Lauderdale leaned back into his chair with a sigh of satisfaction. “I used to call her ‘Little Lynx.’ There never was such a child for sinuousness. Ah, what a treat you’re giving me, Mr. Pape, to help me see again the beauties of my beautiful girl! Tell me—” The father’s voice lowered without loss of eagerness. His hands quavered forward, as though to supply the lack in his misted, striving eyes. “I want to know particularly about the expression of her face. Has the trouble I’ve brought upon her shadowed its brilliant paleness? Has it still that rare repose, with only a lift of the eyelid, a twitch of a corner of her lips or a quiver of her chin, to show the emotions beneath?”
Pape drew back from the he-man habit of hiding his heart; then, after a thought, leaned forward again. Why hide from this one man who could be her true lover, yet no rival to himself? Why not show what he felt? He closed his eyes, the better and more companionably to picture Jane. He felt that they two, both sightless now, saw the same vision as he spoke.
“I ain’t what you’d call up in art, sir. But I saw in Paris the finest statues in the world, or so they told me. The quiet of those still, white people sort of got on my imagination. Their suppression seemed to spoil me for the awful animation of the average face. Likely that’s why your Jane’s got me at first sight, although I hadn’t thought it out up to now. Hers is the first female face I ever was glad to watch in vain for a smile. There couldn’t be a marble paler or purer or with features finer lined. Just as I used to thank Heaven, looking at those statued ladies, that they couldn’t relax from their perfection, I feel like praying that Jane never will relax into a smile—until she smiles on me.”
A crowded silence fell between, but did not separate them. Its most vital question the Westerner next answered bluntly, after his way.
“It ain’t impudence, my calling her by her first name, Mr. Lauderdale. I haven’t had a real good opportunity as yet to ask your daughter to marry me. You see, we haven’t met any too often—this is time the fourth and only a shade less perturbed than the former three. But rest assured that I’ll take advantage of the first chance. Our ‘happily-ever-afterward’ is all settled so far as I am concerned.”
“I see.”
Although in one way the blind man’s quiet statement wasn’t true, in another he looked as though it was.
At a call from the rear room, Pape sprang to open the door and relieve Jane of her laden tea-tray. On turning, he noticed that the father’s one hand gripped the other in his strong, firm, Westernwise clasp, as though in self-congratulation. He looked as though he now felt sincere in the welcome extended earlier for form’s sake to one Peter Stansbury Pape. Just why? Well, why not?
CHAPTER XVI—AN ACCEPTED ALLY
“Mr. Pape has been painting your picture with a brush dipped in colors of the Yellowstone,“ observed Curtis Lauderdale as he sipped the fragrant amber brew which his daughter had poured and passed.