Ewing's Lady

by Harry Leon Wilson

And there were the mountains themselves, things that had once leaped alive and tortured themselves into frenzied furies of striving only to be stricken and left at last in all the broken tossing of their folly. They had tried the fighting death, and it had availed only to fix their last agonies. Their scarred hulks testified to the wisdom of submission.

Yet her mind was normal in these sun-warmed hours of musing. She knew that those dead hills with their dying leafage told another tale to the pair of young lives housed with her. To them they were but inspirations to life vital and triumphant; eminences to be scaled in joyous effort, offering to youth's dreaming, half-true clairvoyance, unending reaches to provoke; near enough to seem attainable; far enough to be plausible with promise of delights.

Nor did she fail to rejoice in the fervor of this fresh view so unlike her own. She was conscious of its truth to untouched souls like theirs, and she sought to throw them together, urging them to excursions through the hills. She thought of them at first as her pair whom she had set in a garden where the fruit of no tree was forbidden.

She coolly studied Ewing on the days when he worked indoors, detaching herself from his life as one about to go on a long journey. From her shadowed couch she scanned his face as he bent over the drawing board. It had filled in the year since she first saw it, and was an older face, the strength of it more conscious, the promise of it almost kept in its well-controlled, level-eyed maturity. Much of the boy remained to flash out, but she saw that this would never go; that it would kindle his eyes when the brown hair had gone white. It was this eternal boyishness, she saw, that made him quick of response to another's interest; this that had made him seem too ductile under Teevan's manipulation, when in truth he had merely been loath to hurt, fearing nothing so much as another's pain. The forward line of the nose and the smoldering fierceness of eye should have been more informing. That was the face, vital, fearless, patently self-willed for all its kindly immaturities of concession, that Teevan had thought to prevail over by his stings of waspish contempt. She smiled pityingly for Teevan, until she recalled that she also had misread its lines. There were moments when her beaten spirit fluttered up at thought of Teevan's being blasted by what he had thought to blast. But a look at the mother's restraining face, or, still more, a look at Ewing as he would glance from his work up to the portrait, stilled this craving for battle. It was well, she thought, as it had fallen.

Ewing had set to work doubtingly at first, but with laughing energy when he found that the lines came again at his call. He felt, indeed, that his facility had been increased, and he confided this to Mrs. Laithe one day as she lay watching him.

"I don't have to 'squeeze' the way I did," he said. "Perhaps I really learned something there in spite of myself, in all that messing with colors. I didn't learn to paint, but I seem to have a new line on bucking bronchos and bucked cowboys." He stopped in sudden thought.

"There, I've forgotten that old painting of mine. I'll treat us both to a look at it."

He went off to Ben's room beyond the kitchen and came back with the dusty canvas. He wiped it with a cloth and placed it on the easel.

She did not look at this. She knew it too well. Her look was for his face as he studied it. She saw surprise there, bewilderment, incredulity, and then, slowly dawning, a consternation of dropped jaw and squinting scowl. Yet this broke at length, and, to her great relief, he laughed, heartily, honestly. She smiled, not at the poor painting, but in sympathy with him. Then he remembered that she had looked at this same canvas once before, and that neither of them had laughed. His face sobered, and he went over to her.

"You had nerve, didn't you—after seeing that thing?"