Carmen la Tosca rode well. She let more than usual of her pelvis drop into the saddle. Upon the reins she kept gloved hands in a grip that was consciously lacking in direction.
Carmen la Tosca was an actress. She had played in “Fife and Fiddle” and “Drums of the King.”
She took parts suggesting a love of danger and intrigue. She was always handsomely gloved and shod, and her dresses were widely copied.
She had been in stock, and in the beginning had sung in opera; she had been the Queen in “Aïda” and she had played a boy’s part in vaudeville. Now she was resting.
She was not the kind of woman who usually came to this quiet country town, snuggled, as they say, among the foothills. The boy who kept the general store said she was “stunning.” Little children ran backward ahead of her, crying provokingly, “Red lips, red lips!” But no one really knew her.
She had appeared in the Spring of the year with a man-servant and a maid. For two days she had been seen at the windows hanging curtains. When they were all hung no one saw her for some time. Then she bought a white horse and rode it. And after that she always rode on the white horse, though she had six or seven others before the Fall came. Usually she rode alone. Now and again a gentleman, with a birth-mark twisting his face into an unwilling irony, rode beside her. There was a goat path in the underbrush and here two boys sometimes came and lay and talked of her and waited for her to pass, riding that smart way on the white mare. These boys were Brandt and Bailey Wilson, a farmer’s sons. Sometimes couples, going berrying by the mountain road, came near enough to hear her laughing behind the casement.
Sometimes she walked, descending the hill carefully, avoiding the melon plants, talking brightly to a young man, but paying little attention to the effect of her words, not through vanity, but simply through lack of interest in the effect itself.
There was a great deal of gossip about her of course. She did not court mystery, but it was all about her.
People said that she was not exactly beautiful, neither was she ugly. Her face held the elements of both in perfect control. She was brutally chic.
A lean, tall woman of the village, who had come from London, said Carmen la Tosca’s back was like the Queen’s. This was probably an exaggeration.