Part 14

Her eyes crinkled up again. "I'll just do it," she said gaily, "I'll do it now. Presto," she shut her eyes. "Now I have his point of view. Now I'm seeing what he sees--that Miss Sally Madeira likes to hear him sing, and humours him and pets him because he is gay and glad to be alive, and because Uncle Bernique says that he needs somebody to mother him. I mother Piney. Can't you see that." She laughed again and arose and stood in front of him, gay, mocking, nonchalant. "Piney love! And if Piney could love, that you should fancy that he might dare love Salome Madeira!"

He forgot about Piney. She blocked his farther vision like a shaft of light. He could not see an inch beyond her. Madeira's voice rang down the garden walk. Steering did not hear it. "Salome! Salome!" he murmured, "Is that it, Salome?"

"Yes, that's it, Salome. Isn't it foolish? The Di down there is the Diaphanous, too. Some pioneer poet named it for its shimmer, but what good did it do? Missouri promptly called it the 'Di.' No more good is it to name a child Salome in the backwoods of Missouri. She's bound to grow up Sally. I've always been Sally, except at school. I'll always be Sally down here with my own people."

"No, you won't always be Sally--no you won't always be down here with your own people either,"--he leaned back on the bench and watched her, his eyes half shut, his whole sense of being illumined by her, his tongue playing audaciously with his discretion.

"Yes, I shall always be Sally, too." That bisque-warm skin of hers flushed wondrously and she seemed to talk out of a little confused audacity of her own. Madeira's voice rang down the walk again. "Yes, Father!--and down here with my own people, too. Yes, Father!"

"Company's here, Sally."

"All right, Father, coming."

"And I have to go?" asked Steering piteously.

"Oh no, come up to the house and meet our sixteen-to-one congressman, Quicksilver Sam."

"No--I'll go," chose Steering. "Say, can't I get through from the garden here, and go down the river road?"

"Yes, you can. Samson shall bring your horse around, if you like. There's a bridle-path down to the river; it's Piney's way."

"Well, if you will be so good as to have the horse brought, I'll take Piney's path. I'm going to the hills to try to find Piney and Uncle Bernique. Think I'll sleep in the hills with them to-night. I feel so sad. When may I come back?"

"Well, you see," the trouble crept into her voice again, misty, tremulous--"you see, I may go away."

"Oh!" he cried, and then again, "Oh!" a bitter wailing note.

"Yes, I may," she said hastily. "You see, your friend, Miss Gossamer, wants me to join her in Europe. She is very insistent about it."

"And you may go?"

"And I may go."

He knew that she said that she would see him again before going, if it came to pass that she decided to go, and that she pressed his hand, with the grateful look that she had bestowed upon him when she had tried to thank him for holding on to her father in the Joplin mine; and that afterwards she stole away through the garden, and a negro man-servant brought his horse around to the rear grounds and showed him a bridle-path to the river; but these things were hazy. The vivid thing was an imprecation that by and by took awful form, like a monster of the mist, hissingly, from between his clenched teeth:

"Damn Miss--Europe!"

Chapter Eight

WHEN A GIRL FINDS HERSELF

Sally Madeira went to her own room early that Sunday night. It was a large room, sheer and white, with its wall space broken here and there by cool, calm etchings, cows knee-deep in clover, sunsets on small rivers, old windmills, wheat fields in harvest, hills where the snow lay thick. When she had lit her lamp a rosy light suffused the room through the tinted globe. The pictures on the walls looked so tonefully tender, intimate, in the soft glow, that the girl, noticing them for the thousandth time, moved from one to another, admiring and loving them. They were, in a way, sign-posts of her development. She had begun to buy them when she had stopped working in colour with a man who had a famous studio in New York. One day she had gone with the man to an exhibition of oil paintings which were infused with a matchless poetry of colour.

"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 assertive, 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."