Part 10 (1/2)
He headed his horse homeward, fully resolved to give notice of removal, but he did not. On the contrary, he lost himself to Fan. The girl, glowing with love and anger and at the very climax of her animal beauty, developed that night a subtlety of approach, a method of attack, which baffled and in the end overpowered him. She was adroit enough to make no mention of her rivals; she merely set herself to cause his committal, to bend him to her side. As the romping girl she played round him, indifferent to the warning glances of her mother, her eyes s.h.i.+ning, her cheeks glowing, till the man he was, the life he had lived, the wishes of his brother, were fused and lost in the blind pa.s.sion of the present.
”This glorious, glowing creature can be mine. What does all the rest matter?” was his final word of renunciation.
In this mood he took her to his arms, in this madness he told her of his love (committing himself into her hands, declining into her life), and in the end requested of her parents the honor of their daughter's hand.
Mrs. Blondell wept a tear or two and weakly gave her consent, but the old ranchman thundered and lightened. ”What can you do for my girl?” he demanded. ”As I understand it, you haven't a cent--the very clothes you've got on your back are paid for by somebody else! What right have you to come to me with such a proposal?”
To all this Lester, surprised and disconcerted, could but meekly answer that he hoped soon to buy a ranch of his own--that his brother had promised to ”set him up” as soon as he had mastered the business.
Blondell opened his jaws to roar again when Fan interposed and, taking a clutch in his s.h.a.ggy beard, said, calmly: ”Now, dad, you hus.h.!.+ George Adelbert and I have made it all up and you better fall in gracefully. It won't do you any good to paw the dirt and beller.”
Lester grew sick for a moment as he realized the temper of the family into which he was about to marry, but when Fan, turning with a gay laugh, put her round, smooth arm about his neck, the rosy cloud closed over his head again.
II
Blondell was silenced, but not convinced. A penniless son-in-law was not to his liking. Fan was his only child, and the big ranch over which he presided was worth sixty thousand dollars. What right had this lazy Englishman to come in and marry its heiress? The more he thought about it the angrier he grew, and when he came in the following night he broke forth.
”See here, mister, I reckon you better get ready and pull out. I'm not going to have you for a son-in-law, not this season. The man that marries my Fan has got to have sabe enough to round up a flock of goats--and wit enough to get up in the morning. So you better vamoose to-morrow.”
Lester received his sentence in silence. At the moment he was glad of it. He turned on his heel and went to packing with more haste, with greater skill, than he had ever displayed in any enterprise hitherto.
His hurry arose from a species of desperation. ”If I can only get out of the house!” was his inward cry.
”Why pack up?” he suddenly asked himself. ”What do they matter--these boots and s.h.i.+rts and books?” He caught a few pictures from the wall and stuffed them into his pockets, and was about to plunge out into the dusk when Fan entered the room and stood looking at him with ominous intentness.
She was no longer the laughing, romping girl, but the woman with alert eye and tightly closed lips. ”What are you doing, Dell?”
”Your father has ordered me to leave the ranch,” he answered, ”and so I'm going.”
”No, you're not! I don't care what he has ordered! You're not going”--she came up and put her arms about his neck--”not without me.”
And, feeling her claim to pity, he took her in his arms and tenderly pressed her cheek upon his bosom. Then she began to weep. ”I can't live without you, Dell,” she moaned.
He drew her closer, a wave of tenderness rising in his heart. ”I'll be lonely without you, Fan--but your father is right. I am too poor--we have no home--”
”What does that matter?” she asked. ”I wouldn't marry you for any amount of _money_! And I know you don't care for this old ranch! _I'll_ be glad to get shut of it. I'll go with you, and we'll make a home somewhere else.” Then her mood changed. Her face and voice hardened. She pushed herself away from him. ”No, I won't! I'll stay here, and so shall you!
Dad can't boss me, and I won't let him run you out. Come and face him up with me.”
So, leading him, she returned to the kitchen, where Blondell, alone with his wife, was eating supper, his elbows on the table, his hair unkempt, his face glowering, a glooming contrast to his radiant and splendid daughter, who faced him fearlessly. ”Dad, what do you mean by talking this way to George Adelbert? He's going to stay and I'm going to stay, and you're going to be decent about it, for I'm going to marry him.”
”No, you're not!” he blurted out.
”Well, I am!” She drew nearer and with her hands on the table looked down into his wind-worn face and dim eyes. ”I say you've got to be decent. Do you understand?” Her body was as lithe, as beautiful, as that of a tigress as she leaned thus, and an unalterable resolution blazed in her eyes as she went on, a deeper significance coming into her voice: ”Furthermore, I'm as good as married to him right now, and I don't care who knows it.”
The old man's head lifted with a jerk, and he looked at her with mingled fear and fury. ”What do you mean?”
”Anything you want to have it mean,” she replied. ”You drive him out and you drive me out--that's what I mean.”
Blondell saw in her face the look of the woman who is willing to a.s.sume any guilt, any shame for her lover, and, dropping his eyes before her gaze, growled a curse and left the room.
Fan turned to her lover with a ringing, boyish laugh, ”It's all right, Dell; he's surrendered!”