Lonesome Land (7 page)

“Oh, sure! I didn’t say such a thing was liable to happen. I just thought you might be—worrying—they’re making so much racket in there,” stammered Arline.

“Indeed, no. I’m not at all worried, thank you. And please don’t let me keep you up any longer, Mrs. Hawley. I am quite comfortable—mentally and physically, I assure you.
Good night.”

Not even Mrs. Hawley could remain after that. She went out and closed the door carefully behind her, without even finding voice enough to return Valeria’s sweetly modulated good night.

“She’s got a whole lot to learn,” she relieved her feelings somewhat by muttering as she mounted the stairs.

What it cost Manley Fleetwood to abstain absolutely and without even the compromise of “soft” drinks that night, who can say? Three years of free living in Montana had lowered his
standard of morality without giving him that rugged strength of mind which makes a man master of himself first of all. He had that day lain, drunken and sleeping, when he should have been at his
mental and physical best to meet the girl who would marry him. It was that very defection, perhaps, which kept him sober in the midst of his taunting fellows. Now that Valeria was actually here,
and was his wife, he was possessed by the desire to make some sacrifice by which he might prove his penitence. At any cost he would spare her pain and humiliation, he told himself.

He did it, and he did it under difficulty. He was denied the moral support of Kent Burnett, for Kent was sulking over his slight, and would have nothing to say to him. He was jeered unmercifully
by Fred De Garmo and his crowd. He was “baptized” by some drunken reveler, so that the stench of spilled whisky filled his nostrils and tortured him the night through. He was urged, he
was bullied, he was ridiculed. His head throbbed, his eyeballs burned. But through it all he stayed among them because he feared that if he left them and went to Val, some drunken fool might follow
him and shock her with his inebriety. He stayed, and he stayed sober. Val was his wife. She trusted him, and she was ignorant of his sins. If he went to her staggering and babbling incoherent
foolishness, he knew it would break her heart.

When the sky was at last showing faint dawn tints and the clamor had worn itself out perforce—because even the leaders were, after all, but men, and there was a limit to their
endurance—Manley entered the parlor, haggard enough, it is true, and bearing with him the stale odor of cigars long since smoked, and of the baptism of bad whisky, but also with the air of
conscious rectitude which sits so comically upon a man unused to the feeling of virtue.

He was jeered unmercifully by Fred De Garmo and his crew

Manley felt the rebuff of her chilling silence when he came in, and when she twitched herself loose from his embrace he came near regretting his extreme virtue. He spent ten minutes trying to
explain, without telling all of the truth, and he felt his good opinion of himself slipping from him before her inexorable disfavor.

“Well, I don’t blame you for not liking the town, Val,” he said at last, rather desperately. “But you mustn’t judge the whole country by it. You’ll like the
ranch, dear. You’ll feel as if you were in another world—”

“I hope so,” Val interrupted quellingly.

“We’ll drive out there just as soon as we have breakfast.” He laid his hand diffidently upon her tumbled hair. “I
had
to stay out there with those fellows. I
didn’t want to—”

“I don’t want any breakfast,” said Val, getting up and going over to the window—it would seem to avoid his caress. “The odor of that dining room is enough to make
one fast forever.” She lifted the grimy lace curtain with her finger tips and looked disconsolately out upon the street. “It’s just a dirty, squalid little hamlet. I don’t
suppose the streets have been cleaned or the garbage removed from the backyards since the place was first—founded.” She laughed shortly at the idea of “founding” a wretched
village like that, but she had no other word at hand.

“
Arline,
” she remarked, in a tone of drawling recklessness. “Arline swears. Did you know it? I suppose, of course, you do. She said something that struck me as being
shockingly true. She said I’m ‘sure having a hell of a honeymoon.’” Then she bit her lips hard, because her eyelids were stinging with the tears she refused to shed in his
presence.

“Oh, Val!” From the sofa Manley stared contritely at her back. She must feel terrible, he thought, to bring herself to repeat that sentence—Val, so icily pure in her thoughts
and her speech.

Val was blinking her tawny eyes—like the eyes of a lion in color—at the street. Not for the world would she let him see that she wanted to cry! A figure, blurred to indistinctness,
appeared in a doorway nearly opposite, stood for a moment looking up at the reddened sky, and came across the street. As the tears were beaten back she saw and recognized him, with a curl of the
lip.

“Here comes your cowboy friend—from a saloon, of course.” Her voice was lazily contemptuous. “Only his presence in the street was needed to complete the picture of
desolation. He has been in a fight, judging from his face. It is all bruised and skinned, and one eye is swollen—ugh! My guide, my adviser—is it possible, Manley, that you
couldn’t find a
nice
man to meet me at the train?” She turned from the disagreeable sight of Kent and faced her husband. “Are all the men like that? And are all the women
like—Arline?”

Manley looked at her dumbly from the sofa. Would Val ever come to understand the place, and the people, he was wondering.

She laughed suddenly. “I’m beginning to feel very sorry for Walt,” she said irrelevantly, pointing to the easel and the expressionless crayon portrait staring out from the gilt
frame. “He has to stay in this room always. And I believe another two hours would drive me hopelessly insane.” The word caught her attention. “Hope!” she laughed ironically.
“What imbecile ever thought of hope in the same breath with this place? What they really ought to do is paint that ‘Abandon-hope’ admonition across the whole front of the
depot!”

Manley, because he had lifted his head too suddenly and so sent white-hot irons of pain clashing through his brain, turned sullen. “If you hate it as bad as all that,” he said,
“why, there’ll be a train for the East in about two hours.”

Val stiffened perceptibly, though the petulance in her face changed to something wistful. “Do you mean—do you want me to go?” she asked very calmly.

Manley pressed his fingers hard against his temples. “You know I don’t. I want you to stay and like the country, and be happy. But—the way you have been talking makes it
seem—a-ah!” He dropped his tortured head upon his hands and did not trouble to finish what he had intended to say. Nervous strain, lack of sleep, and a headache to begin with, were
taking heavy toll of him. He could not argue with her; he could not do anything except wish he were dead, or that his head would stop aching.

Val took one of her unexpected changes of mood. She went up and laid her cold fingers lightly upon his temples, where she could see the blood beating savagely in the swollen veins. “What a
little beast I am!” she murmured contritely. “Shall I get you some coffee, dear? Or some headache tablets, or—You know a cold cloth helped you last evening. Lie down for a little
while. There’s no hurry about starting, is there? I—I don’t hate the place so awfully, Manley. I’m just cross because I couldn’t sleep for the noise. Here’s a
cushion, dear. I think it’s stuffed with scrap iron, for there doesn’t seem to be anything soft about it except the invitation to ‘slumber sweetly,’ in red and green silk;
but anything is better than the head of that sofa in its natural state.”

She arranged the cushion to her own liking, if not to his, and when it was done she bent down impulsively and kissed him on the cheek, blushing vividly the while.

“I won’t be nasty and cross any more,” she promised. “Now, I’m going to interview Arline. I hear dishes rattling somewhere; perhaps I can get a cup of real coffee
for you.” At the door she shook her finger at him playfully. “Don’t you dare stir off that sofa while I’m gone,” she admonished. “And, remember, we’re not
going to leave town until your head stops aching—not if we stay here a week!”

She insisted upon bringing him coffee and toast upon a tray—a battered old tray, purloined for that purpose from the saloon, if she had only known it—and she informed him, with a
pretty, domestic pride, that she had made the toast herself.

“Arline was going to lay slices of bread on top of the stove,” she explained. “She said she always makes toast that way, and no one could tell the difference! I never heard of
such a thing—did you, Manley? But I’ve been attending a cooking school ever since you left Fern Hill. I didn’t tell you—I wanted it for a surprise. I could have done better
with the toast before a wood fire—I think poor Arline was nearly distracted at the way I poked coals down from the grate; but she didn’t say anything. Isn’t it funny, to have
cream in cans! I don’t suppose it ever saw a cow—do you? The coffee’s pretty bad, isn’t it? But wait until we get home! I can make lovely coffee—if you’ll get me
a percolator. You will, won’t you? And I learned how to make the most delicious fruit salad, just before I left. A cousin of Mrs. Forman’s taught me how. Could you drink another cup,
dear?”

Manley could not, and she deplored the poor quality, although she generously absolved Arline from blame, because there seemed so much to do in that kitchen. She refused to take any breakfast
herself, telling him gayly that the odor in the kitchen was both food and drink.

Because he understood a little of her loathing for the place, Manley lied heroically about his headache, so that within an hour they were leaving town, with the two great trunks roped securely
to the buckboard behind the seat, and with Val’s suitcase placed flat in the front, where she could rest her feet upon it. Val was so happy at the prospect of getting away from the town that
she actually threw a kiss in the direction of Arline, standing with her frowsy head, her dough-spotted apron, and her tired face in the parlor door.

Her mood changed immediately, however, for she had no more than turned from waving her hand at Arline, when they met Kent, riding slowly up the street with his hat tilted over the eye most
swollen. Without a doubt he had seen her waving and smiling, and so he must have observed the instant cooling of her manner. He nodded to Manley and lifted his hat while he looked at her full; and
Val, in the arrogant pride of virtuous young womanhood, let her golden-brown eyes dwell impersonally upon his face; let her white, round chin dip half an inch downward, and then looked past him as
if he were a post by the roadside. Afterwards she smiled maliciously when she saw, with a swift, sidelong glance, how he scowled and spurred unnecessarily his gray gelding.

CHAPTER FIVE