The Prairie Mother Part 18

_Sat.u.r.day the Twenty-sixth_

Coming events do _not_ cast their shadows before them. I was busy in the kitchen this morning, making marmalade out of what was left of Peter's oranges and contentedly humming _Oh, Dry Those Tears_ when the earthquake that shook the world from under my feet occurred.

The Twins had been bathed and powdered and fed and put out in their sleeping-box, and d.i.n.kie was having his morning nap, and Struthers was busy at the sewing-machine, finis.h.i.+ng up the little summer s.h.i.+rts for Poppsy and Pee-Wee which I'd begun to make out of their daddy's discarded B. V. D.'s. It was a glorious morning with a high-arching pale blue sky and little baby-lamb cloudlets along the sky-line and the milk of life running warm and rich in the bosom of the sleeping earth. And I was bustling about in my ap.r.o.n of butcher's linen, after slicing oranges on my little maple-wood carving-slab until the house was aromatic with them, when the sound of a racing car-engine smote on my ear. I went to the door with fire in my eye and the long-handled preserving spoon in my hand, ready to call down destruction on the pinhead who'd dare to wake my kiddies.

My visitor, I saw, was Lady Alicia; and I beheld my broken wash-tub under the front axle of her motor-car.

I went out to her, with indignation still in my eye, but she paid no attention to either that or the tub itself. She was quite pale, in fact, as she stepped down from her driving-seat, glanced at her buckskin gauntlets, and then looked up at me.

"There's something we may as well face, and face at once," she said, with less of a drawl than usual.

I waited, without speaking, wondering if she was referring to the tub.

But I could feel my heart contract, like a leg-muscle with a cramp in it. And we stood there, face to face, under the flat prairie sunlight, ridiculously like two c.o.c.kerels silently estimating each other's intentions.

"I'm in love with your husband," Lady Alicia suddenly announced, with a bell-like note of challenge in her voice. "And I'd rather like to know what you're going to do about it."

I was able to laugh a little, though the sound of it seemed foolish in my own startled ears.

"That's rather a coincidence, isn't it?" I blithely admitted. "For so am I."

I could see the Scotch-granite look that came into the thick-lashed tourmaline eyes. And they'd be lovely eyes, I had to admit, if they were only a little softer.

"That's unfortunate," was her ladys.h.i.+p's curt retort.

"It's more than unfortunate," I agreed, "it's extremely awkward."

"Why?" she snapped, plainly annoyed at my lightness of tone.

"Because he can't possibly have both of us, you know--unless he's willing to migrate over to that Mormon colony at Red-Deer. And even there, I understand, they're not doing it now."

"I'm afraid this is something much too serious to joke about," Lady Alicia informed me.

"But it strikes me as essentially humorous," I told her.

"I'm afraid," she countered, "that it's apt to prove essentially tragic."

"But he happens to be _my_ husband," I observed.

"Only in form, I fancy, if he cares for some one else," was her ladys.h.i.+p's deliberate reply.

"Then he has acknowledged that--that you've captured him?" I inquired, slowly but surely awakening to the sheer audacity of the lady in the buckskin gauntlets.

"Isn't that rather--er--primitive?" inquired Lady Allie, paler than ever.

"If you mean coming and squabbling over another woman's husband, I'd call it distinctly prehistoric," I said with a dangerous little red light dancing before my eyes. "It's so original that it's aboriginal.

But I'm still at a loss to know just what your motive is, or what you want."

"I want an end to this intolerable situation," my visitor averred.

"Intolerable to whom?" I inquired.

"To me, to Duncan, and to _you_, if you are the right sort of woman,"

was Lady Alicia's retort. And still again I was impressed by the colossal egoism of the woman confronting me, the woman ready to ride rough-shod over the world, for all her sparkling veneer of civilization, as long, as she might reach her own selfish ends.

"Since you mention Duncan, I'd like to ask if you're speaking now as his cousin, or as his mistress?"

Lady Alicia's stare locked with mine. She was making a sacrificial effort, I could see, to remain calm.

"I'm speaking as some one who is slightly interested in his happiness, and his future," was her coldly intoned reply.

"And has my husband acknowledged that his happiness and his future remain in your hands?" I asked.

"I should hate to see him waste his life in a hole like this," said Lady Alicia, not quite answering my question.

"Have you brought any great improvement to it?" I parried. Yet even as I spoke I stood impressed by the thought that it was, after all, more than primitive. It was paleolithic, two prehistoric she-things in combat for their cave-man.

"That is not what I came here to discuss," she replied, with a tug at one of her gauntlets.

"I suppose it would be nearer the mark to say, since you began by being so plain-spoken, that you came here to ask me to give you my husband," I retorted as quietly as I could, not because I preferred the soft pedal, but because I nursed a strong suspicion that Struthers' attentive ear was just below the nearest window-sill.

Lady Alicia smiled forbearingly, almost pityingly.

"Any such donation, I'm afraid, is no longer your prerogative," she languidly remarked, once more mistress of herself. "What I'm more interested in is your giving your husband his liberty."

I felt like saying that this was precisely what I had been giving him.

But it left too wide an opening. So I ventured, instead: "I've never heard my husband express a desire for his liberty."

"He's too honorable for that," remarked my enemy.

"Then it's an odd kind of honor," I icily remarked, "that allows you to come here and bicker over a situation that is so distinctly personal."

"Pardon me, but I'm not bickering. And I'm not rising to any heights of courage which would be impossible to your husband. It's consoling, however, to know how matters stand. And Duncan will probably act according to his own inclinations."

That declaration would have been more inflammatory, I think, if one small truth hadn't gradually come home to me. In some way, and for some reason, Lady Alicia Elizabeth Newland was not so sure of herself as she was pretending to be. She was not so sure of her position, I began to see, or she would never have thrown restraint to the winds and come to me on any such mission.

"Then that counts me out!" I remarked, with a forlorn attempt at being facetious. "If he's going to do as he likes, I don't see that you or I have much to say in the matter. But before he does finally place his happiness in your hands, I rather think I'd like to have a talk with him."

"That remains with Duncan, of course," she admitted, in a strictly qualified tone of triumph, as though she were secretly worrying over a conquest too incredibly facile.

"He knows, of course, that you came to talk this over with me?" I suggested, as though it were an after-thought.

"He had nothing to do with my coming," a.s.serted Lady Alicia.

"Then it was your own idea?" I asked.

"Entirely," she admitted.