Sally of Missouri Part 8

"If I paint all my life am I ever going to be able to paint like that?"

she had asked of the man earnestly.

"No, my child, you are not," he had answered, quite as earnestly.

"I wonder why I should try to do something poorly that someone else can do so well?" she had mused.

And then, because she had talent, and, finest of all, an exquisite temperament in whose pulses the sense of colour beat in veritable tides of joy, the man from the studio had encouraged her with warm words of praise. "You will some day paint well enough to win a high place," he had reminded her.

But she had stayed thoughtful, and a day or two later had talked to him again.

"I don't believe, since I have thought it all out, that I can get what's in life for me out of it in a high place," she had said, shy but eager.

Then, on that line, she had forged on to a swift and comprehensive conclusion. "You have told me," she had continued to the studio man, "that what I have in me for painting is not the real thing, and since I have seen the real thing I know for myself that colour is too rich and a.s.sertive, too apt to run away with one, for any but master hands to use it. I feel that I don't want even to see poor colouring on canvas any more. I shan't ever even have poor colour pictures around me. I can get my colour stories outside. Inside, the stories shall all be told in light and shadow. And I am not going to paint bad pictures myself any more."

"Ah, but the work, the beautiful work!" cried the painter.

"Well, as for me, do you know, I've come to believe that my work is just living--for a time anyhow."

"Well, then, the fame!" cried the painter.

"I don't seem to care for the fame."

It had gone much like that with her music. She had a fine voice, and her New York teacher had told her over and over that she "must go on." She had been pleased with his praise and had worked hard for a time. Then she had gone to him, too, one day, open-eyed and inquiring.

"Go on to what?" she had asked.

"Why, to glory," the singer had said.

She had shaken her head, unconvinced. "I don't seem to care for the glory," she had said. And beyond learning to use her voice well she would not work with it. "It is not that I am lazy," she had protested to the singer, "but I couldn't get what's in life for me out of it by singing."

"What's in life for you?" queried the singer, interested, for the girl was beautiful and rich and aspirant.

"Ah, I don't quite know yet," said the girl, the pretty pathos of youth and waiting upon her, "but some day I shall find myself; then I shall know."

All through her college days she had been looking for herself. When the time had come that she had gone to Elsie Gossamer's house to visit, and there had met men--college boys at first and later on men of a larger world--she had still been looking for herself. But though in the meantime she had learned how to meet men and how to treat them--capably, Elsie Gossamer said--she had not found herself. During the past summer, since her return from college, she had idled on here through a little interim with her father, comfortable, dreamy, waiting, seeking. But she had not found herself.

As she began to make ready for bed that Sunday night she had, suddenly and subtly, a quiver of consciousness that the waiting and the seeking were nearly over. Just how she knew it she could not have told, or just what she meant by knowing it, or just what would happen because of knowing it. Moving about the large room softly, her harmonious strength and grace were revealed in the swing of her long lithe limbs, the reach of her satiny brown arms, the breadth of her sweet smooth breast, the straightness and firmness of her tall frame. Only a self-reliant girl could have moved as she moved, a girl made self-reliant by exuberant health and ideals and hope. When she stopped moving about and stood before her mirror, her hand on the great rope of s.h.i.+ning hair that hung over her shoulder, her body a.s.sumed a rare natural poise, cla.s.sically, ancestrally beautiful, Grecian. By and by she roused from the little reverie before the mirror, put out the light, and came over to the window.

"Oh," she cried at once, "that was what was the matter with me, that was why I felt that something was about to happen! It was the storm!"

Beyond the window a Missouri tempest was rising. The girl, responsive as a reed to the wind, sat down in a low chair, the subtle quiver of consciousness intensified within her, and watched the lightning that began to play over the hills, and the rain that began to beat through the trees. Strangely enough, as she sat there, in the flashes she could see little, but in the dark--a warm, wind-blown, sweet-smelling dark--she saw several things. For one thing, she saw that, most probably, she would never again in her life spend an evening with a sixteen-to-one congressman. It had been a very tiresome evening. For another thing, she saw that she was not going to Europe. Her father needed her; or if he didn't he ought to. For a third thing, she saw that, in some way, she was going to have to make her father like Bruce Steering again. Then she saw the fourth thing. There had not been a flash for some minutes. Seeing that fourth thing, in the intense dark, she gave a trembling sigh, put one of her hands on top of the other on her breast and pushed, as though she were pus.h.i.+ng her heart down. Then presently the pressure of her hands relaxed, her head dropped down until her chin touched her fingers, and a great flush that was like a charge from something electric surged through her.

"Oh," she cried, "oh, is it you! Have you come!" It was a triumphant, shy, thrilling greeting to something, something that she had been waiting for, born for. The dark grew intenser, sweeter, warmer. She lifted her arms and held them out yearningly toward the Tigmore hills, half-leaning out the window, catching the rain on her eager young face, in her s.h.i.+ning hair, on her broad low breast. "I am so glad of it!" she panted, in a singing whisper, "I am so glad----" A great sheet of lightning unrolled across the Tigmore hills and held steadily magnificent for a moment, revealing everything to everybody, so it seemed to Sally Madeira. She crept into bed shaking, ecstatic, afraid.

Next morning she made her toilet away from the mirror as much as was possible, not being quite ready to face her whole found self as yet. But before she went downstairs she crossed to the window and looked out at the tumbling Tigmore line, a kissing sigh on her lips.

When she reached the dining room she found that Madeira had not yet come down, so she walked out into the garden, where she stood for a little while by the vine-covered stump, her eyes closed, her little straight nose in the air, the broad daylight beating down on her. Then presently she opened her eyes determinedly. "Yes, I can stand it," she said, as though she had been afraid that she couldn't, and looked straight up into the rain of light over-head. "I can stand it, in the daytime as in the dark, from now on forever."

In the air was an autumn mellowness that had not been there the day before. It nipped, with a strong, winey flavour, as it went down. All around her lay drifts of petals, rain-beaten roses, ragged lilies. The storm had stolen the garden's glory. "To put it into my heart!" cried the girl, in her all-conquering joy. "Oh, you Garden of Dreams, you!

See, my eyes are wide open, and this, _this_ is better than dreams!"

She went back to the house with her arms full of the very last roses.

"For now, I must go bring my father around," she said.

Madeira had had a bad night. He had not slept at all as far as he could tell. For hours he had had to lie on his bed and face the dark, with Bruce Grierson's letter under his pillow, licking out at his temples like a tongue of flame. But he had not taken the letter away all night long. "Let it burn," he had said. "Let it find out who's stronger, me or it. That's my way." All night long he had made plans, with his face set toward the dark. When he got to the dining room that morning he went to the window and stood there waiting for Sally, revolving one of the night's plans in his head, deciding with how much force to project it, how to hit the mark patly with it. "For I won't have him here at my house again," Madeira was telling himself there at the window. "G.o.d! I _can't_ have him here." He caught at the vest pocket above his heart.

His teeth were chattering. His daughter, with the roses in her arms, entered the room just then.

As long as she lived Sally Madeira never forgot the way the dining room looked that morning, as she came into it from the Garden of Dreams: the dull green wall s.p.a.ces, broken by some of her beloved cool etchings, and by great walnut panels that deepened and toned and strengthened the room beautifully; the old walnut side-board that had been her mother's mother's; in the centre of the room the heavy round table, unlaid, snowy, waiting for her effective interference; Madeira, her big handsome father, idling by the window, his fine physical maturity cut out strongly against the light, his deep chest, his great height, his wide, well-featured face, his good clothes, the adaptability with which he wore them; and on beyond Madeira, outside the window, the satin green foliage of the pet magnolia tree. It was all finely satisfying. She had tried her hardest to kiss the foolish gladness out of her eyes and voice into the roses in her hands, but things grew so increasingly pleasant that all her endeavour went for nothing. As soon as her father saw her and heard her, he said:

"Well, Honey-love, are you as happy as _that_?"

She put her roses into an old blue bowl and went over to him, and he sat down in one of the big chairs by the window and drew her to his knee.

Then they fell into a caressing habit of theirs, he with both arms about her body, she with both arms about his neck, half-choking him with tenderness, rumpling his thick hair with the tip of her chin. She looked as much mother as child like that.

"What a big girl you are, Pet!"

"I have a big excuse for it, Dad."

"But your mother, now, was little, Sally. My, yes, reckon that was why I loved her so. Such a little, little thing!"

"And I'm so big--'reckon' that's why you love me so, huh?"

"Reckon," he said. They sat on for a moment silent, looking out of the window. There was a lost cardinal whisking among the satin leaves of the pet magnolia, gazing wistfully at an old nest that swung in the branches like the ragged ghost of a summer's completeness and happiness. The nest seemed to arouse memories and hopes in the cardinal's breast. He had to flirt about it nervously for some minutes before he could satisfy himself that his housekeeping notions were unseasonable. Finally he perched himself on an humble syringa bush and stared at the nest, quiet, depressed.

"Are you betting on the magnolia tree with anybody this winter?" she asked, her eyes, too, on the high nest.

"No one left to bet with, Pet. Everybody knows now that it can live through the worst that can come to it. Let's see, it's twenty years since I planted it there, and I've won twenty jack-knives betting that it would live, twenty different winters. Twenty years! Sally, that's a good while, my honey. Why, twenty years ago you didn't come knee-high to a puddle-duck. We had just moved down here from St. Louis, your mother and I, twenty years ago."

As he talked, the moment shaped itself for Madeira as a little negligible interim, wedged in between the restless night, with its defined purposes, and the next hour, when he should have consummated at least one of the night's purposes.

"That mother of yours was a lovely little thing, Sally."

The girl was sure of it. She had felt the loveliness of her mother all her life. Once she had gone to her mother's old Kentucky home, and though her mother's people were all dead long ago, the great Kentucky house was still there, and, standing before it, she had been almost able to see the aura of influence that it had been in the moulding of the loveliness of her mother, the southern girl, lifting from it to ensphere her, the western girl.

"I know she was lovely," said Sally.

"Oh my, yes,--just about at her loveliest twenty years ago. But as for twenty years, Sally, why, I can go a lot farther back than that. I can go back forty years, close to my beginning. This is all sort of different from my beginning, Sally." Out beyond the window, into the September suns.h.i.+ne, rolled the fat corn lands, hundreds upon hundreds of acres, the wheat flats, the miles of cattle range of Madeira Place.

Around them shut the strong walls of the old Peele house, a memorable house in its way, ma.s.sive and wide-porched and staunch.

"You can hardly imagine anything more different from this than was my beginning," went on Madeira. "This is pretty luxurious, isn't it? In its way, though it is down here on the Di, it's just about as good for a country house as the places you saw on the Hudson, aint it?"

"Oh, it has a lot more soul and story than the Hudson places," she acquiesced at once. Sometimes she could feel that desire of his to give her as good as the best palpitate like a pulse through his words.

"Well, anyhow, Lord knows it's mighty different from what I began with, Sally. Why, Honey, in my boy-days living on a farm in Missouri was mighty much like living on the fringes of h.e.l.len-blazes. Br-r-rt!" He clamped and unclamped his big hand, watching the strong muscle-play in it. "I can feel my fingers burn to this day where the frozen fodder sawed and rasped 'em in winter and the hot plough-handles bit and blistered 'em in summer. And then, afterwards, those old St. Louis days meant hard pulling, too, of another kind. From grocery clerk, to dry-goods clerk, to old Peele's real estate office, it was pull, pull, if not over one thing, over another. Takes a thundering lot of pulling to pull out in this world, Sally." All in a minute his voice sounded perplexed and resentful.

"Well, you did it, didn't you? You pulled out. I'm proud of you. I like the way you did it."

"Do you, Pet? Do you like me?" he queried with a peculiar anxiety.