Blue Kingdom Read online

  “Convalescents are always mighty hungry,” she said, and stood by with an encouraging smile to see him eat.

  But a touch of shadowy thought came into the eyes of Carrick. “Tell me,” he said suddenly, “how many men you keep to run your place?”

  “I can’t afford hired men,” she responded.

  “What! None at all?”

  “There isn’t much to do. I only run a few head of cows . . . then I have a few more for milk . . . a few chickens. I can sell milk and eggs in town for a very good price . . . and it’s only now and then that I have to get in hired help for plowing and harvesting the river bottomland.”

  SIX

  Now Carrick Dunmore looked at her in bewilderment. Across his mind flashed the picture of himself, at an early time of boyhood, idling about his father’s ranch, refusing to work, drifting off into the wild fields in the morning with his horse, hunting birds, or coyotes, or deer, and returning in the evening to meet the bitter words of his tired father, and the silent, worn face of his mother. He had hated himself, at times, for the pain that he allowed them to endure without effort on his part—but always his indolence was greater than his shame.

  Now he felt a great impulse to do something for this woman. But what could he do, except physical labor spread over weary months and months of monotony? No sooner did the impulse soar in him than it faded dimly again. These were not the days when a man could pasture his cattle on the horizon blue, or hunt the fat-sided ships on the blue of the ocean. These were not the days of the first Carrick Dunmore.

  So he sighed as he looked at Elizabeth Furneaux. “Have you always carried on like this?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Things were a lot easier when my nephew was here with me.”

  “What became of him?”

  She hesitated. “You’ve never heard of Rodman Furneaux?” she asked him.

  “No. I guess not.”

  “Well, Rod had a dash of the true Dunmore blood in him, of course. He wants happiness, but he expects to get it by short cuts.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean this, in short. He worked here, well enough, but work was not really what he wanted. Work brings in dollars, but I don’t suppose any true Dunmore ever cared a lot for a bank account. And . . . at last he went off into the blue.”

  “On the highway, you mean?” asked Carrick bluntly.

  “Well, to be frank, I’m afraid that’s it. He’s joined Tankerton and his gang, they say.”

  “He’s joined The Bull?” said Carrick Dunmore.

  “I suppose he has.”

  “That sort of beats me,” he said. “You take a brute of a man like Tankerton, why, what would keep your nephew up there with him?”

  “The fun of the thing, Carrick. Just the fun of it.”

  “It ain’t so much fun to get your neck stretched.”

  She shivered. “Boys don’t think that far ahead,” she commented.

  He fell to musing, and, when he looked up again, she had gone back with the emptied tray.

  Carrick Dunmore stood up suddenly and rolled himself a cigarette. I’d better drift, he thought. He went out to the corral and found the mare there. She was now his, for had not Colonel Clisson vowed that the man who rode her should have her? She lifted her fine head and watched him curiously, but without fear. He wanted to see her in action, and to study the flowing lines of her gallop, so he waved his hands, but Excuse Me stood fast and merely backed into a corner.

  When he went up to her, that tigerish beauty did not so much as flatten her ears, but she cringed a bit when he extended his hand, and the very heart of Carrick Dunmore winced within him. He could see on her velvet skin the marks of his quirt and the long lines of the scratching spurs that had raked her fore and aft. He knew that she had been injured in more than flesh. He gentled her with his hand and spoke softly, and Excuse Me turned dreamy and wondering eyes upon him. So swiftly had she been tamed—if only her spirit were not utterly broken. He thought of various mysteries as he stood beside her, stroking her, and of how women and men, also, may be made or broken by the right or the wrong touch.

  Carrick Dunmore, for instance—suppose the earl had not blundered upon him as he juggled in the street of the village and made a rudely overbearing demand—why, then, in that case the boy would have remained a clod, a cowherd, or some such thing, to the end of his days. From the depths of his heart, Carrick Dunmore the First must have thanked his lordship in after days for the whip stroke of discourtesy that had roused his heart. Such a stroke, mused the new Carrick Dunmore, might fall upon him, also, one of these days.

  He looked back to the big, looming shoulders of the house above the trees, and then scowled as he thought of his cousin washing dishes inside. His impulse was to go and help her; his second thought was that it was no use to make one pleasant gesture.

  He spent two hours with the mare. From the grain bin, he fed her crushed barley out of the palm of his hand. With shining eyes she would nibble at it, and then toss her head wildly, and back away, but she would come again, until at last she seemed to lose her fear that the flattened hand might be a steel trap about to spring shut on her tender muzzle.

  The moment she began to trust Dunmore, his heart suddenly enlarged and embraced her with love. He wondered how it could be that in one day she had been subdued, in one day she had learned to forget her tigerish manners, but then it occurred to him that she never had failed of her own way since the day she was foaled. That made the great difference.

  He strolled back to the house to see his cousin for the last time and to thank her for what she had done for him. He found her already through the dishes and hanging out a few scraps of laundry on the wire line that ran from the edge of the creamery to the corner post of the rear porch.

  “I suppose I’ll have to start on,” he said.

  “Before the doctor gives you marching orders?”

  “Yes. I’d better drift.”

  “Well, wait a moment, then.”

  Somehow he had thought that she would make it difficult for him to leave. It rather surprised him and hurt him that she let him go so readily. But now she came out again with a thick envelope.

  “That’s the prize for the riding contest,” she told him. “Colonel Clisson raised the prize to two hundred dollars. Wasn’t that fine of him?”

  He reached for the envelope, and then checked his hand. He looked at her face and colored a little. “Cousin Elizabeth,” he said at last, “I’ve been wondering how I could pay you back for the way you’ve taken me in. Now, look here. You keep that envelope, will you?”

  She lowered her hand. He saw that she was smiling gently at him, and his heart bounded.

  “Why should I take your money, Carrick?” she asked. “Do you want to pay me because I’ve had the pleasure of taking care of the head of our house for a day or two?”

  Her smile persisted; she seemed waiting for him to argue. But Carrick felt oddly out of place and ill at ease. It was not the first time that she had called him the head of the house, and the idea troubled him. It was a position of importance. It dragged in its train certain responsibilities that he did not at all wish to shoulder, and Carrick Dunmore blundered out: “All that fencin’ around the corral ain’t so strong, and maybe you’d use this to put up a new fence, Elizabeth. I want to do something.”

  “Of course, you do. I know that you’ve got a heart of gold, Carrick. But you see that I can’t take it. Oh, if I were desperate, of course, I wouldn’t hesitate an instant. I knew that you’d feel a bit of responsibility about us all . . . but that time hasn’t come, Carrick. I still get along very well. Do take your money.”

  He took it, beginning to feel hot and wishing that this farewell ceremony were over. But now she suggested that he might want to see the rest of the house, and he had to consent. She took him up to the very top, where there was a sort of captain’s walk that her father used to walk up and down on and from it overlook the country. She led him throu
gh the bedrooms, and named the big, faded, enlarged photographs that hung upon the walls. Carrick Dunmore began to feel that he was walking through a house of death until, in a rear bedroom, she showed him a new photograph of a handsome youngster.

  “That’s poor Rod,” she said. “Such a dear boy, Carrick. But I suppose I’ll never see his face again.”

  “And why not?”

  “Ah, well, he’s the kind to take great chances, and perhaps he’s grown callous. Heaven knows what his end will be, but I think it will surely come inside the next six months. And then I’ll. . . .”

  She led the way hastily out of the room, and Carrick Dunmore followed with a gloomy face. And then?— then she would be left utterly alone in the world, with the failing house and the failing farm upon her hands. He sighed, and followed her down the stairs to the first floor, over the hushed carpet of the parlor, with its pattern of roses bright at the edges and fading toward the center, and so to the library, a room of real dignity.

  There, also, were several portraits, and, pointing to a corner, Elizabeth remarked: “That’s said to be a picture of the first Carrick Dunmore.”

  He looked at it in amazement. He had heard so much about this first of his line that now he walked closer to the portrait, curiously. He saw at first only a blur of brown and of black shadows, with the paint peeled off to wood in spots. It had been painted, apparently, in imitation of the effigies that appear of the good knights in parish churches. The mail-shod feet pointed down, with tapering toes, and the long hands were pressed together. A cowl of mail covered the head, but the face itself was quite distinct, and, when he had seen it, Carrick Dunmore suddenly shaded his eyes and stared again. Then he looked wildly around at Elizabeth Furneaux.

  “Can you make it out?” she said. “It’s a dim old thing, isn’t it? I don’t suppose it looks a whit like him.”

  “Great guns!” he exclaimed. “Look at it again, and then look at me, will you, Elizabeth?”

  She looked a bit askance at him, and then obediently came nearer. But when she was quite close, she cried out in her turn and caught at his arm.

  “Carrick!” she cried. “It’s your face over again!”

  SEVEN

  It seemed to Carrick Dunmore like the appearance of a ghost—as though it were not paint but spirit that looked out at him from the old warped wood of the image. For, beyond a doubt, there was his face reproduced. It was not an exact thing. One could not have expected that, but it was very clear that there was a great resemblance. Some of the paint was peeled or crumbled off, the left eye was streaked across by a great crack, and the right cheek was falling to bits, but it was as though he looked at his own image in muddy, rippling water. The features were dim, but all that could be seen were his own. It was a similarity that overrode all chance, or possibility, of doubt—it was not likeness, or kinship—it was the actual reproduction of the same man, the same flesh, the same spirit. As he stared, vague and vast thoughts arose in the mind of Carrick Dunmore and flooded dimly forward upon his consciousness. He had heard of such things as reincarnation.

  But his mind was set against the acceptance of any such nonsense. Of all men, none was more earthly minded, more concerned with the affairs of the moment only, than Carrick Dunmore. For that reason, he was shocked and upset to the core of his being. Indeed, he had to grip the back of a chair and look at the portrait again and again.

  He turned toward Elizabeth Furneaux, at last, and saw that she was looking first at the picture, and then at him, in fully as much amazement as he suffered.

  “It’s the same. It’s the very same,” she said. She rubbed her knuckles across her eyes. “Good heavens, Carrick,” she exclaimed, “I must be losing my wits! Such things can’t be!” She went hastily to the window and threw it open, and he followed her, very glad of that air.

  “We’ll have a look at it in the sun,” he said firmly. He brought the picture, therefore, straight to the window and held it where the sun flooded across it.

  There was, at first, an effect of making the whole thing vanish in confusion, which was perhaps caused by the gleam of the broken surface of the paint, and of the varnish that someone had applied some century or so before the original, apparently. But, when Carrick Dunmore’s eyes grew accustomed to the thing, he could see all that he had seen before, and even more. There was the effect of standing before a mirror with a very poor backing or rust instead of quicksilver, but as much as could be seen was perfect in his eyes.

  Elizabeth Furneaux, her eyes staring rather wildly, held the picture beside him and looked at him, and then at it, studying with a frown that grew more dark and lips that were more and more compressed. At length she went silently to the wall and hung the picture in its place. When she turned to Carrick Dunmore, she looked plainly frightened.

  “Carrick,” she said. “I don’t know. . . . What are you? A ghost?”

  “Ghosts don’t eat four pounds of beefsteak,” he said.

  She smiled faintly. “This is something like algebra and advanced chemistry,” she said. “I can’t get my hand upon it. I can’t begin to understand it. But the thing’s there. You are Carrick Dunmore.”

  At this, Carrick answered grimly: “He slapped the face of the King of Scotland, took an earl’s castle, and put a whole herd of cattle in each vest pocket when he went out for a walk. Will you say that I’m Carrick Dunmore?”

  Her glance steadied him. “You speak perfectly well, Carrick,” she said, “when you forget yourself. You’re only ungrammatical because you’re careless. Well, about the similarity between you and the picture . . . it isn’t just the features that matter to me. It’s the expression. That’s the amazing thing. The expression is the same.”

  “It is,” he admitted finally, and he drew in a quick breath; he still had need of air.

  She concluded briefly: “People don’t have the same expression without having the same sort of mind and nature . . . I . . . but I don’t want to talk about it. It’s too spooky.”

  He agreed with her. It fairly made his flesh crawl, and he was glad to go outdoors with her a moment later. She pulled on a pair of old gloves, and tied a leather apron around her.

  “What are you going to do, Elizabeth?” he asked.

  “I’m going out to the blacksmith shop. There’s a broken brake rod that I have to weld.”

  He stared as he answered: “You? Weld it?”

  “I can do all sorts of odd jobs,” she replied, and smiled at him.

  He went with her without a word and found the blacksmith shop quite a spacious shed on the edge of the corral. Around it was the usual junk heap that accumulates on an old ranch—broken wheels, ribs of iron, a rake with a sagging back, a decrepit mowing machine, tangles of wire and barrel hoops of iron, and some fifty more items. Inside, the place seemed thoroughly gone to pieces. The roof was partly gone, and a sheathing of tin insufficiently replaced the shingles in two places. There were a few tools and much junk; everything was very old; the iron curled back from the much-battered faces of the hammers.

  However, she went to work at once on the brake rod. It was a clumsy job because of its length, but Dunmore helped her by handling the weight of the rod while she worked the bellows and attended to the fire. She, too, did the hammering when the glowing iron was brought from the fire—he saw her set her teeth and apply the strokes quickly and with skill. The sparks showered. It seemed to him that he never before had been so little a man as he was now.

  The welding was finished in an amazingly short time, the tempering and cooling accomplished, and then he carried out the rod and helped her refasten it beneath the wagon. It was an old, two-ton, wooden affair, with the wheels sagging in and out in perilous attitudes.

  “Is that your best?” he asked her.

  “That’s our best,” she assured him. “Carrick, I know you want to be riding on. Don’t you bother about these odd jobs now. I know you’d like to stay and help, but you have your own life to lead.”

  He took a long breath,
then he said: “Elizabeth, there’s not a shadow of doubt that I’m a Dunmore of the old line. That picture was enough to wipe out any such idea. I’ve got to stay here and do my share.”

  “It’s no use, Carrick,” she assured him without bitterness. “The family fortunes have been skidding for so long that it would take ten men digging their heels in to stop them going downhill. Tie yourself to something that’s going up, not down. There’s no use in that, you know.”

  He looked vaguely around him. Everything he saw was sagging. The fence posts stood at odd angles, showing plainly that they were rotted away at the bottom; the barbed wire drooped or hung in festoons; the back of the barn had fallen in, and the eastern end of it, on the nearest side, was quite broken through.

  “Elizabeth, is that pile of shakes intended for the roof?” he asked.

  “Yes, for the roof of the barn. When I have a chance to put in a couple of days, before the rains. . . .”

  “You’d climb up there and fix the thing?”

  “Yes. I’ve done harder things than that, since Rodman left.”

  “Rodman . . . what sort of a fellow?” he asked tersely.

  “Rodman . . . is twenty-one,” she said, after a moment of hesitation. “He’s a good boy, too. But you can’t blame a youngster for growing tired of such a life as this, can you?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m goin’ to fix that roof,” he said, and he marched straight to the task. As he went, his heart swelled. When he looked about him at the signs of wreck and ruinous age, it no longer made him hopeless, but, instead, it filled him with determination. When he sat on the roof looking over the task to be accomplished, he already, in his mind’s eye, had repaired every flaw, had covered the land of the ranch with cattle, had enlarged its boundaries, and placed a hired man in the garden, a cook in the kitchen, and put Elizabeth at a tea table in the living room in a pleasant summer frock.

  He roused himself from this reverie and took more careful note of the condition of the roof. It was very bad. The shakes had in part worked loose, rotting away around the nails that held them, and in part they had been clean stripped away by strong winter winds. So he went down the ladder and began carrying up bunches of shakes.