at it and make good right on the ground.”

“All right,” her father’s tone was grave enough to mean a great deal more than the present enterprise; he spread out his color-box and paints on the desk, made some further exclamation in a low tone, and went to work. There was silence in the office. Hilda knew that she ought to slip away. She was just going to do so when she saw Uncle Hank purse up his lips, look very fiercely at the needle which he was holding at a considerable distance from his face, finally thread it, and begin to speak, not to her father at all but to something he had evidently propped up on his end of the desk in front of him. It must be that product he had called “a pretty fair Van Brunt.” Shaking a finger at it, he began to sew on some small white object, glancing occasionally over his spectacles toward the invisible doll, murmuring to her:

“Now, you set there, Miss—well, what is your blessed name?—Miss Bon Bon—Miss High Stepper—Miss Tip-Top—and mind how you shoot off your mouth to-morrow. Ye want to be mighty clear on one point, and that is that you came from Fort Worth. Pa was just saving a little surprise when he failed to mention you to Pettie to-day. You was right there in that grip of his’n all the time; so don’t let me hear any remarks about a bronco sewing-machine, nor white domestic, nor Charley’s paint-box, nor Uncle Hank’s number forty sewing thread. Mind what I’m telling you, Miss Tip-Top; we don’t want a word of and concerning the spare-room bed-comfort. Fort Worth’s where you come from—Fort Worth; a-bringing the latest fashions in young-lady dolls; and Pettie’s not to be told things.”

Such discounting of her delight in the doll! It was a relief to her when, a moment later, her father raised his head to say:

“Look there, Pearsall—there are the petticoats and such like.” Charley spread out handkerchiefs of exquisite linen cambric. “And this,” unfurling a brocaded white satin muffler a yard or more square, “there’s enough stuff in this for a frock.” He put down several four-in-hand ties. “Those blue ones are exactly alike; enough of a kind to make the dolly a sash.”

“Yes, that’s right, Charley. I’ll sew ’em together and press ’em out and rig her a surcingle of ’em. The Fort Worth doll was going to have a blue surcingle—a blue sash—I ricollect.”

Suddenly Hank dropped the ties; a look of perplexity, almost of consternation, spread over his face.

“Great Scott, Charley! I’ve just this minute remembered—do you know that Pettie figured that doll was a-going to show up with white kid hands, and tan shoes on its feet—tan shoes! Now, how in time are we going to fix that?”

“I’ll show you,” whispered Van Brunt, as he once more hurried out of the room. He was back the next minute, with a pair of heavy tan driving gloves and a pair of white ones.

“Oh, fine, boy—scrumptious!” Uncle Hank’s eyes fastened upon them with a pleased look. Then he hesitated, holding one of them up to note that it was fresh and new. “But these are mighty good gloves, Charley, to—”

“I hope to heaven they are!” cried Van Brunt, and his pale face reddened. “I hope they’re good enough to make right a man’s broken promise.”

Uncle Hank said no more. One at each side of the desk, the two men worked for a time in silence, the watcher at the door drawing her breath softly lest it betray her presence. Suddenly the elder man began to speak:

“Ye see, Charley, I was a widder’s boy—the oldest; and the mother she used to make doll-babies for the little chaps. I’ve set up of nights toward Christmas, before now, to work this-here sort of racket. But mammy and me, we couldn’t paint—nary one of us—not a bit. A lead-pencil or pen and ink; eyes and nose and mouth—laid out mighty flat and square, I’m bound to say—’twas all the face them dolls of ours ever got. The hair was generally ink, too. The best we could do in that line would be some onraveled tow rope. This here Miss High Stepper’s face and hair are simply the finest ever.”

As he spoke he moved aside a little, and Hilda caught her breath in a gasp of incredulous joy. What vision of delight was this Uncle Hank held forth, turning his head to look at it sidewise, half questioning, half pleased?

Muslin had furnished the ground tone for its delicate complexion. Charles Van Brunt, with the help of his color-box, had been placing thereon not the usual countenance of the store doll, but the roguish face of a gay little mischief. There was nothing tame in her sweetness. Heavily black-fringed blue eyes looked out at you with stimulating significance. The lips smiled saucily. The long-fleeced Angora goatpelt had yielded a head of streaming crinkled tresses, which (after an interview with the color-box) showed an adorable gamboge tint. Head and body were fairly proportioned and well-shaped; and small anatomical inaccuracies were more than compensated for by her beaute du diable.

“What’s the matter with that?” cried the young father boyishly. “Say, she’s a corker, Hank!”

But now a new thought came to Hilda, which made her drag her fascinated eyes resolutely from the beautiful, smiling water-color face. They wished her to know nothing of the doll—to be surprised. With a last doting glance which caressed its perfections, she moved noiselessly back across the dark hall and into the sitting-room, shivering but ecstatic; oh, how different a creature from the bereaved little soul who had crossed that room, leaden-footed, sore-hearted, but a few moments back! She drew her slim legs up deliciously under the warm covers that seemed to close about her like the very arms of love, and with a deep, deep sigh of perfect peace, relaxed her comforted spirit to sleep.

Silence enfolded the ranch house. All the little nocturnal sounds that noisy daylight blurs or blots out gradually became audible. Somebody walked across the upstairs hall in stockinged feet. There was a stamping among the ponies down at the corral. A little owl called sleepily from the willows over by the irrigating ditch.

Hours afterward, when she wakened—this time on her bed in her own room, whither she had been carried and undressed in that sound sleep—she found a radiant being perched upon a table beside her pillow.

Save for the presence of the doll herself, the child could never have believed but that the vision of last night was a dream. When later Uncle Hank explained to her, with her father’s assistance, that the beautiful Fort Worth doll had only been withheld from her the day before because it was a surprise, she accepted the explanation with a look and manner singular even for Hilda. There was something exultant in the seven-year-old’s bearing and in her thought. Her doll had a different origin from Maybelle Marchbanks’, or those that belonged to any other little girl in the world. Uncle Hank was not telling her the truth. It was not so, that her father had bought the doll. But her imaginative soul seized eagerly upon the spirit of the thing. All statements—and they were voluminous—concerning the importation and handling of Miss High Stepper (now Rose Marie) she understood to be figurative. This was not fact to which she was listening; it was poetry—parable; and she answered in parable of her own.

She kissed them both passionately, and hugged the pretty doll to her with tears and with laughter, dwelling ardently upon each personal beauty and each separate elegance of attire; the arch, expressive eyes, the dainty tan shoes—all from Fort Worth; that is to say, all found and purchased in, and brought to Hilda out of the blessed country of Love and Good Faith.