He threw her a wistful glance, as he was a good lad and naturally chivalrous. However, his mother had a tongue that was sharp, and she wanted the berries for his father’s pie.
“I’ll be sure to tell everyone what you said, ma’am,” said Horatio, and off he went.
The sun now glared directly into the widow’s face. With the departure of the youth, all visible animation had disappeared from the arid landscape. She had no energy to get up, and she was beginning to wonder why. Was it possible something was the matter with her besides the heat and the horrible rejection she had just suffered?
She could not remember ever feeling quite so weak. This was her last thought before falling unconscious.
Zelda Brighton had been bitten by a serpent-like creature that had slithered toward her while she was sitting under the trees at Devil’s Bellows.
Intent on watching the couple in the garden, she had failed to see the adder draw up to its full height, stick out its spiky tongue, and hiss a warning before making the strike. The female adder was furious at the intruder who was sitting on her nest. When the strike came, the Widow was aware of the pain, but she thought it was the sun’s heat piercing the fragile skin on her calf.
Rousing from his nap, Nicholas looked around for his wife. He saw she was sitting by the fireplace with a book in her hand, drowsing. As he watched, she sat bolt upright, evidently startled by something in her reverie. Her dreams were often troubling to her. He had often been puzzled by the trance she seemed to be in when awakening.
Cassandra's first sight was of Nick rubbing his eyes with both hands. “Nick, stop it! You know what the doctor said.”
“Oh, sorry, dear. I had quite a dream just now, one I won’t soon forget.”
“Yes?”
“It was about my mother. I dreamed I went to her house to make amends. When I got there, I couldn’t get in. No matter how many times I knocked, she wouldn’t answer the door. My knuckles hurt from clenching them. What time is it, Cassandra?”
She avoided his eyes as she answered. “Nearly two o’clock.”
“Oh my! I will be late getting back at it today, and there is much to do in the field. Why didn’t you wake me?”
“You were sleeping so heavily, my love. Annie May has not come back from the village yet to make your supper. I thought I would let you sleep until then.”
“Do we have any berries remaining, my sweet?” If his eyesight had been better, he might have noticed her cheeks were the color of strawberries.
“We do, and some cream, if you would like a dish. It is so hot, I wish you would stay here with me instead of going back out.”
“I must say I feel starved after all that distressful dreaming. But there is something else on my mind.
“Yes?”
“I am motivated to do something about my mother. Today, I mean.”
Nicholas went to the window and said, while looking out, “I would have thought I would hear something from mother by now, after I sent her the note about my inheritance. I keep expecting to see her at the door.”
Cassandra squirmed. Faced with the difficulty of explaining her own behavior, she made a decision on the spot. She resolved to tell her husband nothing about his mother's failed visit. It was a failure of courage she would regret to the end of her days.
“I have come to a decision,” said Nicholas, after he had eaten a light meal. There was a tone of unusual resolution in his voice. “I must certainly go to the Grange, as she is too stubborn to come here.”
“Shall I go with you?”
He looked at his wife with surprise, as he had often asked her to do so, and she had always refused. “Actually, my love, I think I had better go alone.”
He picked up his work gloves, then threw them down again. “In fact, instead of working anymore, I'll go see mother right now. I might be home late, dear, so don’t wait up for me.”
Cassandra was silent.
“What are you thinking of that makes you look down in the mouth? Certainly not my being away for a few hours.”
“Oh, living in this place gets me down. The world seems all wrong.”
“I see you’ve been reading novels and dreaming of living in a castle again. Well, cheer up, dear. Life isn’t so melodramatic as it is in fiction.”
“I wish you weren’t going to Alta alone, Nick.”
“Why not? You said it would be best if I went to her first.”
“I was wrong. I have a feeling something may be said which will haunt us.”
“I assure you my mother is not vindictive!” cried Nicholas, his color faintly rising.
“Please, just stay with me tonight, Nick. I am feeling low. I promise I'll ride to Alta first thing tomorrow and set things right. You can meet me at the end of the morning when you are finished with work.”
He frowned. “I’ve asked you several times to do just that, and you always refused. What is different now?”
She searched his face for a look of suspicion, but his expression merely seemed to say he was tired of dealing with her whims.
“I cannot explain why. It's just a feeling I have. One of dread.”
“Well, it’s very odd you suddenly want to see her after refusing to do so all this time. If I wait until tomorrow, I will spend another sleepless night. I would like to get it over with now, Cassie. Indeed I insist that I must.”
“Then couldn't I go with you, Nick?”
“My, my, my. You certainly are a mystery to me. But you would need more rest along the way than I’m planning to take, dear. Better if I go alone and keep it brief. Come, stop being perverse. Annie May will be back soon, so you’ll have company. Take your book and go to bed early. I will be back before you know it.”
“As you wish,” Cassandra said, with the resigned air of one who lets the devil take the hindmost.
And so, two hours after his mother had failed to gain entrance to his home, Nicholas set off toward his old native home. Although the heat of the day had been intense, he rode in a fair degree of comfort. He felt a sense of peace, for he had no doubt that everything would be improved by his actions. He traveled on the hidden path, taking the bumpy back way to Alta, as it was faster.
After only a few minutes of his ride, he grew thirsty and turned to reach for the water flask strapped to Teddy’s underside. As he did so, he caught a whiff of something cloyingly sweet in the air.
Strange, he thought, how the floral fragrance was very like his mother’s tincture of roses worn on special occasions. On an impulse, he whistled his horse to a stop. It was then he heard a faint moan from the vicinity of a thatch of bushes at the south side of the path, below a knoll.
As old man Like's livery stables lay on the other side of the knoll, Nicholas’s first surmise was someone having been thrown from a skittish horse and now thrashing in the bushes. He thought he had better investigate further. It was no good leaving his wife unprotected in an unlocked cabin with a stranger nearby. Sometimes cowboys and goat herders were known to sleep out on the range, and they could be a rough lot.
He looked to where the sound came from, but nothing appeared there except the hillock stretching across the sky in an unbroken line. He moved several long strides in the direction from where the sound had come, and it was then he heard it again.
He perceived a prone human figure, though his eyes were too feeble to make out if it was adult or child, male or female. When he ran forward and bent over the figure, then looked more closely into her dead-white face and saw who she was, he screamed aloud to the windswept skies:
“Oh, no! Dear God! No! No!”
His mother's features were distorted and her eyes closed, but he had heard another moan; she was still alive. Bending yet lower, he heard her breaths coming, though irregularly and with an occasional rasp.
“Mother! It is me, Nick! Can you hear me? Can you speak?” He pressed his lips to her face. The skin was cold and clammy. “What has happened? Are you ill?”
She moved her lips, appearing to k
now him, but unable to speak.
What he could not hear were three sentences repeated, not by her tongue and lips, but said over and over in her brain: “My son, you have come to me. I forgive you.”
Nicholas considered the best way to move her, as the dew would set in soon. He was able-bodied, and his mother was thin. Getting her on the horse might cause her further damage, depending on what was wrong.
He decided he would carry her into Bulette to see a doctor. Clasping his arms around her, he lifted her gently. “Does that hurt you, mother?”
Her head moved slightly, indicating no. He remembered with such clarity other times they had been together out in the wilderness like this, when he was a child and she was a strong young woman, helping her husband conquer the land and build a home. How strong she appeared then, and how frail now, weak as a kitten.
The air was much cooler and the wind was rising. But the long patches of ground uncarpeted with vegetation reflected from their surfaces the heat that had collected from the day. He feared her blood was still overheated, as she felt hot to the touch. His burden, though light, kept his pace to a crawl. Yet he stolidly persisted, heedlessly walking through clouds of miller moths and bats.
While he was still a half-mile from the town, his mother's face showed some signs of agitation, so he stopped, shifted her onto his knees, and looked around for help. Spotting a group of tiny cabins not far off, the sort inhabited by workmen, it occurred to him he might solicit someone's help in getting a doctor. Picking his burden up again, he proceeded at a fast pace toward the nearest of the cabins and knocked loudly on the wood door with his bare knuckles.
As it happened, two of the three young men within were Jason Harrison and Sam the haymaker, who had come over to play cards with a Bulette tradesman and fellow bachelor they had gone to school with. They had been having quite an enjoyable time of it.
When the cabin's owner opened the door, the two inside, who had been shouting at each other over the card-table, were suddenly quiet. They were dumbfounded to see Nicholas Brighton standing there, dressed in laborer’s clothes and bearing his unconscious mother in his arms.
“Get us a doctor,” he said as he carefully placed his mother on a rude cot that served as a bed.
Harrison volunteered to run with all speed. Sam was dispatched for brandy from the cupboard, and Nicholas administered a little to the Widow. She gasped, though her eyes remained closed.
“Where do you hurt, mother? Can you show me?”
The weak woman still could not speak, but after a time, she managed to dangle a hand near a leg. There on the calf, just above her walking boot, they saw a raw puncture wound. Around it the skin was swollen and red; even as they watched, it was turning a more livid color.
“I know what it is!” cried Sam. “She has been stung by an adder!”
“You’re right,” said Nicholas. “I remember seeing such a bite as a child. Vipera berus. My poor mother!”
“My father was bit on our old farm. There is only one way to cure it,” said Sam. “The wound has to be treated with the fat of a fried adder.” He did not want to say the bite had killed his father, making his mother a widow Sam had the care of.
“They say the devil abides in snakes and adders,” said the owner of the cabin. “Injuns worship ‘em.”
“Those old notions aren’t science, just superstition,” said Nicholas harshly. “Our best chance is the medical man. I hope he comes quickly.”
At that moment Jason Harrison, who had run like a deer in the service of his friend, plunged through the door with the doctor, who immediately went to the collapsed woman's side.
After Nicholas left the cabin, I was restlessly pacing through the house and the garden, wondering what my mother-in-law would say to my husband. I then repeated the circuit. I could not bear the dreary cabin one moment longer. I had to get out.
“Annie May!” I called out. “I’m going for a walk. Would you leave the lantern on when you retire? I may be out until after dark.”
My idea was to walk toward Alta for an hour and then rest. Once the day's heat receded, I would set out again. In this way, I would meet up with my husband on his return trip from the Brighton Grange, and I could nip any damage in the bud.
I also needed to get out of the cabin because I was disappointed in myself. I had failed in my duty as a wife, just as I had predicted to Nicholas I would. What would my husband think of me if my adultery was revealed? I remembered that Mother Brighton had warned me about falling into disfavor with my husband: “You’ll find out that though he appears to be mild-mannered as a child, he can be hard as steel.”
I had not been walking for long when, much to my surprise, whom should I see but my grandfather! He was driving along the main road from Alta in a brand new horseless carriage, outfitted with isinglass windows.
I recalled he had often threatened to go down to Casper and buy himself one of the newfangled things, as he had never been comfortable riding a horse—”my sea legs don’t fit, you know, and the mile walk into town is a terrible chore for a man of my age in the winter.” Beholding my grandfather's grinning face inside a vision of chrome and rubber,
I laughed with delight, and my worries flew away. I was so glad to see him, as well as delighted with this vehicle of the future!
“Cassie! Care for a jolly ride with a peevish old man on this day of Indian summer?”
For the next hour, we bumped along merrily and without a care in the world, waving to the occasional passersby and laughing at the startled expressions on the faces of cattle and antelope. With all the noise the thing made, backfiring and roaring along faster than the wind, we spoke hardly at all.
Finally, we were stopped back at my cottage door, and the Tin Lizzie was silent.
“Well, have you heard the news?”Grandfather asked, with a sly look into my face. Immediately my feelings of guilt returned. Had word already got out about my shameful behavior? If so, I would kill Drake.
“Well, no need for a long face. It appears Curly Drake has become a rich man overnight.”
“What! How so?”
Grandfather said a member of Drake's family had died, his Aunt Betty in Canada. She had emigrated from Scotland, where the rest of Drake’s family was already in the family plot. Her husband Eugene had opened the first cigarette-making factory in Canada. On his death, he made Betty a filthy rich widow. Curly was his aunt's favorite and her only remaining relative. Betty had been planning a visit to him when she was killed by a freak accident at a gambling hall in St. Louis. Luckily, she had written a will.
“Curly inherits eleven thousand dollars, without in the least expecting it.”
“When did he learn of this?”
“Several nights ago. I was at the Plush Horse when the telegram came in. What a fool you were, Cassie.”
“I? In what way?”
“Why, in not sticking to Drake when you had him.”
“Stick to him, indeed!” I scoffed.
“I know there was something between you. Why in the deuce didn’t you marry him?”
“I had my reasons,” I said with a shrug.
“How is your poor blind husband, by the way? Not a bad fellow either, if you like the type.”
“He is quite well.”
“This news about Drake is good fortune for your husband's cousin, what’s-her-name. Now I must drive home. I have been out in my machine, looking for folks to ride with me, but you are the first. Do you want any financial assistance, Cassie? Be frank with me, dear. What is mine is yours, you know. You are my only family.”
“Thank you, dear, but my husband declares we are not in any need of money.”
“I hear he cuts hay.”
“He does it as a pastime, until his eyes heal.”
“He is paid for his hobby, isn’t he? Three cents a pound, I heard.”
I colored. “Nick has money, but he likes to earn a little.”
“Very well. You know where I am if you need me.”
; After depositing Cassandra at her cabin, Captain Vye found he was not yet ready to go home. He was delighted when he spotted another acquaintance to accompany him in the horseless carriage jaunt. Horatio Nelson was dawdling along on the road. He looked crossly at him when the Captain invited him to jump in.
“Can't. Gotta go home.”
“Oh come on, boy. Live a little.”
In the end, Horatio could not resist. He allowed himself to be driven around Bulette and even to pretend it was the Fourth of July again, shouting “hurrah, hurrah!”
When the boy fell fast asleep, the Captain was unsure what to do with him. It was getting late. Should he take him to Cassandra's? The boy had said he was going home.
Horatio's mother was close friends with the gloomy Brown sisters, who did their utmost to make sure everyone's life was as miserable as their own. The Captain hated to deposit the boy back in Alta with his mother, who would only scold him. At that moment, he heard a great noise from a cabin that he was driving past. He stopped. Through the open door he could see several young men who seemed to be having an uproariously good time.
The Captain carried the lad to a nearby shepherd's hut. He thought Horatio might make himself part of the merriment when he awakened, which would be the best thing for him, even if he got a whipping from his mother. From his perspective, a lack of male companionship was not good for a boy's upbringing.
The lad cried out once. “Oh, miss!” And then he went back to sleep.
Three hours after her ride in the roadster, Cassandra roused herself from a nap. It was now after eight o'clock, and she was worried in earnest about Nicholas. His plan was to keep his visit brief. What was keeping him so late? Had he had an accident?
Because it was dusk, she put on her traveling cloak and picked up a lantern before going outside. Her walk brought her near a collection of workmen's cabins. In the distance she could see a crowd was gathering outside one of them, which was certainly odd, as it was growing dark.
Some instinct was drawing her ever closer to the crowd. She was consumed with dread about what she might see and even more dread about the prospect of being seen.
The Siren's Tale Page 20