The Baron of Diamond Tail/Chapter 20
NEARING had come home after dark that evening, harassed as Alma never had seen him before. He labored under a wild constraint that bordered on insanity, his courage completely crushed. Supper had been waiting for him; Alma was already dressed for the ball at Four Corners, to which she intended to ride with Findlay, according to her promise.
Ordinarily, Nearing had a cheerful word, even & bantering passage or two, for his niece, who watched for him and sprang to greet his coming always as eagerly as a daughter might have done. But this evening he had no cheer in his gloomy heart, no welcome, no gladness, in his wild, fearful eyes. He had gone at once to his room, whence the issue of voices presently, told that his wife had joined him.
Alma heard the drone of his distressed voice, and wailing exclamations of despair from her Aunt Hope, such anguished sounds as if their souls had been thrown into the mill of the inexorable gods and were being shredded from their living hearts.
It had come the time of the year when the herds were being shifted down from the higher mesas to the fattening grass in the valleys, many cattle being now on the range near the ranch. As a consequence of this activity, men were quartered again in the long bunkhouse, their singing and laughter at night making the place lively after its summer months of quiet.
Tonight several men were going to the dance, from which they would ride in the waning hours of the night only to change into their working clothes and to the backs of other horses. The memory of the night's pleasures would refresh them as no amount of sleep could do.
Now, as Nearing groaned under the load that galled his heart, pouring forth Alma knew not what story to bring fresh trouble to his already burdened wife, these carefree cowpunchers were singing in the bunkhouse as they went about shaving and slicking up for the dance. There were honest young fellows among Findlay's crew, to whom the indictment laid by Alma before Barrett on the evening of his first arrival at the ranch did not reach. Not all of them were reckless, drinking, swearing social outlaws, although it must be admitted that, taking them the range over, from the Rio Grande to the Little Missouri, they were an unholy band.
But some of them were as clean of thought and deed as the best of men, and the lives they led in the open places gave them graces of body and heart lacking in large measure in those more fortunately assigned. Alma had looked forward with anticipation of pleasure to the dance, where she expected to renew old acquaintances and foot off many a quadrille with these supple, simple men.
This consideration was not all that lay behind her desire to go to the dance, although she confessed a plain, girlish, human desire for a dash of unusual pleasure, a bit wilder and rougher than she was accustomed to. She had given up the hope of getting at Findlay's secret by the strategy of jealousy; she was sorry for Cattle Kate, regretful of the pain she had given her already by appearing before her in Findlay's company, but she had another plan.
More than that, she had seen at one glance on that occasion, when the riving pang of jealousy tore poor, simple Kate's breast, that Kate's rage was not likely to be vented on Findlay if it should be goaded to the breaking point. Kate would take her gun and shoot whoever stood in her way, perhaps; but she would die, if necessity ever called for that sacrifice, before she would betray that evil, dark-hearted man by a word.
Alma had meant to ride to the hay-ranch to tell Barrett that they could not hope to do anything through Kate's jealousy, but had deferred it from day to day. Not so much out of consideration of convention, as a timid shrinking from seeking one whom her heart had begun to hunger after with a disturbing unrest. It is but a foolish, shallow woman, let her be never so good, who discovers to the author of her heart's disquietude the sickness that he alone can cure.
Alma was not of that shallow kind in whom a passion flares and falls like the caprice of a day. Her regard for Barrett had grown slowly, against her own conviction, from a rather indifferent liking, a wholly indifferent attitude of caring not at all whether he remained on the range or went his way. She had not taken the trouble at the beginning to sound him, and find whether he was molded around a hollow core, or contained the substance of a true man.
The revelation had come, after her arraignment of him, her fiery scorn, on the night Nearing drew his weapon to shoot Barrett down at the gate. Following that revelation of the young sailor's true manliness, Findlay's attempt on his life had supplied the opportunity of closer association. She had found him neither simple nor saintly as she went on exploring during the days of his convalescence; but she had found in him the admirable balance of an amiable spirit and an honest heart. Where men were to be counted, there he would be found.
There was an unusual coming and going of people about the place that evening, of passing and repassing through the patio, all of which could not be due, Alma knew, to the activities of Manuel and Teresa. She resented this trespass upon what always had been held peculiarly her private ground, even as she wondered if her uncle's unusual perturbation could have any connection with the stir. She wondered if something had happened; if Nearing at last had accomplished the thing he rode the range like a baffled avenger to do, and if it had brought down the tottering arch of that house's fortunes in some unexpected way.
Findlay had not appeared to take her to the dance, although it was past the hour set for them to start. Even though he still rode in his arrogance, safe in the unremitting watchfulness of his friends, she felt that she could not go with him now, and leave those two broken people alone with their shame and sorrow that night.
This Alma regretted, for it had been her great hope, a hope that had come to her like an inspiration, that she might soften Findlay on that long ride and influence him to lift his oppressive hand. This had been her great hope when she promised Findlay to go to the dance with him; all consideration of pleasure was secondary and small.
She had meant to try if this cattle thief, who masked his widespread operations under the cover of a respectable, responsible connection, had any pity left alive in his breast, and, if she could discover never so small a grain, to water it with the softening plea of mercy until it might expand and fill his heart.
She had determined to plead with him to quit the range, go away with whatever gain had been his from the long and extensive plundering of the Diamond Tail properties, carrying his dread secret with him. She would not ask him to disclose that secret; she felt now that she did not want to know. Let the two old people—for they were old, the past few weeks had aged them cruelly—close their days in such peace as they might gather out of the ruin of their hopes that he had made.
Findlay was not a common man who never had known the refinements of living. It was said he came of a good family, and that he had been university bred. In such a man there must remain some chord that the plea of simple justice, or compassion, if justice should prove too stern, could reach and waken, as her fingers caressed to melody her harpstrings in the dark.
The dining table was spread, late roses, which bloomed abundantly until frost in the warm patio, giving it a cheerful, even festive air. Teresa, soft of tread as a panther, came anxiously from the kitchen to survey the setting, a troubled look in her dark face, and went dolefully back to her carefully cooked dishes again.
Alma went to her room, which looked out on the patio opposite the one in which Barrett had been imprisoned by his wound but a little while past. There was no ray of moonlight among the foliage of the little court, where the fountain tinkled in its basin, overflowing among the ferns. And in the girl's heart there was a gathering of darkness as deep and oppressive, in which there was not even the cheer of one sweet sound of hope.
She heard somebody cross the patio softly, the sound retreating from her window, as she entered the room. She went to the open window, leaned out and called, softly:
"Manuel!"
There was no reply, but the smoke of a cigarette came blowing on the wind, as if the trespasser insolently challenged her to discover him if she could.
Alma felt that she was being drawn into this heart-crushing trouble that hung over her uncle's house. By what means of involution she was being hurried on to participation in the sombre tragedy that was coming rapidly to its climax, she did not know; but she could feel it with every nerve of her body. That step in the patio, that whiff of defiant, insolent smoke, had some part in the shaping event, the shadow of which fell cold upon her heart.
She sat on the low stool beside her harp, drew the instrument down to her shoulder, ran her fingers over the strings. There seemed to rush into her heart with the sound a great sorrow, a vast, poignant longing for some precious thing taken away forever. It was as if night had brought a sorrow which day could not again purge away. Tears burst from her eyes in copious overflowing; a sob rose clamoring for utterance, like a wail for the dead.
Nearing was knocking at her door. In wheedling, ingratiating, humble tones of one who had given offense and craved forgiveness which he neither merited nor expected, he asked to see her. She sprang up, shocked by the strange quality of his voice, and opened the door.
"Uncle Hal! For heaven's sake tell me what has happened!" she appealed.
"Now, now! It's all right, it's all right," he said, with fatuous soothing. "It's nothing but a little matter of business, Alma."
He seemed weak, unsteady on his feet, which he shuffled like a very old man. She took his arm, smitten to the heart with a feeling of compassion that outweighed all the blame she could find in her conscience to charge to this wreck of the strong, handsome man she once knew.
"Wait till I make a light, Uncle Hal, it's so dark tonight."
"Dark tonight—God! Dark!" he muttered. Then, rousing as a drowning man plucks resolution to fight the current that is sweeping him away: "No, don't make a light, we'll not need a light. Just a little matter of business we can discuss in the dark."
His hand trembled on her arm; it was damp with the sweat of an agony she could not fathom as she took it to guide him to a chair.
"Sit by the window—it seems close in here tonight."
"I feel an oppression in the air," said he. "It seems heavy, as if a storm might be gathering."
He sat by the open window, silent for a little while, as a weary man come home to his repose. A gust of wind, little more than a breath, rustled the leaves, and shook down a shower of them from the maple and aspen boughs with sound as melancholy as his own sighs.
"The business is going badly, Alma," Nearing said at last, catching himself in his drifting, it seemed, coming back by sheer force to the subject he had sought her to discuss.
"But that's not news, Uncle Hal. The business has been going badly a long time, hasn't it?"
"A long time. Now it's rushing to a fall, I'll be overwhelmed, buried in the ruins that will drag all of us down. You are the only one that can stop this avalanche—I've come to appeal to you."
"I stop it?" she asked, amazed. "Why, Uncle Hal"
"Your interest as a stockholder"
"Oh!" she stopped him impatiently. "I forgot, long ago, that I was a stockholder, I threw my chips in with yours, I count my little inheritance swallowed up in the loss you've stood. You've repaid me, a thousand times over, Uncle Hal. As a stockholder, don't count me in."
"It can't be done that way," he said, wearily insistent, "I'm honor bound to account to you for every dollar of your patrimony, as well as every dollar the other stockholders have in the business. But I'm on the edge of the precipice now. Tomorrow morning will see me drawn over, dashed to ruin—unless you put out your hand to save me."
"Why, Uncle Hal," she said, her voice trembling with generous emotion, tears rushing into her eyes, "I'll do anything humanly possible to help you. Don't you know that without asking me?"
"I thought I knew," he said, seeking her hand, pressing it with warm gratitude, a lifting of eager hope in his voice. "But love, even, is slow to sacrifice. I have found human support a vain and fickle thing in my day, Alma. So I hesitate."
"We can't get anywhere by beating around the bush," she said.
"No, Alma." Then, suddenly, eagerly, driving himself headlong, it seemed: "Dale wants to marry you."
"What a strange digression, Uncle Hal!" Alma chided him, shocked more by that unaccountable turn in his talk than by the revelation made, it seemed.
"It's the only way," he said, with the stress of utmost gravity, not taking into account, it seemed, that he had overleaped the most vital portion of his explanation. But he was not to be spared.
"The only way?" Alma repeated, incredulous, baffled. "Why, you haven't even given me any insight into Dale's connection with your business crisis. What's he got to do with it? A hired man on this ranch!"
"Everything!" with bitter emphasis. "At least much," floundering to retrieve the admission, "much that I can't explain now, that is really beside the main question. Dale is a man of character, a man"
"You don't say what kind of character! Well, I know all about Dale Findlay, the man that's been robbing us for years and nobody able to stop him. What is it this man holds over you, Uncle Hal? Is he threatening a foreclosure on his security unless I pay the price?"
"Whatever there is between him and me, if anything at all, is between him and me," Nearing returned, with an attempt at the dignity and severity once so fittingly his own. He seemed to forget that he had come a suppliant.
"All right," said Alma, scorning the poor attempt. "Let him go to the devil to cash in on his secrets, whatever they are! I'm not paying that kind of debts for this family!"
"Will it be enough to tell you, then, that this man can ruin me with a word?" Nearing demanded, his voice steady and severe.
He rose from his chair as he spoke, standing outlined against the dim light of the window. Alma could see that he leaned toward her, as if in menace for her defiance.
"No, it is not enough," she told him, with cold bluntness.
There rose in her a feeling of immeasurable contempt for this man, who had, by some rash deed of his past, betrayed himself so completely into another's hands.
"Where are your guns? what has become of your manhood?" she asked him. "There's a man's way out of a thing like this, without coming to a woman to drag you out!"
"Will it be enough, if that much doesn't suffice you, to tell you that he can bring sorrow and disgrace to us all? Woe and desolation he can bring upon us, and you, least of all, can escape it! Is that enough?"
Nearing came toward her as she drew away from him, so passionate in his half confession of some terrible thing, some crime, some transgression, she knew not what name to give it, that had bound him in such despicable servitude.
"No," she said; "no, no!"
"If duty, if compassion, if the thought of me and mine, my name, my honorable past"
"Honorable past!" she mocked him, like a taunting echo.
"If the misery of your Aunt Hope, if the earnest appeal that I make to you, I, a man that has stood equal to and above princes and potentates—if all this is not enough"
"It is not enough! Until you're man enough to tell me what it is this thief knows, and leave me to judge for myself, I'll"
"I can't tell you!" Nearing groaned, sinking again to his chair. "Alma, I can't tell you!" Then, stiffening in a moment, shored by the memory of his past consequence, "You are not my confessor, I'm under no obligation to reveal my—business affairs to you!"
"No, you are under no obligation to me at all," coldly, leaving her chair, starting toward the door.
"Alma!" he appealed.
"There's no more to be said between us, Uncle Hal. When you come to yourself, when you're a man again"
"I can't tell you, I can't tell you!" he said, frantic from the barbs which were galling him from every side. "Sit down again, Alma, hear me for a little while. You don't seem to understand the seriousness of this situation."
"Serious for you alone. You've forgotten how to talk to a man—where are your guns? You didn't have them on when you came home. Has he stripped them from you along with your honor?"
"You do Findlay an injustice to blame him for everything," Nearing made a weak defense. "He loves you, tenderly, passionately. He has told you so a hundred times."
"He's had his answer a hundred times. And what he couldn't win honestly for himself, he drives a bargain for through you! Where are your guns?"
"You raised the poor fellow's hopes lately, you renewed"
"I renewed nothing. There never was anything between us but contempt on my side, whatever was on his. I've talked with him lately, I've taken two or three little rides; I was going to Four Corners with him tonight to the dance, but not because I wanted to marry him. Uncle Hal, I was only working on a plan to help to free you."
"Free me? You can do it with a word!" Nearing spoke eagerly as a thirsty man hastens to water.
"We—I was scheming to find out what that thief's hold over you is, and break it."
"You and that young pup! You and that young pup!"
"It must be a dreadful thing when you'd kill a man at your own door to cover it up," she said.
"He's a liar!" Nearing sprang to his feet, striding menacingly toward her, his foot striking the pedestal of her harp, making the strings groan.
"He lied like the gentleman that he is—only to conceal the truth," she said.
"Trouble increased a hundred-fold the day he came to this range. Would to God his ship had gone down in the sea!"
"If you would be frank with him, with me!" she appealed, standing near him, her white arms outstretched in beseeching.
"Whatever it is I'm keeping from you, Alma, I am doing so for your own peace," he assured her, his voice sombre, steady. "And whatever this—this—hold, as you have called it, may be, it will be broken, I will be free to go on with my business plans and the redemption of my word to my trusting friends, the moment you marry Dale. It isn't—it isn't—a—a hard fate. Dale's a gentleman by birth and breeding, he's a man among"
"Thieves! No, If I can't have your confidence, you can't have mime. In the morning I'll leave this house, Uncle Hal. You and Dale Findlay can stand or fall together, as you deserve. Oh, poor old Uncle Hal! What a hole you must be in!"
"By God! I am in a hole!" he said, so fiercely desperate that she drew away from him as if she had seen him lift his hand to strike her. "I'm in such a hole, by God! that you're not going to stand in the light of my only way out. Will you, or will you not, do as I command you?"
"Command me!" She shrank from him to the corner beside the door, her heart sinking, her cheeks cold. "Command me!" she repeated, the words slow and fearful on her numb lips.
"Marry him tonight! I have given my word."
"No!" she answered, a sudden fire fusing the ice of her fear. "Not if he can drag you—all of us—down to worse than ruin!"
"Since you choose to fight, then we'll fight," he returned, cold and unfeeling in his desperation. "Marrying him isn't a matter of living with him. I'll carry out my part of the agreement; I'll give you to him. It's for you to decide afterwards whether you'll live with him or not. His mouth will be shut."
"You contemptible coward!" she assailed him, too furious to give utterance to all that rose in her.
"Charley Thomson will be here in an hour or two, he is on his way. He is a notarial officer, empowered in extraordinary cases to perform the marriage rite. Be ready to come when you're wanted."
Nearing turned after opening the door, closed it again, drew close to where Alma sat overwhelmed by humiliation and shame, yet on fire with a dangerous resentment.
"There'll be no use in your trying to leave us, Alma," he informed her. "You'd be stopped, humiliated, I expect, and carried back. You'd better stay quietly here and see it through."
"You can't force me into a marriage!" she defied him.
"It might not stand the test of law," he admitted. "But I'll do my part."
"The part of a scoundrel!"
"It's only a form; you don't need to let it go any farther."
"It never will go that far!" she told him, vibrant in her rage.
Nearing had become indifferent to her scorn. It touched him no deeper than her angry arraignment and rebellious rage.
"Dale is a man who will know how to take care of you, anyhow," he said.
"He's robbed you of everything, even your manhood. Even if I were fool enough to let you force me into such a disgraceful thing, what do you suppose you'd gain in honor by it before the world?"
"It is not for you to pass judgment on my acts and purposes—only to do as you are commanded. His mouth will be shut, I tell you, his mouth will be shut!"
Nearing left her, closing the door after him gently, as if he shut it on one who had fallen asleep in a sickness, after a long struggle with a delirium that racked the foundations of life.