第15章

She was barely twenty-three years old.It is probable that up to that age, and the beginning of this episode, her life had been uneventful.Born to the easy mediocrity of such compensating extremes as a small farmhouse and large lands, a good position and no society, in that vast grazing district of Kentucky known as the "Blue Grass" region, all the possibilities of a Western American girl's existence lay before her.A piano in the bare-walled house, the latest patented mower in the limitless meadows, and a silk dress sweeping the rough floor of the unpainted "meeting-house"were already the promise of those possibilities.Beautiful she was, but the power of that beauty was limited by being equally shared with her few neighbors.There were small, narrow, arched feet besides her own that trod the uncarpeted floors of outlying log-cabins with equal grace and dignity; bright, clearly opened eyes that were equally capable of looking unabashed upon princes and potentates, as a few later did, and the heiress of the county judge read her own beauty without envy in the frank glances and unlowered crest of the blacksmith's daughter.Eventually she had married the male of her species, a young stranger, who, as schoolmaster in the nearest town, had utilized to some local extent a scant capital of education.In obedience to the unwritten law of the West, after the marriage was celebrated the doors of the ancestral home cheerfully opened, and bride and bridegroom issued forth, without regret and without sentiment, to seek the further possibilities of a life beyond these already too familiar voices.

With their departure for California as Mr.and Mrs.Spencer Tucker, the parental nest in the Blue Grass meadows knew them no more.

They submitted with equal cheerfulness to the privations and excesses of their new conditions.Within three years the schoolmaster developed into a lawyer and capitalist, the Blue Grass bride supplying a grace and ease to these transitions that were all her own.She softened the abruptness of sudden wealth, mitigated the austerities of newly acquired power, and made the most glaring incongruity picturesque.Only one thing seemed to limit their progress in the region of these possibilities.They were childless.It was as if they had exhausted the future in their own youth, leaving little or nothing for another generation to do.

A southwesterly storm was beating against the dressing-room windows of their new house in one of the hilly suburbs of San Francisco, and threatening the unseasonable frivolity of the stucco ornamentation of cornice and balcony.Mrs.Tucker had been called from the contemplation of the dreary prospect without by the arrival of a visitor.On entering the drawing-room she found him engaged in a half-admiring, half-resentful examination of its new furniture and hangings.Mrs.Tucker at once recognized Mr.Calhoun Weaver, a former Blue Grass neighbor; with swift feminine intuition she also felt that his slight antagonism was likely to be transferred from her furniture to herself.Waiving it with the lazy amiability of Southern indifference, she welcomed him by the familiarity of a Christian name.

"I reckoned that mebbee you opined old Blue Grass friends wouldn't naturally hitch on to them fancy doins," he said, glancing around the apartment to avoid her clear eyes, as if resolutely setting himself against the old charm of her manner as he had against the more recent glory of her surroundings, "but I thought I'd just drop in for the sake of old times.""Why shouldn't you, Cal?" said Mrs.Tucker with a frank smile.

"Especially as I'm going up to Sacramento to-night with some influential friends," he continued, with an ostentation calculated to resist the assumption of her charms and her furniture."Senator Dyce of Kentucky, and his cousin Judge Briggs; perhaps you know 'em, or may be Spencer--I mean Mr.Tucker--does.""I reckon," said Mrs.Tucker smiling; "but tell me something about the boys and girls at Vineville, and about yourself.YOU'RElooking well, and right smart too." She paused to give due emphasis to this latter recognition of a huge gold chain with which her visitor was somewhat ostentatiously trifling.

"I didn't know as you cared to hear anything about Blue Grass," he returned, a little abashed."I've been away from there some time myself," he added, his uneasy vanity taking fresh alarm at the faint suspicion of patronage on the part of his hostess."They're doin' well, though; perhaps as well as some others.""And you're not married yet," continued Mrs.Tucker, oblivious of the innuendo."Ah, Cal," she added archly, "I am afraid you are as fickle as ever.What poor girl in Vineville have you left pining?"The simple face of the man before her flushed with foolish gratification at this old-fashioned, ambiguous flattery."Now look yer, Belle," he said, chuckling, "if you're talking of old times and you think I bear malice agin Spencer, why--"But Mrs.Tucker interrupted what might have been an inopportune sentimental retrospect with a finger of arch but languid warning.

"That will do! I'm dying to know all about it, and you must stay to dinner and tell me.It's right mean you can't see Spencer too;but he isn't back from Sacramento yet."