Part 27 (1/2)
”All dance as pretty as you can, Turn your toes and left alleman; First gent sashay to the right, Now swing the girl you last swung about, And now the one that's cut her out, And now the one that's dressed in white, And now the belle of the ball.”
The dancers seemed bitten to the quick with the tarantula of an ecstatic hilarity; their bodies swayed in perfect harmony to the swing of the fiddles and the swell of the chorus. The most uncouth of them came under the spell of that mad magic. Their movements, that in the beginning of the dance had been shy and awkward, became almost beautiful; they forgot arms, hands, feet; their bodies had become like the strings of some skilfully played instrument, obediently responsive to rhythm, and in that composite blending of races each in his dancing brought some of the poetry of his own far land. The scene was amazing in its beauty and simplicity, like the strong, inspirational power and rugged rhythm of some old border minstrel.
One by one the dancers glowed with better understanding; discordant elements, alien nations were fused to harmony in this vivid picture.
Peter turned to Kitty, expecting to see her face aglow with the warmth of it. She stood beside him, the one unresponsive soul in the room, on her lips a pale, tolerant smile.
”Aren't they splendid, Kitty, these women? More than half of them work like beavers all day, and they have young children and dozens of worries, but would you suspect it? They're just the women for this country.”
Now in the present state of affairs almost any other subject would have been better calculated to promote good feeling than the one on which Peter had alighted. Kitty's thoughts had perversely lingered about one who, though not one with these women, had yet their st.u.r.dy self-reliance, their acquiescence in grim conditions, their pleasure in simple things. Kitty's apprehension, slow to kindle, had taken fire like a forest, and by its blaze she saw things in a distorted light; her present vision magnified the relations of Peter and Judith to a degree that a month ago she would have regarded as impossible. ”He is her lover!” was the accusation that suddenly flashed through her mind, and with the thought an overwhelming desire to say something unkind, something that should hurt him, supplanted all judgment and reason.
”Oh, it's a decidedly remarkable scene, pictorially, I agree with you. And an artist, of course-but isn't it a trifle quixotic, Peter, to idealize them because they are having a good time? There's no virtue in it. It is conceivable that they might have to work just as hard and have just as many little children to look after, and yet not have these dances you praise them for coming to.”
”I'm afraid you find us and our amus.e.m.e.nts a little crude. Evidently the spirit of our dances does not appeal to you; but I did not suppose it necessary to remind you that they should not be judged by the standard of conventional evening parties,” said Peter, hurt and angry in his turn.
”Us, our amus.e.m.e.nts, our dances? So you are quite identified with these people, my dear Peter, and I had thought you an ornament of cotillions and country clubs. I can only infer that it is somebody in particular who has brought about your change of heart.”
Peter flushed a little, and Kitty kept on: ”Some of the native belles are quite wonderful, I believe. Nannie Wetmore tells of a half-breed who is very handsome.”
Peter set his lips. ”At the expense of spoiling Nannie's pretty romance, I must tell you that the lady she refers to is not only the most beautiful of women, but she would be at ease in any drawing-room. It would be as ridiculous to apply the petty standards of ladyhood to her as it would to-well, imagine some foolish girl bringing up the question at a woman's club-'Was Joan of Arc a lady?'” Peter spoke without calculating the conviction that his words carried. He was angry, and his manner, voice, intonation showed it.
Kitty, now that her most unworthy suspicions had been confirmed by Peter's ardent championing of Judith, lost her discretion in the pang that gnawed her little soul: ”I beg your pardon, Peter. When I spoke I did not, of course, know that this young woman was anything to you.”
”Anything to me? My dear Kitty, I've never had a better friend than Judith Rodney.”
The dance was at its flood-tide. The exhilaration had grown with each sweep of the fiddle-bow, with the sorcery of sinuous, swaying bodies, with the song of the dancers as they joined in the calling out of the figures, with the rhythmic shuffle of feet, with the hum of the pulses, with the leaping of blood to cheek and heart till the dancers whirled as leaves circling towards the eddies of a whirlpool. The dancing Mrs. Dax split her favors into infinitesimal fragments, for each measure of which her long list of waiting gallants stood ready to pick a quarrel if need be. Her dancing, in the splendor of its spontaneity, had something of the surge of the west wind sweeping over a field of grain. Sometimes she waved back her partner and alone danced a figure, putting to the music her own interpretation-barbaric, pa.s.sionate, rude, but magnificently vivid. And the dancers would stop and crowd about her, clapping hands and stamping feet to the rhyming movement of her body, while against the wall her hostile sister-in-law, Mrs. Leander, stood and glared in a fury of disapproval, Leander himself smiling broadly meanwhile and exercising the utmost restraint to keep from joining Mrs. Johnnie's train.
The ”x.x.x” men, who had remained aloof from the dancers and the merriment, keeping a faithful vigil in the bunk-room, where the hospitable bottles were to be found, seemed to awaken from the spell that had bound them all day. Henderson, the foreman, whose face had not lost its tallow paleness despite the number of his potations, put his head through the door to have a look at the dancing Mrs. Dax, was caught in the outermost eddy of the whirling throng, and was soon dancing as madly as the others. The rest of the ”x.x.x” party still hugged the bunk-room, where the bottles gleamed hospitable. They were still dusty from their long ride of the early morning, and more than once their fear-quickened imaginations had been haunted by the spectre of the dead cotton-woods, from which something heavy and limp and warm had been swaying when they left it. Henderson had secured the dancing Mrs. Dax for a partner. The ”caller-out,” stationed between the two rooms, warmed to his genial task. He improvised, he put a wealth of imagination and personality into his work, he showered compliments on the nimbleness of Mrs. Dax's feet, he joked Henderson on his pallor, he attempted a florid venture at Kitty. Miguel put fresh magic into his bowing, Jose's fiddle rioted with the madness of it.
Judith stood for a moment in the kindly enveloping darkness, and her heart cried out in protest at the thing she must do. It was the utmost cruelty of fate that forced her here to dance on the evening of the day that they had killed him. But she must do it, that his children might evade the stigma of ”cattle-thief,” that the shadow of the gallows-tree might not fall across their young lives, that the neighbors might give credence to the tale of Jim's escape from his enemies, that Alida and she might earn the pittance that would give the children the ”clean start” that Jim had set his heart on so confidently. And she must dance and be the merriest of them all that these things might happen, but again and again she deferred the dread moment. The light, the music, the voices, the shuffle of the feet came to her as she stood forlorn in the grateful darkness. On the wall the shadows of the dancers, magnified and grotesque, parodied their movements, as they contended there, monstrous, uncouth shapes, like prehistoric monsters gripping, clinching in some mighty struggle; and above it all sang out the wild rhythm of Miguel's fiddle, and young Jose's bow capered madly.
Judith drew close to the window, and the merriment struck chill at her heart like the tolling of a knell. She saw the pale face of Henderson gleam yellow-white among the dancers, and, watching him, the blood-l.u.s.t of the Indian woke in her heart. The rest of the room was but a blur; the dancers faded into swaying shadows; she saw nothing but Henderson as he danced that he might forget the gray of morning, the black, dead trees, and the grotesque thing with head awry that swayed in the breeze like a pendulum. He dreaded the long, black ride that would bring him to his camp, for he alone of the lynchers remained. Something was drawing his gaze out into the blackness of the night. He struggled against the temptation to look towards the window. He whirled the Dax woman till her twinkling feet cleared the floor. He sang to the accompaniment of Miguel's fiddle. He was outwitting the thing that dangled before his eyes, having the incontrovertible last word with a vengeance. And as he danced and swayed, all unwittingly his glance fell on the window opposite, and Jim Rodney's face looked in at him, beautiful in its ecstasy of hate-Rodney's face, refined, sharpened, tried in some bitter crucible, but Rodney's face! Henderson could not withdraw his fascinated gaze. He stood in the midst of the dancers like a man turned to stone. He put up his hand to his eyes as if to brush away a cloud of swarming gnats, then threw up his arms and rushed from the room. The dancers paused in their mad whirl. Miguel's bow stopped with a wailing shriek. Every eye turned towards the window for an explanation of Henderson's sudden panic, but all was dark without on the prairie. The magic had gone from the dance, the whirlwind of drapery that had swung like flags in a breeze dropped in dead air. ”What was it?”
the dancers asked one another in whispers.
And for answer Judith entered, but a Judith that was strange to them.
There was about her a white radiance that kept the dancers back, and in her eyes something of Mary's look, as she turned from Calvary. The dancers still kept the position of the figures, the men with their arms about their partners' waists, the women stepping forward; they were like the painted figures of dancers in a fresco. And among them stood Judith, waiting to play her part, waiting to show her world that she could dance and be merry because all was well with her and hers. But the bronzed sons of the saddle hung back, they who a day before would have quarrelled for the honor of a dance. They were afraid of her; it would be like dancing with the death angel. She looked from face to face. Surely some one would ask her to dance, and her eyes fell on Henderson, returning from the bottled courage in the bunk-room. Some word was due from him to explain his terror of a moment ago.
”Oh, Miss Judith, I thought you was a ghost when I seen you at the window.”
”A ghost that's ready to dance.” She held out her hand to him. In her gesture there was something of royal command, and Henderson, reading the meaning in her eyes, stepped forward. Her face, almost a perfect replica of the dead man's, looked at him.
”I bring you greeting from my brother,” she said. ”He has gone on a long journey.”
Henderson started. Through the still room ran the murmur, ”Rodney's outwitted them; he's played a joke on the rope!” And Judith, his dare-devil sister, had come with his greetings to Henderson, leader of the faction against him! The tide had turned. The applause that is ever the meed of the winner was hers to command. The cattle faction were ready to sing the praises of her splendid audacity. In their hearts they were glad in the thought that Jim had outwitted them.
Miguel's bow dashed across the strings, and he drew from the little brown fiddle music that again made them merry and glowing. The magic came back to the dance, the blood leaped again with the merry madness, and they swept to the bowing like leaves when the first faint wail of winter cries in the trees.
Hamilton, standing apart with Kitty Colebrooke, had been a dazed witness of the scene. With the rest he had watched the entrance of Judith, had been stunned by the change in her appearance, had seen her triumph and heard the rumor of Jim's escape, and his heart had warmed with the good word. She had probably managed the plan, and had come to-night, in the joy of her triumph, to hurl in their faces that she had outwitted them. And she had paid the penalty of her courage-her face told that. What a woman she was! Her heart would pay the penalty to the last throb, and yet she could dance with the merriest of them. And as she danced she seemed to Peter Hamilton, in her white draperies, like a cloud of whirling snow-flakes drifting across the silence of the desert night. She was the one woman in all the world for him, though his blind eyes had faced the light for years and had not known it. He had squandered the strength of his youth in the pursuit of a little wax light, and had not marked the serene s.h.i.+ning of the moon.
”And a man there was and he made his prayer-” he quoted to himself. Well, thank G.o.d that it had not been answered. He would take her away from here.
She could take her place in his family and reflect credit on his choice.