Susy, A Story of the Plains

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He was still holding her; but in that instant her manner had completely
changed again; the old Susy seemed to have slipped away and evaded him,
and he was retaining only a conscious actress in his arms.

"Release me, Mr. Brant, please," she said, with a languid affected
glance behind her; "we are not alone."

Then, as the rustling of a skirt sounded nearer in the passage, she
seemed to change back to her old self once more, and with a lightning
flash of significance whispered,--

"She knows everything!"

To add to Clarence's confusion, the woman who entered cast a quick
glance of playful meaning on the separating youthful pair. She was an
ineffective blonde with a certain beauty that seemed to be gradually
succumbing to the ravages of paint and powder rather than years;
her dress appeared to have suffered from an equally unwise excess of
ornamentation and trimming, and she gave the general impression of
having been intended for exhibition in almost any other light than the
one in which she happened to be. There were two or three mud-stains
on the laces of her sleeve and underskirt that were obtrusively
incongruous. Her voice, which had, however, a ring of honest intention
in it, was somewhat over-strained, and evidently had not yet adjusted
itself to the low-ceilinged, conventual-like building.

"There, children, don't mind me! I know I'm not on in this scene, but I
got nervous waiting there, in what you call the 'salon,' with only those
Greaser servants staring round me in a circle, like a regular chorus.
My! but it's anteek here--regular anteek--Spanish." Then, with a glance
at Clarence, "So this is Clarence Brant,--your Clarence? Interduce me,
Susy."

In his confusion of indignation, pain, and even a certain conception of
the grim ludicrousness of the situation, Clarence grasped despairingly
at the single sentence of Susy's. "In my own home." Surely, at least, it
was HER OWN HOME, and as he was only the business agent of her adopted
mother, he had no right to dictate to her under what circumstances
she should return to it, or whom she should introduce there. In her
independence and caprice Susy might easily have gone elsewhere with this
astounding relative, and would Mrs. Peyton like it better? Clinging to
this idea, his instinct of hospitality asserted itself. He welcomed Mrs.
McClosky with nervous effusion:--

"I am only Mrs. Peyton's major domo here, but any guest of her
DAUGHTER'S is welcome."

"Yes," said Mrs. McClosky, with ostentatious archness, "I reckon Susy
and I understand your position here, and you've got a good berth of it.
But we won't trouble you much on Mrs. Peyton's account, will we, Susy?
And now she and me will just take a look around the shanty,--it is real
old Spanish anteek, ain't it?--and sorter take stock of it, and you
young folks will have to tear yourselves apart for a while, and play
propriety before me. You've got to be on your good behavior while
I'm here, I can tell you! I'm a heavy old 'doo-anna.' Ain't I, Susy?
School-ma'ms and mother superiors ain't in the game with ME for
discipline."

She threw her arms around the young girl's waist and drew her towards
her affectionately, an action that slightly precipitated some powder
upon the black dress of her niece. Susy glanced mischievously at
Clarence, but withdrew her eyes presently to let them rest with
unmistakable appreciation and admiration on her relative. A pang shot
through Clarence's breast. He had never seen her look in that way at
Mrs. Peyton. Yet here was this stranger, provincial, overdressed, and
extravagant, whose vulgarity was only made tolerable through her good
humor, who had awakened that interest which the refined Mrs. Peyton had
never yet been able to touch. As Mrs. McClosky swept out of the room
with Susy he turned away with a sinking heart.

Yet it was necessary that the Spanish house servants should not suspect
this treason to their mistress, and Clarence stopped their childish
curiosity about the stranger with a careless and easy acceptance of
Susy's sudden visit in the light of an ordinary occurrence, and with a
familiarity towards Mrs. McClosky which became the more distasteful to
him in proportion as he saw that it was evidently agreeable to her. But,
easily responsive, she became speedily confidential. Without a single
question from himself, or a contributing remark from Susy, in half an
hour she had told him her whole history. How, as Jane Silsbee, an elder
sister of Susy's mother, she had early eloped from the paternal home
in Kansas with McClosky, a strolling actor. How she had married him
and gone on the stage under his stage name, effectively preventing any
recognition by her family. How, coming to California, where her husband
had become manager of the theatre at Sacramento, she was indignant to
find that her only surviving relation, a sister-in-law, living in the
same place, had for a money consideration given up all claim to the
orphaned Susy, and how she had resolved to find out "if the poor child
was happy." How she succeeded in finding out that she was not happy.
How she wrote to her, and even met her secretly at San Francisco and
Oakland, and how she had undertaken this journey partly for "a lark,"
and partly to see Clarence and the property. There was no doubt of the
speaker's sincerity; with this outrageous candor there was an equal
obliviousness of any indelicacy in her conduct towards Mrs. Peyton that
seemed hopeless. Yet he must talk plainly to her; he must say to her
what he could not say to Susy; upon HER Mrs. Peyton's happiness--he
believed he was thinking of Susy's also--depended. He must take the
first opportunity of speaking to her alone.

That opportunity came sooner than he had expected. After dinner, Mrs.
McClosky turned to Susy, and playfully telling her that she had "to talk
business" with Mr. Brant, bade her go to the salon and await her. When
the young girl left the room, she looked at Clarence, and, with that
assumption of curtness with which coarse but kindly natures believe they
overcome the difficulty of delicate subjects, said abruptly:--

"Well, young man, now what's all this between you and Susy? I'm looking
after her interests--same as if she was my own girl. If you've got
anything to say, now's your time. And don't you shilly-shally too long
over it, either, for you might as well know that a girl like that can
have her pick and choice, and be beholden to no one; and when she don't
care to choose, there's me and my husband ready to do for her all the
same. We mightn't be able to do the anteek Spanish Squire, but we've got
our own line of business, and it's a comfortable one."

To have this said to him under the roof of Mrs. Peyton, from whom, in
his sensitiveness, he had thus far jealously guarded his own secret, was
even more than Clarence's gentleness could stand, and fixed his wavering
resolution.

"I don't think we quite understand each other, Mrs. McClosky," he said
coldly, but with glittering eyes. "I have certainly something to say to
you; if it is not on a subject as pleasant as the one you propose,
it is, nevertheless, one that I think you and I are more competent to
discuss together."

Then, with quiet but unrelenting directness, he pointed out to her that
Susy was a legally adopted daughter of Mrs. Peyton, and, as a minor,
utterly under her control; that Mrs. Peyton had no knowledge of any
opposing relatives; and that Susy had not only concealed the fact from
her, but that he was satisfied that Mrs. Peyton did not even know of
Susy's discontent and alienation; that she had tenderly and carefully
brought up the helpless orphan as her own child, and even if she had not
gained her affection was at least entitled to her obedience and respect;
that while Susy's girlish caprice and inexperience excused HER
conduct, Mrs. Peyton and her friends would have a right to expect more
consideration from a person of Mrs. McClosky's maturer judgment. That
for these reasons, and as the friend of Mrs. Peyton, whom he could alone
recognize as Susy's guardian and the arbiter of her affections, he must
decline to discuss the young girl with any reference to himself or his
own intentions.

An unmistakable flush asserted itself under the lady's powder.

"Suit yourself, young man, suit yourself," she said, with equally direct
resentment and antagonism; "only mebbee you'll let me tell you that
Jim McClosky ain't no fool, and mebbee knows what lawyers think of an
arrangement with a sister-in-law that leaves a real sister out! Mebbee
that's a 'Sister's title' you ain't thought of, Mr. Brant! And mebbee
you'll find out that your chance o' gettin' Mrs. Peyton's consent ain't
as safe to gamble on as you reckon it is. And mebbee, what's more to the
purpose, if you DID get it, it might not be just the trump card to fetch
Susy with! And to wind up, Mr. Brant, when you DO have to come down to
the bed-rock and me and Jim McClosky, you may find out that him and me
have discovered a better match for Susy than the son of old Ham Brant,
who is trying to play the Spanish grandee off his father's money on a
couple of women. And we mayn't have to go far to do it--or to get THE
REAL THING, Mr. Brant!"

Too heartsick and disgusted to even notice the slur upon himself or the
import of her last words, Clarence only rose and bowed as she jumped up
from the table. But as she reached the door he said, half appealingly:--

"Whatever are your other intentions, Mrs. McClosky, as we are both
Susy's guests, I beg you will say nothing of this to her while we are
here, and particularly that you will not allow her to think for a moment
that I have discussed MY relations to her with anybody."

She flung herself out of the door without a reply; but on entering the
dark low-ceilinged drawing-room she was surprised to find that Susy was
not there. She was consequently obliged to return to the veranda, where
Clarence had withdrawn, and to somewhat ostentatiously demand of the
servants that Susy should be sent to her room at once. But the young
girl was not in her own room, and was apparently nowhere to be found.
Clarence, who had now fully determined as a last resource to make a
direct appeal to Susy herself, listened to this fruitless search with
some concern. She could not have gone out in the rain, which was again
falling. She might be hiding somewhere to avoid a recurrence of the
scene she had perhaps partly overheard. He turned into the corridor
that led to Mrs. Peyton's boudoir. As he knew that it was locked, he was
surprised to see by the dim light of the hanging lamp that a duplicate
key to the one in his desk was in the lock. It must be Susy's, and the
young girl had probably taken refuge there. He knocked gently. There was
a rustle in the room and the sound of a chair being moved, but no reply.
Impelled by a sudden instinct he opened the door, and was met by a cool
current of air from some open window. At the same moment the figure of
Susy approached him from the semi-darkness of the interior.

"I did not know you were here," said Clarence, much relieved, he knew
not why, "but I am glad, for I wanted to speak with you alone for a few
moments."

She did not reply, but he drew a match from his pocket and lit the two
candles which he knew stood on the table. The wick of one was still
warm, as if it had been recently extinguished. As the light slowly
radiated, he could see that she was regarding him with an air of
affected unconcern, but a somewhat heightened color. It was like her,
and not inconsistent with his idea that she had come there to avoid an
after scene with Mrs. McClosky or himself, or perhaps both. The room was
not disarranged in any way. The window that was opened was the casement
of the deep embrasured one in the rear wall, and the light curtain
before it still swayed occasionally in the night wind.

"I'm afraid I had a row with your aunt, Susy," he began lightly, in his
old familiar way; "but I had to tell her I didn't think her conduct to
Mrs. Peyton was exactly the square thing towards one who had been as
devoted to you as she has been."

"Oh, for goodness' sake, don't go over all that again," said Susy
impatiently. "I've had enough of it."

Clarence flashed, but recovered himself.

"Then you overheard what I said, and know what I think," he said calmly.

"I knew it BEFORE," said the young girl, with a slight supercilious toss
of the head, and yet a certain abstraction of manner as she went to the
window and closed it. "Anybody could see it! I know you always wanted
me to stay here with Mrs. Peyton, and be coddled and monitored and
catechised and shut up away from any one, until YOU had been coddled and
monitored and catechised by somebody else sufficiently to suit her
ideas of your being a fit husband for me. I told aunty it was no use our
coming here to--to"--

"To do what?" asked Clarence.

"To put some spirit into you," said the young girl, turning upon him
sharply; "to keep you from being tied to that woman's apron-strings. To
keep her from making a slave of you as she would of me. But it is of
no use. Mary Rogers was right when she said you had no wish to please
anybody but Mrs. Peyton, and no eyes for anybody but her. And if it
hadn't been too ridiculous, considering her age and yours, she'd say you
were dead in love with her."

For an instant Clarence felt the blood rush to his face and then sink
away, leaving him pale and cold. The room, which had seemed to
whirl around him, and then fade away, returned with appalling
distinctness,--the distinctness of memory,--and a vision of the first
day that he had seen Mrs. Peyton sitting there, as he seemed to see her
now. For the first time there flashed upon him the conviction that the
young girl had spoken the truth, and had brusquely brushed the veil from
his foolish eyes. He WAS in love with Mrs. Peyton! That was what his
doubts and hesitation regarding Susy meant. That alone was the source,
secret, and limit of his vague ambition.

But with the conviction came a singular calm. In the last few moments
he seemed to have grown older, to have loosed the bonds of old
companionship with Susy, and the later impression she had given him of
her mature knowledge, and moved on far beyond her years and experience.
And it was with an authority that was half paternal, and in a voice he
himself scarcely recognized, that he said:--

"If I did not know you were prejudiced by a foolish and indiscreet
woman, I should believe that you were trying to insult me as you have
your adopted mother, and would save you the pain of doing both in HER
house by leaving it now and forever. But because I believe you are
controlled against your best instinct by that woman, I shall remain
here with you to frustrate her as best I can, or until I am able to lay
everything before Mrs. Peyton except the foolish speech you have just
made."

The young girl laughed. "Why not THAT one too, while you're about it?
See what she'll say."

"I shall tell her," continued Clarence calmly, "only what YOU yourself
have made it necessary for me to tell her to save you from folly and
disgrace, and only enough to spare her the mortification of hearing it
first from her own servants."

"Hearing WHAT from her own servants? What do you mean? How dare you?"
demanded the young girl sharply.

She was quite real in her anxiety now, although her attitude of virtuous
indignation struck him as being like all her emotional expression,
namely, acting.

"I mean that the servants know of your correspondence with Mrs.
McClosky, and that she claims to be your aunt," returned Clarence. "They
know that you confided to Pepita. They believe that either Mrs. McClosky
or you have seen"--

He had stopped suddenly. He was about to say that the servants
(particularly Incarnacion) knew that Pedro had boasted of having met
Susy, when, for the first time, the tremendous significance of what he
had hitherto considered as merely an idle falsehood flashed upon him.

"Seen whom?" repeated Susy in a higher voice, impatiently stamping her
foot.

Clarence looked at her, and in her excited, questioning face saw a
confirmation of his still half-formed suspicions. In his own abrupt
pause and knitted eyebrows she must have read his thoughts also. Their
eyes met. Her violet pupils dilated, trembled, and then quickly shifted
as she suddenly stiffened into an attitude of scornful indifference,
almost grotesque in its unreality. His eyes slowly turned to the window,
the door, the candles on the table and the chair before it, and then
came back to her face again. Then he drew a deep breath.

"I give no heed to the idle gossip of servants, Susy," he said slowly.
"I have no belief that you have ever contemplated anything worse than an
act of girlish folly, or the gratification of a passing caprice. Neither
do I want to appeal to you or frighten you, but I must tell you now,
that I know certain facts that might make such a simple act of folly
monstrous, inconceivable in YOU, and almost accessory to a crime! I can
tell you no more. But so satisfied am I of such a possibility, that I
shall not scruple to take any means--the strongest--to prevent even
the remotest chance of it. Your aunt has been looking for you; you had
better go to her now. I will close the room and lock the door. Meantime,
I should advise you not to sit so near an open window with a candle at
night in this locality. Even if it might not be dangerous for you, it
might be fatal to the foolish creatures it might attract."

He took the key from the door as he held it open for her to pass out.
She uttered a shrill little laugh, like a nervous, mischievous child,
and, slipping out of her previous artificial attitude as if it had been
a mantle, ran out of the room.




CHAPTER X.


As Susy's footsteps died away, Clarence closed the door, walked to the
window, and examined it closely. The bars had been restored since he had
wrenched them off to give ingress to the family on the day of recapture.
He glanced around the room; nothing seemed to have been disturbed.
Nevertheless he was uneasy. The suspicions of a frank, trustful nature
when once aroused are apt to be more general and far-reaching than the
specific distrusts of the disingenuous, for they imply the overthrow of
a whole principle and not a mere detail. Clarence's conviction that Susy
had seen Pedro recently since his dismissal led him into the wildest
surmises of her motives. It was possible that without her having reason
to suspect Pedro's greater crime, he might have confided to her his
intention of reclaiming the property and installing her as the mistress
and chatelaine of the rancho. The idea was one that might have appealed
to Susy's theatrical imagination. He recalled Mrs. McClosky's sneer
at his own pretensions and her vague threats of a rival of more lineal
descent. The possible infidelity of Susy to himself touched him lightly
when the first surprise was over; indeed, it scarcely could be called
infidelity, if she knew and believed Mary Rogers's discovery; and the
conviction that he and she had really never loved each other now enabled
him, as he believed, to look at her conduct dispassionately. Yet it was
her treachery to Mrs. Peyton and not to himself that impressed him most,
and perhaps made him equally unjust, through his affections.

He extinguished the candles, partly from some vague precautions he could
not explain, and partly to think over his fears in the abstraction and
obscurity of the semi-darkness. The higher windows suffused a faint
light on the ceiling, and, assisted by the dark lantern-like glow
cast on the opposite wall by the tunnel of the embrasured window,
the familiar outlines of the room and its furniture came back to him.
Somewhat in this fashion also, in the obscurity and quiet, came back
to him the events he had overlooked and forgotten. He recalled now some
gossip of the servants, and hints dropped by Susy of a violent quarrel
between Peyton and Pedro, which resulted in Pedro's dismissal, but which
now seemed clearly attributable to some graver cause than inattention
and insolence. He recalled Mary Rogers's playful pleasantries with Susy
about Pedro, and Susy's mysterious air, which he had hitherto
regarded only as part of her exaggeration. He remembered Mrs. Peyton's
unwarrantable uneasiness about Susy, which he had either overlooked or
referred entirely to himself; she must have suspected something. To his
quickened imagination, in this ruin of his faith and trust, he believed
that Hooker's defection was either part of the conspiracy, or that he
had run away to avoid being implicated with Susy in its discovery.
This, too, was the significance of Gilroy's parting warning. He and
Mrs. Peyton alone had been blind and confiding in the midst of this
treachery, and even HE had been blind to his own real affections.

The wind had risen again, and the faint light on the opposite wall grew
tremulous and shifting with the movement of the foliage without. But
presently the glow became quite obliterated, as if by the intervention
of some opaque body outside the window. He rose hurriedly and went to
the casement. But at the same moment he fancied he heard the jamming of
a door or window in quite another direction, and his examination of
the casement before him showed him only the silver light of the thinly
clouded sky falling uninterruptedly through the bars and foliage on the
interior of the whitewashed embrasure. Then a conception of his mistake
flashed across him. The line of the casa was long, straggling, and
exposed elsewhere; why should the attempt to enter or communicate
with any one within be confined only to this single point? And why not
satisfy himself at once if any trespassers were lounging around the
walls, and then confront them boldly in the open? Their discovery and
identification was as important as the defeat of their intentions.

He relit the candle, and, placing it on a small table by the wall beyond
the visual range of the window, rearranged the curtain so that, while
it permitted the light to pass out, it left the room in shadow. He then
opened the door softly, locked it behind him, and passed noiselessly
into the hall. Susy's and Mrs. McClosky's rooms were at the further end
of the passage, but between them and the boudoir was the open patio, and
the low murmur of the voices of servants, who still lingered until he
should dismiss them for the night. Turning back, he moved silently down
the passage, until he reached the narrow arched door to the garden.
This he unlocked and opened with the same stealthy caution. The rain had
recommenced. Not daring to risk a return to his room, he took from a
peg in the recess an old waterproof cloak and "sou'wester" of Peyton's,
which still hung there, and passed out into the night, locking the
door behind him. To keep the knowledge of his secret patrol from the
stablemen, he did not attempt to take out his own horse, but trusted to
find some vacquero's mustang in the corral. By good luck an old "Blue
Grass" hack of Peyton's, nearest the stockade as he entered, allowed
itself to be quickly caught. Using its rope headstall for a bridle,
Clarence vaulted on its bare back, and paced cautiously out into the
road. Here he kept the curve of the long line of stockade until he
reached the outlying field where, half hidden in the withered, sapless,
but still standing stalks of grain, he slowly began a circuit of the
casa.

The misty gray dome above him, which an invisible moon seemed to have
quicksilvered over, alternately lightened and darkened with passing
gusts of fine rain. Nevertheless he could see the outline of the broad
quadrangle of the house quite distinctly, except on the west side,
where a fringe of writhing willows beat the brown adobe walls with their
imploring arms at every gust. Elsewhere nothing moved; the view was
uninterrupted to where the shining, watery sky met the equally shining,
watery plain. He had already made a half circuit of the house, and was
still noiselessly picking his way along the furrows, muffled with soaked
and broken-down blades, and the velvety upspringing of the "volunteer"
growth, when suddenly, not fifty yards before him, without sound or
warning, a figure rode out of the grain upon the open crossroad, and
deliberately halted with a listless, abstracted, waiting air. Clarence
instantly recognized one of his own vacqueros, an undersized half-breed,
but he as instantly divined that he was only an outpost or confederate,
stationed to give the alarm. The same precaution had prevented each
hearing the other, and the lesser height of the vacquero had rendered
him indistinguishable as he preceded Clarence among the grain. As the
young man made no doubt that the real trespasser was nearer the casa,
along the line of willows, he wheeled to intercept him without alarming
his sentry. Unfortunately, his horse answered the rope bridle clumsily,
and splashed in striking out. The watcher quickly raised his head, and
Clarence knew that his only chance was now to suppress him. Determined
to do this at any hazard, with a threatening gesture he charged boldly
down upon him.