Part 10 (1/2)
From the corner of her mouth protruded a snuff-brush, so constantly in this accustomed place that it had come to be regarded by members of her family as part and parcel of her attire-the first thing a.s.sumed in the morning, the last thing laid aside at night. Mary Carmichael had little difficulty in recognizing Judith Rodney's step-mother, _nee_ Tumlin-she who had been the heroine of the romance lately recorded.
Mrs. Rodney's interest in the girl alighting from the stage was evinced in the palsied motion of the chair as it quivered slightly back and forth in place of the swinging seesaw with which she was wont to wear the hours away. The snuff-brush was brought into more fiercely active commission, but she said nothing till Mary Carmichael was within a few inches of her.
Then, s.h.i.+fting the snuff-brush to a position more favorable to enunciation, she said: ”Howdy? Ye be Miz Yellett's gov'ment, ain't ye?”
There was something threatening in her aspect, as if the office of governess to the Yelletts carried some challenging quality.
”Government?” repeated Mary, vaguely, her head still rumbling with the noise and motion of the stage; ”I'm afraid I hardly understand.”
”Ain't you-uns goin' to teach the Yellett outfit ther spellin', writin', and about George Was.h.i.+ngton, an' how the Yankees kem along arter he was in his grave an' fit us and broke up the kentry so we had ter leave our home in Tennessee an' kem to this yere outdacious place, where n.o.body knows the diffunce between aig-bread an' corn-dodger? I war a Miss Tumlin from Tennessee.”
The rocking-chair now began to recover its accustomed momentum. This much-heralded educational expert was far from terrifying. Indeed, to Mrs.
Rodney's hawklike gaze, that devoured every visible item of Mary's extremely modest travelling-dress, there was nothing so very wonderful about ”the gov'ment from the East.” With a deftness compatible only with long practice, Mrs. Rodney now put a foot on the round of an adjoining chair and shoved it towards Mary Carmichael in hospitable pantomime, never once relaxing her continual rocking the meantime. Mary took the chair, and Mrs. Rodney, after freshening up the snuff-brush from a small, tin box in her lap, put spurs to her rocking-chair, so to speak, and started off at a brisk canter.
”I 'low it's mighty queer you-uns don't recognize the job you-uns kem out yere to take, when I call it by name.” From the sheltering flap of the pink sun-bonnet she turned a pair of black eyes full of ill-concealed suspicion. ”Miz Yellett givin' herself as many airs 'bout hirin' a gov'ment 's if she wuz goin' to Congress. Queer you don't know whether you be one or not!” She withdrew into the sun-bonnet, muttering to herself.
She could not be more than fifty, Mary thought, but her habit of muttering and exhibiting her depopulated gums while she was in the act of revivifying the snuff-brush gave her a cronish aspect.
A babel of voices came from the open-faced room on the opposite side of the house corresponding to the one in which Mary and Mrs. Rodney were sitting. Apparently supper was being prepared by some half-dozen young people, each of whom thought he or she was being imposed upon by the others. ”Hand me that knife.” ”Git it yourself.” ”I'll tell maw how you air wolfing down the potatoes as fast as I can fry 'em.” ”Go on, tattle-tale.” This was the repartee, mingled with the hiss of frying meat, the grinding of coffee, the thumping sound made by bread being hastily mixed in a wooden bowl standing on a wooden table. The babel grew in volume. Dogs added to it by yelping emotionally when the smell of the newly fried meat tempted them too near the platter and some one with a disengaged foot at his disposal would kick them out of doors.
Personalities were exchanged more freely by members of the family, and the meat hissed harder as it was newly turned. ”Laws-a-ma.s.sy!” muttered Mrs.
Rodney; and then, shoving back the sun-bonnet, she lifted her voice in a shrill, feminine shriek:
”Eudory! Eu-dory! You-do-ry!”
A Hebe-like creature, blond and pink-cheeked, in a blue-checked ap.r.o.n besmeared with grease and flour, came sulkily into her mother's presence.
Seeing Mary Carmichael, she grasped the skirt of the greasy ap.r.o.n with the sleight of hand of a prestidigitateur and pleated it into a single handful. Her manner, too, was no slower of transformation. The family sulks were instantly replaced by a company bridle, aided and abetted by a company simper. ”I didn't know the stage was in yet, maw. I been talking to Iry.”
”This here be Miz Yellett's gov'ment. Maybe she'd like to pearten up some before she eats.” She started the rocking-chair at a gallop, to signify to her daughter that she washed her hands of further responsibility. Being proficient in the sign language of Mrs. Rodney's second self, as indeed was every member of the family, Eudora led Mary to a bench placed in one of the rooms enjoying the distinction of a side wall, and indicated a family toilet service, which displayed every indication of having lately seen active service. A roll-towel, more frankly significant of the mult.i.tude of the Rodneys than had been the babel of voices, a discouraged fragment of comb, a tin basin, a slippery atom of soap, these Eudora proffered with an unction worthy of better things. ”I declare Mist' Chugg have scarce left any soap, an' I don't believe thar's 'nother bit in the house.” Eudora's accent was but faintly reminiscent of her mother's strong Smoky Mountain dialect, as a crude feature is sometimes softened in the second generation. It was not unpleasing on her full, rosy mouth. The girl had the seductiveness of her half-sister, Judith, without a hint of Judith's spiritual quality.
Mary told her not to mind about the soap, and went to fetch her hand-bag, which, consistent with the democratic spirit of its surroundings, was resting against a clump of sage-brush, whither it had been lifted by Chugg. Miss Carmichael's individual toilet service, which was neither handsome nor elaborate, impressed Eudora far more potently in ranking Mary as a personage than did her dignity of office as ”gov'ment.”
”I reckon you-uns must have seen Sist' Judy up to Miz Dax's. I hope she war lookin' right well.” There was in the inquiry an unmistakable note of pride. The connection was plainly one to be flaunted. Judith, with her gentle bearing and her simple, convent accomplishments, was plainly the _grande dame_ of the family. Eudora had now divested herself of the greasy, flour-smeared ap.r.o.n, flinging it under the wash-bench with a single all-sufficient movement, while Mary's look was directed towards her dressing-bag. In glancing up to make some remark about Judith, Mary was confronted by a radiant apparition whose lilac calico skirts looked fresh from the iron.
At the side of the house languished a wretched, abortive garden, running over with weeds and sage-brush, and here a man pottered with the purposeless energy of old age, working with an ear c.o.c.ked in the direction of the house, as he turned a spade of earth again and again in hopeless, pusillanimous industry. But when his strained attention was presently rewarded by a shouted summons to supper, and he stood erect but for the slouching droop of shoulders that was more a matter of temperament than of age, one saw a tall man of ma.s.sive build, whose keen glance and slightly grizzled hair belied his groping, ineffectual labor. The head, and face were finely modelled. Unless nature had fas.h.i.+oned them in some vagrant, prankish mood, such elegance of line betokened prior generations in which gentlemen and scholars had played some part-the vagabond scion of a good family, perhaps. A mult.i.tude of such had grafted on the pioneer stock of the West, under names that carried no significance in the places whence they came.
Weakness and self-indulgence there were, and those writ large and deep, on the face of Warren Rodney; and, in default of an expression of deeper significance, the wavering lines of instability produced a curiously ambiguous effect of a fine head modelled by a 'prentice hand; a lady's copy of the Belvidere, attempted in the ardors of the first lessons, might approximate it.
A smoking kerosene lamp revealed a supper-table of almost inst.i.tutional proportions. There were four sons and two daughters of the Tumlin union, strapping lads and la.s.ses all of them, with more than a common dower of l.u.s.ty health and a beauty that was something deeper than the perishable iridescence of youth. There was Fremont, named for the explorer-soldier; there was Orlando, named from his mother's vague, idle musings over paper-backed literature at certain ”unchancy” seasons; there was Richards, named from pure policy, for a local great man of whom Warren Rodney had antic.i.p.ated a helping hand at the time; there was Eudora, whose nominal origin was uncertain, unless it bore affiliation to that of Orlando; there was Sadie, thus termed to avoid the painful distinctions of ”old Sally”
and ”young Sally”; and, lastly, like a postscript, came Dan-with him, fancy, in the matter of names, seemed to have failed. Dan was now six, a plump little caricature of a man in blue overalls, which, as they had descended to him from Richards in the nature of an heirloom, reached high under his armpits and shortened the function of his suspenders to the vanis.h.i.+ng point.
Eudora was now sixteen, and the woman-famine in all the land had gifted her with a surprising precocity. Eudora knew her value and meant to make the most of it. Unlike her mother in the old Black Hill days, she expected more than a ”home of her own.” To-night four suitors sat at table with Eudora, and she might have had forty had she desired it. Any one of the four would have cheerfully murdered the remaining three had opportunity presented itself. Supper was a mockery to them, a Barmecide feast. Each watched his rivals-and Eudora. This was a matter of life and death. There was no time for food. The girl revelled in the situation to the full of her untaught, unthinking, primitive nature. She gave the incident a tighter twist by languis.h.i.+ng at them in turns. She smiled, she sighed, she drove them mad by taking crescent bites out of a slice of bread and exhibiting the havoc of her little, white teeth with a delectably dainty gluttony.
Her mother, mumbling her supper with toothless impotency, renewed her youth vicariously, and, while she quarrelled with her daughter from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same, she added the last straw to the burden of the distracted suitors by announcing what a comfort Eudora was to her and how handy she was about the house.
Warren Rodney supported the air of an exile at his own table. Beyond a preliminary greeting to his daughter's guests, he said nothing. His family, in their dealings with him, seemed to accord him the exemptions of extreme age. He ate with the enthusiasm of a man to whom meals have become the main business in life.
”How's your mine up to Bad Water comin' along, Iry?” Orlando inquired, not from any hospitable interest in Ira's claim, but because he had sundry romantic interests in that neighborhood and hoped to make use of the young prospector's interest in his sister by securing an invitation to return with him. Ira regarded the inquiry in the light of a special providence.
Here was his chance to impress Eudora with the splendor of his prospects and at the same time smite the claims of his rivals, and behold! a brother of his lady had led the way.
Ira cleared his throat. ”They tell me she air like to yield a million any day.” At this Eudora gave him the wealth of her eyes, and her mother reached across two of the glowering suitors and dropped a hot flapjack on his plate.
”Who sez that she air likely to yield a million any day?” inquired Ben Swift, openly flouting such prophecy. ”Yes, who sez it?” inquired Hawks and Taylor, joining forces for the overthrow of the common enemy.