The Cup of Trembling and Other Stories Part 19

"Is what?"

"Your best fellah; the one who gave you that."

"There isn't any. It was nothing. I won't tell you what it was! I made it myself, there! It was only 'b.u.t.ter-b.a.l.l.s.'"

"Oh, good Lord!" laughed Henniker.

Meta thought he was laughing at her. It was too much! The sweetness of his music was all jangled in her nerves. Tears would come, and then more tears because of the first.

Had Meta been the child of her father, she might have been sitting that night in one of the vine-shaded porches of the houses on the line, with a brace of young lieutenants at her feet, and in her wildest follies with them she would have been protected by all the traditions and safeguards of her cla.s.s. As she was the child of her mother, instead, she was out on the hills with Henniker. And how should the squaw's daughter know the difference between protection and pursuit?

When Henniker put his arm around her and kissed the tears from her eyes, she would not have changed places with the proudest lady of the line,--captain's wife, lieutenant's sweetheart, or colonel's daughter of them all. Her chief, who blew the trumpet, was as great a man in Meta's eyes as the officer who buckled on his sabre in obedience to the call.

As for Henniker, no girl's head against his breast had ever looked so womanly dear as Meta's; no shut eyelids that he had ever kissed had covered such wild, sweet eyes. He did not think of her at all in words, any more than of the twilight afterglow in which they parted, with its peculiar intensity, its pang of color. He simply felt her; and it was nearest to the poetic pa.s.sion of any emotion that he had ever known.

That night Meta deceived her foster-mother, and lying awake beside Callie's empty cot, in the room which the two girls shared together, she treacherously prayed that it might be long before her sister's return.

The wild white lily had opened, and behold the stain!

It had been a hard summer for Tim Meadows's family,--the second summer on a sagebrush ranch, their small capital all in the ground, the first hay crop ungathered, and the men to board as well as to pay. The boarding was Mrs. Tim's part; yet many a young wife would have thought that she had enough to do with her own family to cook and wash for, and her first baby to take care of.

"You'll get along all right," the older mothers encouraged her. "A summer baby is no trouble at all."

No trouble when the trouble is twenty years behind us, among the joys of the past. But Tim's wife was wondering if she could hold out till cool weather came, when the rush of the farm work would be over, and her "summer baby" would be in short clothes and able to sit alone. The heat in their four-roomed cabin, in the midst of the treeless land, was an ordeal alone. To sleep in the house was impossible; the rooms and the windows were too small to admit enough air. They moved their beds outside, and slept like tramps under the stars; and the broad light awoke them at earliest dawn, and the baby would never sleep till after ten at night, when the dry Plains wind began to fan the face of the weary land. Even Callie, whose part in the work was subsidiary, lost flesh, and the roses in her cheeks turned sallow, in the month she stayed on the ranch; but she would have been ashamed to complain, though she was heartsick for a word from Henniker. He had written to her only once.

It was Mrs. Meadows who thought it high time that Callie should come home. She had found a good woman to take her daughter's place, and arranged the matter of pay herself. Tim had said they could get no help, but his mother knew what that meant; such help as they could afford to pay for was worse than none.

It seemed a poor return to Callie, for her sisterly service in the valley, to come home and find her lover a changed man. Mrs. Meadows said he was like all the soldiers she had ever known,--light come, light go.

But this did not comfort Callie much, nor more to be reminded what a good thing it was she had found him out in time.

Henniker was not scoundrel enough to make love to two girls at once, two semi-sisters, who slept in the same room and watched each other's movements in the same looking-gla.s.s. It was no use pretending that he and Callie could "heat their broth over again;" so the coolness came speedily to a breach, and Henniker no longer openly, in fair daylight, took the path to the cottage gate. But there were other paths.

He had found a way to talk to Meta with his trumpet. He sent her messages at guard-mounting, as the guard was forming, when, as senior trumpeter, he was allowed a choice in the airs he played; and when he was orderly trumpeter, and could not come himself to say it, he sent her his good-night in the plaintive notes of taps.

This was the climax of Henniker's flirtations: all that went before had been as nothing, all that came after was not much worse than nothing. It was the one sincere as it was the one poetic pa.s.sion of his life; and had it not cost him his self-respect through his baseness to Callie, and the treachery and dissimulation he was teaching to an innocent child, it might have made him a faithful man. As it was, his soldier's honor slept; it was the undisciplined part of him that spoke to the elemental nature of the girl; and it was fit that a trumpet's reckless summons, or its brief inarticulate call, like the note of a wild bird to its mate, should be the language of his love.

Retreat had sounded, one evening in October, but it made no stir any more in the cottage where the girls had been so gay. Callie, putting the tea on the table, remembered, as she heard the gun fire, how in the the spring Henniker had said that when "sound off" was at six he would drop in to supper some night, and show her how to make _chili con carne_, a dish that every soldier knows who has served on the Mexican border. Her face grew hard, for these foolish, unsleeping reminders were as constant as the bugle calls.

The women waited for the head of the house; but as he did not come, they sat down and ate quickly, saving the best dish hot for him.

They had finished, and the room was growing dusk, when he came in breezily, and called at once, as a man will, for a light. Meta rose to fetch it. The door stood open between the fore-room and the kitchen, where she was groping for a lamp. Mr. Meadows spoke in a voice too big for the room. He had just been conversing across the common with the quartermaster-sergeant, as the two men's footsteps diverged by separate paths to their homes.

"I hear there's going to be a change at the post;" he shouted. "The --th is going to leave this department, and C troop of the Second is coming from Custer. Sergeant says they are looking for orders any day now."

Mrs. Meadows, before she thought, glanced at Callie. The girl winced, for she hated to be looked at like that. She held up her head and began to sing audaciously, drumming with her fingers on the table:--

"'When my mother comes to know That I love the soldiers so, She will lock me up all day, Till the soldiers march away.'"

"What sort of a song is that?" asked her father sharply.

Callie looked him in the eyes. "Don't you know that tune?" said she.

"Henniker plays that at guard-mount; and sometimes he plays this:--

'Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad, Though father and mither and a' should go mad.'"

"Let him play what he likes," said the father angrily. "His saucy jig tunes are nothing to us. I'm thankful no girl of mine is following after the army. It's a hard life for a woman, I can tell you, in the ranks."

Callie pushed her chair back, and looked out of the window as if she had not heard.

"Where's Meta with that lamp? Go and see what's keeping her."

"Sit still," said Mrs. Meadows. She went herself into the kitchen, but no one heard her speak a word; yet the kitchen was not empty.

There was a calico-covered lounge that stood across the end of the room; Meta sat there, quite still, her back against the wall. Mrs. Meadows took one look at her; then she lighted the lamp and carried it into the dining-room, and went back and shut herself in with Meta.

"'When my mother comes to know,'"

hummed Callie. Her face was pale. She hardly knew that she was singing.

"Stop that song!" her father shouted. "Go and see what's the matter with your sister."

"Sister?" repeated Callie. "Meta is no sister of mine."

"She's your tent-mate, then. Ye grew nest-ripe under the same mother's wing."

"Meta can use her own wings now, you will find. She grew nest-ripe very young."

Father Meadows knew that there was trouble inside of that closed door, as there was trouble inside the white lips and shut heart of his frank and joyous Callie, but it was "the women's business." He went out to attend to his own.

Irrigation on the scale of a small cottage garden is tedious work. It has intervals of silence and leaning on a hoe while one little channel fills or trickles into the next one; and the water must be stopped out here, and floated longer there, like the bath over the surface of an etcher's plate. Water was scarce and the rates were high that summer, and there was a good deal of "dry-point" work with a hoe in Father Meadows's garden.

He had come to one of the discouraging places where the ground was higher than the water could be made to reach without a deal of propping and damming with shovelfuls of earth. This spot was close to the window of the kitchen chamber, which was "mother's room." She was in there talking to Meta. Her voice was deep with the maternal note of remonstrance; Meta's was sharp and high with excitement and resistance.

Her faintness had pa.s.sed, but Mother Meadows had been inquiring into causes.

"I am married to him, mother! He is my husband as much as he can be."

"It was never Father Magrath married you, or I should be knowing to it before now."

"No; we went before a judge, or a justice, in the town."

"In town! Well, that is something; but be sure there is a wrong or a folly somewhere when a man takes a young girl out of her home and out of her church to be married. If Henniker had taken you 'soberly, in the fear of G.o.d'"--

"He _was_ sober!" cried Meta. "I never saw him any other way."

"Mercy on us! I was not thinking of the man's habits. He's too good to have done the way he has. That's what I have against him. I don't know what I shall say to Father Josette. The disgrace of this is on me, too, for not looking after my house better. 'Never let her be humbled through her not being all white,' the father said when he brought you to me, and G.o.d knows I never forgot that your little heart was white. I trusted you as I would one of my own, and was easier on you for fear of a mother's natural bias toward her own flesh and blood; and now to think that you would lie to me, and take a man in secret that had deceived your sister before you,--as if nothing mattered so that you got what you wanted! And down in the town, without the priest's blessing or a kiss from any of us belonging to you! It's one way to get married, but it's not the right way."

"Did no white girl ever do as I have?" asked Meta, with a touch of sullenness.