Susy, A Story of the Plains - Bret Harte (ebook reader for pc and android txt) 📗

them. You couldn’t do it; it isn’t in your nature. I am on YOUR side, and for you and yours always, Mrs. Peyton. From the first time I saw you on the plains, when I was brought, a ragged boy, before you by your husband, I think I would gladly have laid down my life for you. I don’t mind telling you now that I was even jealous of poor Susy, so anxious was I for the smallest share in your thoughts, if only for a moment. You could have done anything with me you wished, and I should have been happy,—far happier than I have been ever since. I tell you this, Mrs. Peyton, now, because you have just doubted if I might be ‘on your side,’ but I have been longing to tell it all to you before, and it is that I am ready to do anything you want,—all you want,— to be on YOUR SIDE and at YOUR SIDE, now and forever.”

He was so earnest and hearty, and above all so appallingly and blissfully happy, in this relief of his feelings, smiling as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and so absurdly unconscious of his twenty-two years, his little brown curling mustache, the fire in his wistful, yearning eyes, and, above all, of his clasped hands and lover-like attitude, that Mrs. Peyton—at first rigid as stone, then suffused to the eyes—cast a hasty glance round the apartment, put her handkerchief to her face, and laughed like a girl.

At which Clarence, by no means discomposed, but rather accepting her emotion as perfectly natural, joined her heartily, and added:—

“It’s so, Mrs. Peyton; I’m glad I told you. You don’t mind it, do you?”

But Mrs. Peyton had resumed her gravity, and perhaps a touch of her previous misgivings.

“I should certainly be very sorry,” she said, looking at him critically, “to object to your sharing your old friendship for your little playmate with her parents and guardians, or to your expressing it to THEM as frankly as to her.”

She saw the quick change in his mobile face and the momentary arrest of its happy expression. She was frightened and yet puzzled. It was not the sensitiveness of a lover at the mention of the loved one’s name, and yet it suggested an uneasy consciousness. If his previous impulsive outburst had been prompted honestly, or even artfully, by his passion for Susy, why had he looked so shocked when she spoke of her?

But Clarence, whose emotion had been caused by the sudden recall of his knowledge of Susy’s own disloyalty to the woman whose searching eyes were upon him, in his revulsion against the deceit was, for an instant, upon the point of divulging all. Perhaps, if Mrs. Peyton had shown more confidence, he would have done so, and materially altered the evolution of this story. But, happily, it is upon these slight human weaknesses that your romancer depends, and Clarence, with no other reason than the instinctive sympathy of youth with youth in its opposition to wisdom and experience, let the opportunity pass, and took the responsibility of it out of the hands of this chronicler.

Howbeit, to cover his confusion, he seized upon the second idea that was in his mind, and stammered, “Susy! Yes, I wanted to speak to you about her.” Mrs. Peyton held her breath, but the young man went on, although hesitatingly, with evident sincerity. “Have you heard from any of her relations since—since—you adopted her?”

It seemed a natural enough question, although not the sequitur she had expected. “No,” she said carelessly. “It was well understood, after the nearest relation—an aunt by marriage—had signed her consent to Susy’s adoption, that there should be no further intercourse with the family. There seemed to us no necessity for reopening the past, and Susy herself expressed no desire.” She stopped, and again fixing her handsome eyes on Clarence, said, “Do you know any of them?”

But Clarence by this time had recovered himself, and was able to answer carelessly and truthfully that he did not. Mrs. Peyton, still regarding him closely, added somewhat deliberately, “It matters little now what relations she has; Mr. Peyton and I have complete legal control over her until she is of age, and we can easily protect her from any folly of her own or others, or from any of the foolish fancies that sometimes overtake girls of her age and inexperience.”

To her utter surprise, however, Clarence uttered a faint sigh of relief, and his face again recovered its expression of boyish happiness. “I’m glad of it, Mrs. Peyton,” he said heartily. “No one could understand better what is for her interest in all things than yourself. Not,” he said, with hasty and equally hearty loyalty to his old playmate, “that I think she would ever go against your wishes, or do anything that she knows to be wrong, but she is very young and innocent,—as much of a child as ever, don’t you think so, Mrs. Peyton?”

It was amusing, yet nevertheless puzzling, to hear this boyish young man comment upon Susy’s girlishness. And Clarence was serious, for he had quite forgotten in Mrs. Peyton’s presence the impression of superiority which Susy had lately made upon him. But Mrs. Peyton returned to the charge, or, rather, to an attack upon what she conceived to be Clarence’s old position.

“I suppose she does seem girlish compared to Mary Rogers, who is a much more reserved and quiet nature. But Mary is very charming, Mr. Brant, and I am really delighted to have her here with Susy. She has such lovely dark eyes and such good manners. She has been well brought up, and it is easy to see that her friends are superior people. I must write to them to thank them for her visit, and beg them to let her stay longer. I think you said you didn’t know them?”

But Clarence, whose eyes had been thoughtfully and admiringly wandering over every characteristic detail of the charming apartment, here raised them to its handsome mistress, with an apologetic air and a “No” of such unaffected and complete abstraction, that she was again dumbfounded. Certainly, it could not be Mary in whom he was interested.

Abandoning any further inquisition for the present, she let the talk naturally fall upon the books scattered about the tables. The young man knew them all far better than she did, with a cognate knowledge of others of which she had never heard. She found herself in the attitude of receiving information from this boy, whose boyishness, however, seemed to have evaporated, whose tone had changed with the subject, and who now spoke with the conscious reserve of knowledge. Decidedly, she must have grown rusty in her seclusion. This came, she thought bitterly, of living alone; of her husband’s preoccupation with the property; of Susy’s frivolous caprices. At the end of eight years to be outstripped by a former cattle-boy of her husband’s, and to have her French corrected in a matter of fact way by this recent pupil of the priests, was really too bad! Perhaps he even looked down upon Susy! She smiled dangerously but suavely.

“You must have worked so hard to educate yourself from nothing, Mr. Brant. You couldn’t read, I think, when you first came to us. No? Could you really? I know it has been very difficult for Susy to get on with her studies in proportion. We had so much to first eradicate in the way of manners, style, and habits of thought which the poor child had picked up from her companions, and for which SHE was not responsible. Of course, with a boy that does not signify,” she added, with feline gentleness.

But the barbed speech glanced from the young man’s smoothly smiling abstraction.

“Ah, yes. But those were happy days, Mrs. Peyton,” he answered, with an exasperating return of his previous boyish enthusiasm, “perhaps because of our ignorance. I don’t think that Susy and I are any happier for knowing that the plains are not as flat as we believed they were, and that the sun doesn’t have to burn a hole in them every night when it sets. But I know I believed that YOU knew everything. When I once saw you smiling over a book in your hand, I thought it must be a different one from any that I had ever seen, and perhaps made expressly for you. I can see you there still. Do you know,” quite confidentially, “that you reminded me—of course YOU were much younger—of what I remembered of my mother?”

But Mrs. Peyton’s reply of “Ah, indeed,” albeit polite, indicated some coldness and lack of animation. Clarence rose quickly, but cast a long and lingering look around him.

“You will come again, Mr. Brant,” said the lady more graciously. “If you are going to ride now, perhaps you would try to meet Mr. Peyton. He is late already, and I am always uneasy when he is out alone,—particularly on one of those half-broken horses, which they consider good enough for riding here. YOU have ridden them before and understand them, but I am afraid that’s another thing WE have got to learn.”

When the young man found himself again confronting the glittering light of the courtyard, he remembered the interview and the soft twilight of the boudoir only as part of a pleasant dream. There was a rude awakening in the fierce wind, which had increased with the lengthening shadows. It seemed to sweep away the half-sensuous comfort that had pervaded him, and made him coldly realize that he had done nothing to solve the difficulties of his relations to Susy. He had lost the one chance of confiding to Mrs. Peyton,—if he had ever really intended to do so. It was impossible for him to do it hereafter without a confession of prolonged deceit.

He reached the stables impatiently, where his attention was attracted by the sound of excited voices in the corral. Looking within, he was concerned to see that one of the vacqueros was holding the dragging bridle of a blown, dusty, and foam-covered horse, around whom a dozen idlers were gathered. Even beneath its coating of dust and foam and the half-displaced saddle blanket, Clarence immediately recognized the spirited pinto mustang which Peyton had ridden that morning.

“What’s the matter?” said Clarence, from the gateway.

The men fell apart, glancing at each other. One said quickly in Spanish:—

“Say nothing to HIM. It is an affair of the house.”

But this brought Clarence down like a bombshell among them, not to be overlooked in his equal command of their tongue and of them. “Ah! come, now. What drunken piggishness is this? Speak!”

“The padron has been—perhaps—thrown,” stammered the first speaker. “His horse arrives,—but he does not. We go to inform the senora.”

“No, you don’t! mules and imbeciles! Do you want to frighten her to death? Mount, every one of you, and follow me!”

The men hesitated, but for only a moment. Clarence had a fine assortment of Spanish epithets, expletives, and objurgations, gathered in his rodeo experience at El Refugio, and laid them about him with such fervor and discrimination that two or three mules, presumably with guilty consciences, mistaking their direction, actually cowered against the stockade of the corral in fear. In another moment the vacqueros had hastily mounted, and, with Clarence at their head, were dashing down the road towards Santa Inez. Here he spread them in open order in the grain, on either side of the track, himself taking the road.

They did not proceed very far. For when they had reached the gradual slope which marked the decline to the second terrace, Clarence, obeying an instinct as irresistible as it was unaccountable, which for the last few moments had been forcing itself upon him, ordered a halt. The casa