CHAPTER VII--THE SHADOW OF THE PAST
Marion Harlan and her uncle, Elam Parsons, did not accompany Carringtonto the Castle Hotel. By telegraph, through Danforth, Carrington hadbought a house near Dawes, and shortly after Quinton Taylor left thestation platform accompanied by his friends and admirers, Marion and heruncle were in a buckboard riding toward the place that, henceforth, wasto be their home.
For that question had been settled before the party left Westwood.Parsons had declared his future activities were to be centered in Dawes,that he had no further interests to keep him in Westwood, and that heintended to make his home in Dawes.
Certainly Marion had few interests in the town that had been the sceneof the domestic tragedy that had left her parentless. She was glad toget away. For though she had not been to blame for what had happened,she was painfully conscious of the stares that followed her everywhere,and aware of the morbid curiosity with which her neighbors regarded her.Also--through the medium of certain of her "friends," she had becomecognizant of speculative whisperings, such as: "To think of beingbrought up like that? Do you think she will be like her mother?"Or--"What's bred in the bone, _et cetera_."
Perhaps these good people did not mean to be unkind; certainly thecrimson stains that colored the girl's cheeks when she passed themshould have won their charity and their silence.
There was nothing in Westwood for her; and so she was glad to get away.And the trip westward toward Dawes opened a new vista of life to her.She was leaving the old and the tragic and adventuring into the new andpromising, where she could face life without the onus of a shame thathad not been hers.
Before she was half way to Dawes she had forgotten Westwood and itswagging tongues. She alone, of all the passengers in the Pullman, hadnot been aware of the heat and the discomfort. She had loved every footof the great prairie land that, green and beautiful, had flashed pastthe car window; she had gazed with eager, interested eyes into the farreaches of the desert through which she had passed, filling her soulwith the mystic beauty of this new world, reveling in its vastness andin the atmosphere of calm that seemed to engulf it.
Dawes had not disappointed her; on the contrary, she loved it at firstsight. For though Dawes was new and crude, it looked rugged andhonest--and rather too busy to hesitate for the purpose of indulging ingossip--idle or otherwise. Dawes, she was certain, was occupying itselfwith progress--a thing that, long since, Westwood had forgotten.
Five minutes after she had entered the buckboard, the spirit of this newworld had seized upon the girl and she was athrob and atingle with thejoy of it. It filled her veins; it made her cheeks flame and her eyesdance. And the strange aroma--the pungent breath of the sage, borne toher on the slight breeze--she drew into her lungs with great longbreaths that seemed to intoxicate her.
"Oh," she exclaimed delightedly, "isn't it great! Oh, I love it!"
Elam Parsons grinned at her--the habitual smirk with which he recognizedall emotion not his own.
"It _does_ look like a good field for business," he conceded.
The girl looked at him quickly, divined the sordidness of his thoughts,and puckered her brows in a frown. And thereafter she enjoyed theesthetic beauties of her world without seeking confirmation from heruncle.
Her delight grew as the journey to the new home progressed. She saw thefertile farming country stretching far in the big section of countrybeyond the water-filled basin; her eyes glowed as the irrigationditches, with their locks and gates, came under her observation; and shesat silent, awed by the mightiness of it all--the tall, majesticmountains looming somberly many miles distant behind a glowingmist--like a rose veil or a gauze curtain lowered to partly conceal themystic beauty of them.
Intervening were hills and flats and draws and valleys, and miles andmiles of level grass land, green and peaceful in the shimmering sunlightthat came from somewhere near the center of the big, pale-blue invertedbowl of sky; she caught the silvery glitter of a river that wound itsway through the country like a monstrous serpent; she saw dark blotches,miles long, which she knew were forests, for she could see the spires oftrees thrusting upward. But from where she rode the trees seemed to beno larger than bushes.
Looking backward, she could see Dawes. Already the buckboard hadtraveled two or three miles, but the town seemed near, and she had quitea shock when she looked back at it and saw the buildings, mere huddledshanties, spoiling the beauty of her picture.
A mile or so farther--four miles altogether, Parsons told her--and theycame in sight of a house. She had difficulty restraining her delightwhen they climbed out of the buckboard and Parsons told her the placewas to be their permanent home. For it was such a house as she hadlonged to live in all the days of her life.
The first impression it gave her was that of spaciousness. For thoughonly one story in height, the house contained many rooms. Those,however, she saw later.
The exterior was what intrigued her interest at first glance. So far asshe knew, it was the only brick building in the country. She had seennone such in Dawes.
There was a big porch across the front; the windows were large; therewere vines and plants thriving in the shade from some big cottonwoodtrees near by--in fact, the house seemed to have been built in a groveof the giant trees; there were several outhouses, one of which hadchickens in an enclosure near it; there was a garden, well-kept; and thegirl saw that back of the house ran a little stream which flowed sharplydownward, later to tumble into the big basin far below the irrigationdam.
While Parsons was superintending the unloading of the buckboard, Marionexplored the house. It was completely furnished, and her eyes glowedwith pleasure as she inspected it. And when Parsons and the driver werecarrying the baggage in she was outside the house, standing at the edgeof a butte whose precipitous walls descended sharply to the floor of theirrigation basin, two or three hundred feet below. She could no longersee the cultivated level, with its irrigation ditches, but she could seethe big dam, a mile or so up the valley toward Dawes, with the watercreeping over it, and the big valley itself, slumbering in the pure,white light of the morning.
She went inside, slightly awed, and Parsons, noting her excitement,smirked at her. She left him and went to her room. Emerging later shediscovered that Parsons was not in the house. She saw him, however, at adistance, looking out into the valley.
And then, in the kitchen, Marion came upon the housekeeper, a negrowoman of uncertain age. Parsons had not told her there was to be ahousekeeper.
The negro woman grinned broadly at her astonishment.
"Lawsey, ma'am; you jes' got to have a housekeeper, I reckon! How youever git along without a housekeeper? You're too fine an' dainty to keephouse you'self!"
The woman's name, the latter told her, was Martha, and there was honestdelight--and, it seemed to Marion, downright relief in her eyes when shelooked at the new mistress.
"You ain't got no 'past,' that's certain, honey," she declared, with adelighted smile. "The woman that lived here befo' had a past, honey. Aman named Huggins lived in this house, an' she said she's his wife.Wife! Lawsey! No man has a wife like that! She had a past, that woman,an' mebbe a present, too--he, he, he!
"He was the man what put the railroad through here, honey. I done hearthe woman say--her name was Blanche, honey--that Huggins was one of themultra rich. But whatever it was that ailed him, honey, didn't help hislooks none. Pig-eye, I used to call him, when I'se mad at him--which wasmostly all the time--he, he, he!"
The girl's face whitened. Was she never to escape the atmosphere sheloathed? She shuddered and Martha patted her sympathetically on theshoulder.
"There, there, honey; you ain't 'sponsible for other folks' affairs.Jes' you hold you' head up an' go about you' business. Nobody sayanything to you because you' livin' here."
But Martha's words neither comforted nor consoled the girl. She wentagain to her room and sat for a long time, looking out of a window. Fornow all the cheer had gone out of the house; the rooms looked dull anddreary-
-and empty, as of something gone out of them.
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