The Prairie Mother Part 21

I finally became conscious of the fact that Peter, instead of staring at the sunset, was staring at me. And I remembered that my hair was half down, trailing across my nose, and that three distinctly new freckles had shown themselves that week on the bridge of that same nose.

"O G.o.d, but you're lovely!" he said in a half-smothered and shamefaced sort of whisper.

"_Verboten!_" I reminded him. "And not so much the cussing, Peter, as the useless compliments."

He said nothing to that, but once more sat staring out over the twilight prairie for quite a long time. When he spoke again it was in a quieter and much more serious tone.

"I suppose I may as well tell you," he said without looking at me, "that I've come into a pretty clear understanding of the situation here at Alabama Ranch."

"It's kind of a mix-up, isn't it?" I suggested, with an attempt at lightness.

Peter nodded his head.

"I've been wondering how long you're going to wait," he observed, apparently as much to himself as to me.

"Wait for what?" I inquired.

"For what you call your mix-up to untangle," was his answer.

"There's nothing for me to do but to wait," I reminded him.

He shook his head in dissent.

"You can't waste your life, you know, doing that," he quietly protested.

"What else can I do?" I asked, disturbed a little by the absence of color from his face, apparent even in that uncertain light.

"Nothing's suggested itself, I suppose?" he ventured, after a silence.

"Nothing that prompts me into any immediate action," I told him. "You see, Peter, I'm rather anch.o.r.ed by three little hostages down in that little shack there!"

That left him silent for another long and brooding minute or two.

"I suppose you've wondered," he finally said, "why I've stuck around here as long as I have?"

I nodded, not caring to trust myself to words, and then, realizing I was doing the wrong thing, I shook my head.

"It's because, from the morning you found me in that mud-hole, I've just wanted to be near you, to hear your voice when you spoke, to see the curve of your lips and the light come and go in your eyes when you laugh," were the words that came ever so slowly from Peter. "I've wanted that so much that I've let about everything else in life go hang. Yet in a way, and in my own world, I'm a man of some little importance. I've been cursed with enough money, of course, to move about as I wish, and loaf as I like. But that sort of life isn't really living. I'm not in the habit, though, of wanting the things I can't have. So what strikes me as the tragic part of it all is that I couldn't have met and known you when you were as free as I am now. In a way, you _are_ free, or you ought to be. You're a woman, I think, with arrears of life to make up. You've struck me, from the very first, as too alive, too sensitive, too responsive to things, to get the fullest measure out of life by remaining here on the prairie, in what are, after all, really pioneer conditions. You've known the other kind of life, as well as I have, and it will always be calling to you.

And if that call means anything to you, and the--the change we've spoken of is on its way, or for some unexpected reason has to come, I'm--well, I'm going to take the bit in my teeth right here and tell you that I love you more than you imagine and a good deal more, I suppose, than the law allows!"

He pushed my hand aside when I held it up to stop him.

"I may as well say it, for this is as good a time and place as we'll ever have, and I can't go around with my teeth shut on the truth any longer. I know you've got your three little tots down there, and I love 'em about as much as you do. And it would seem like giving a little meaning and purpose to life to know that I had the chance of doing what I could to make you and to make them happy. I've--"

But I couldn't let him go on.

"It's no use, Peter," I cried with a little choke in my voice which I couldn't control. "It's no earthly use. I've known you liked me, and it's given me a warm little feeling down in one corner of my heart.

But I could never allow it to be more than a corner. I like you, Peter, and I like you a lot. You're wonderful. In some ways you're the most adorable man I've ever known in all my life. That's a dangerous thing to say, but it's the truth and I may as well say it. It even hurts a little to remember that I've traded on your chivalry, though that's the one thing in life you _can_ trade on without reproof or demand for repayment. But as I told you before, I'm one of those neck-or-nothing women, one of those single-track women, who can't have their tides of traffic going two ways at once. And if I'm in a mix-up, or a maelstrom, or whatever you want to call it, I'm in it. That's where I belong. It would never, never do to drag an innocent outsider into that mixed-up mess of life, simply because I imagined it could make me a little more comfortable to have him there."

Peter sat thinking over what I'd said. There were no heroics, no chest-pounding, no suggestion of romantically blighted lives and broken hearts.

"That means, of course, that I'll have to climb out," Peter finally and very prosaically remarked.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it's so apt to leave one of us sailing under false colors,"

was his somewhat oblique way of explaining the situation. "I might have hung on until something happened, I suppose, if I hadn't shown my hand. And I hadn't quite the right to show my hand, when you take everything into consideration. But you can't always do what you intend to. And life's a little bigger than deportment, anyway, so what's the use of fussing over it? There's just one thing, though, I want to say, before we pull down the shutters again. I want you to feel that if anything does happen, if by any mischance things should take a turn for the worse, or you're worried in any way about the outcome of all this"--he indulged in a quiet but comprehensive hand-wave which embraced the entire ranch that lay in the gray light at our feet--"I want you to feel that I'd be mighty happy to think you'd turn to me for--for help."

It was getting just a little too serious again, I felt, and I decided in a bit of a panic to pilot things back to shallower water.

"But you _have_ helped, Peter," I protested. "Look at all that hay you cut, and the windmill here, and the orange marmalade that'll make me think of you every morning!"

He leaned a little closer and regarded me with a quiet and wistful eye. But I refused to look at him.

"That's nothing to what I'd like to do, if you gave me the chance," he observed, settling back against the tower-standard again.

"I know, Peter," I told him, "And it's nice of you to say it. But the nicest thing of all is your prodigious unselfishness, the unselfishness that's leaving this talk of ours kind of--well, kind of hallowed, and something we'll not be unhappy in remembering, when it could have so easily turned into something selfishly mean and ugly and sordid. That's where you're _big_. And that's what I'll always love you for!"

"Let's go down," said Peter, all of a sudden. "It's getting cold."

I sat staring down at the world to which we had to return. It seemed a long way off. And the ladder that led down to it seemed a cobwebby and uncertain path for a lady whose heart was still slipping a beat now and then. Peter apparently read the perplexity on my face.

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll go down one rung ahead of you. Even if you did slip, then, I'll be there to hold you up. Come on."

We started down, with honest old Peter's long arms clinging to the ladder on either side of me and my feet following his, step by step, as we went like a newfangled sort of quadruped down the narrow steel rungs.

We were within thirty feet of the ground when I made ever so slight a misstep and brought Peter up short. The next moment he'd caught me up bodily in his right arm, and to steady myself I let my arms slip about his neck. I held on there, tight, even after I knew what I was doing, and let my cheek rest against the bristly side of his head as we went slowly down to the bottom of the tower.

It wasn't necessary, my holding my arms about Peter's neck. It wasn't any more necessary than it was for him to pick me up and carry me the rest of the way down. It wasn't true-to-the-line fair play, even, when you come to think of it in cold blood, and it wasn't by any manner of means just what sedately married ladies should do.

But, if the terrible truth must be told, _it was nice_. I think both our hearts were a little hungry for the love which didn't happen to be coming our way, which the law of man and his Maker alike prohibited.

So we saved our dignity and our self-respect, oddly enough, by resorting to the shallowest of subterfuges. And I don't care much if it wasn't true-to-the-line ethics. I liked the feel of Peter's arm around me, holding me that way, and I hope he liked that long and semi-respectable hug I gave him, and that now and then, later on, in the emptier days of his life, he'll remember it pleasantly, and without a bit of bitterness in his heart.

For Alabama Ranch, of course, is going to lose Peter as soon as he can get away.

_Tuesday the Twenty-fourth_

Peter is no longer with us. He went yesterday, much to the open grief of an adoring and heart-broken Struthers. I stood in the doorway as he drove off, pretending to mop my eyes with my hankie and then making a show of wringing the brine out of it. He laughed at this bit of play-acting, but it was rather a melancholy laugh. Struthers, however, was quite snappy for the rest of the morning, having apparently construed my innocent pantomime as a burlesque of her tendency to sniffle a little.

I never quite knew how much we'd miss Peter until he was gone, and gone for good. Even d.i.n.kie was strangely moody and downcast, and showed his depression by a waywardness of spirit which reached its crowning misdemeanor by poking a bean into his ear.

This seemed a trivial enough incident, at first. But the heat and moisture of that little pocket of flesh caused the bean to swell, and soon had d.i.n.kie crying with pain. So I renewed my efforts to get that bean out of the child's ear, for by this time he was really suffering.

But I didn't succeed. There was no way of getting behind it, or getting a hold on it. And poor d.i.n.kie bawled bitterly, ignorant of why this pain should be inflicted on him and outraged that his own mother should add to it by probing about the already swollen side of his head.