Cavanagh, Forest Ranger. Garland Hamlin

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      Upon this a mutter of astonishment arose, and the waiter-girls, giggling, marvelling, and envious, paused, their platters in hand, to exchange comment on the new-comer’s hat and gown. A cowboy at the washing-sink in the corner suspended his face-polishing and gaped over his shoulder in silent ecstasy.

      For a full minute, so it seemed, this singular, interesting, absorbed immobility lasted; then a seedy little man rose, and approached the girl. His manner was grotesquely graceful as he said: “We are all glad to greet you home again, Miss Virginia.”

      She gave her hand hesitatingly. “It’s Mr. Sifton, isn’t it?”

      “It is,” he replied; “the same old ha’penny, only a little more worn—worn, not polished,” he added, with a smile.

      She remembered him then—an Englishman, a remittance man, a “lord,” they used to say. His eyes were kind, and his mouth, despite its unshaved stubble of beard, was refined. A harmless little man—his own worst enemy, as the saying goes.

      Thereupon others of the men came forward to greet her, and though she had some difficulty in recognizing one or two of them (so hardly had the years of her absence used them), she eventually succeeded in placing them all.

      At length her mother led her through the archway which connected the two shanties, thence along a narrow hall into a small bedroom, into which the western sunset fell. It was a shabby place, but as a refuge from the crowd in the restaurant it was grateful.

      Lize looked at her daughter critically. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with a girl like you.—Why, you’re purty—purty as a picture. You were skinny as a child—I’m fair dazed. Great snakes, how you have opened out!—You’re the living image of your dad.—What started you back? I told you to stay where you was.”

      The girl stared at her helplessly, trying to understand herself and her surroundings. There was, in truth, something singularly alien in her mother’s attitude. She seemed on the defensive, not wishing to be too closely studied. “Her manner is not even affectionate—only friendly. It is as if I were only an embarrassing visitor,” the girl thought. Aloud she said: “I had no place to go after Aunt Celia died. I had to come home.”

      “You wrote they was willing to keep you.”

      “They were, but I couldn’t ask it of them. I had no right to burden them, and, besides, Mrs. Hall wrote me that you were sick.”

      “I am; but I didn’t want you to come back. Lay off your things and come out to supper. We’ll talk afterward.”

      The eating-house, the rooms and hallways, were all of that desolate shabbiness which comes from shiftlessness joined with poverty. The carpets were frayed and stained with tobacco-juice, and the dusty windows were littered with dead flies. The curtains were ragged, the paper peeling from the walls, and the plastering cracked into unsightly lines. Everything on which the girl’s eyes fell contrasted strongly with her aunt’s home on the Brandywine—not because that house was large or luxurious, but because it was exquisitely in order, and sweet with flowers and dainty arrangement of color.

      She understood now the final warnings uttered by her friends. “You will find everything changed,” they had said, “because you are changed.”

      She regretted bitterly that she had ever left her Eastern friends. Her mother, in truth, showed little pleasure at her coming, and almost nothing of the illness of which a neighbor had written. It was, indeed, this letter which had decided her to return to the West. She had come, led by a sense of duty, not by affection, for she had never loved her mother as a daughter should—they were in some way antipathetic—and now she found herself an unwelcome guest.

      Then, too, the West had called to her: the West of her childhood, the romantic, chivalrous West, the West of the miner, the cattle-man, the wolf, and the eagle. She had returned, led by a poetic sentiment, and here now she sat realizing as if by a flash of inward light that the West she had known as a child had passed, had suddenly grown old and commonplace—in truth, it had never existed at all!

      One of the waitresses, whose elaborately puffed and waved hair set forth her senseless vanity, called from the door: “You can come out now, your ma says! Your supper’s ready!”

      With aching head and shaking knees Virginia reentered the dining-room, which was now nearly empty of its “guests,” but was still misty with the steam of food, and swarming with flies. These pests buzzed like bees around the soiled places on the table-cloths, and one of her mother’s first remarks was a fretful apology regarding her trials with those insects. “Seems like you can’t keep ’em out,” she said.

      Lee Virginia presented the appearance of some “settlement worker,” some fair lady on a visit to the poor, as she took her seat at the table and gingerly opened the small moist napkin which the waiter dropped before her. Her appetite was gone. Her appetite failed at the very sight of the fried eggs and hot and sputtering bacon, and she turned hastily to her coffee. A fly was in that! She uttered a little choking cry, and buried her face in her handkerchief and sobbed.

      Lize turned upon the waitress and lashed her with stinging phrases. “Can’t you serve things better than this? Take that cup away! My God, you make me tired—fumblin’ around here with your eyes on the men! Pay more attention to your work and less to your crimps, and you’ll please me a whole lot better!”

      With desperate effort Lee conquered her disgust. “Never mind, I’m tired and a little upset. I don’t need any dinner.”

      “The slob will go, just the same. I’ve put up with her because help is scarce, but here’s where she gits off!”

      In this moment Virginia perceived that her mother was of the same nature with Mrs. McBride—not one whit more refined—and the gulf between them swiftly widened. Hastily sipping her coffee, she tried hard to keep back the tears, but failed; and no sooner did her mother turn away than she fled to her room, there to sob unrestrainedly her despair and shame. “Oh, I can’t stand it,” she called. “I can’t! I can’t!”

      Outside, the mountains deepened in splendor, growing each moment more mysterious and beautiful under the sunset sky, but the girl derived no comfort from them. Her loneliness and her perplexities had closed her eyes to their majestic drama. She felt herself alien and solitary in the land of her birth.

      Lize came in half an hour later, pathetic in her attempt at “slicking up.” She was still handsome in a large-featured way, but her gray hair was there, and her face laid with a network of fretful lines. Her color was bad. At the moment her cheeks were yellow and sunken.

      She complained of being short of breath and lame and tired. “I’m always tired,” she explained. “ ’Pears like sometimes I can’t scarcely drag myself around, but I do.”

      A pang of comprehending pain shot through Virginia’s heart. If she could not love, she could at least pity and help; and reaching forth her hand, she patted her mother on the knee. “Poor old mammy!” she said. “I’m going to help you.”

      Lize was touched by this action of her proud daughter, and smiled sadly. “This is no place for you. It’s nothin’ but a measly little old cow-town gone to seed—and I’m gone to seed with it. I know it. But what is a feller to do? I’m stuck here, and I’ve got to make a living or quit. I can’t quit. I ain’t got the grit to eat a dose, and so I stagger along.”

      “I’ve come СКАЧАТЬ