Peaches stood outside all day, checking up the lugs as they arrived, arranging about freight rates, overseeing the allotment of box cars to the various growers, and generally doing a man's job. And never once during the twelve months which followed did I know her to fail in her work—her magnificent constitution helping, no doubt, to pull her through. But I could see that a permanent change had taken place in her from the day of Abby's letter. She was no longer the madcap, and though she was even more beautiful she was different—and through love, the great tamer—as Blake would have it.
This was the first incident to which I have referred as punctuating the monotony of the war for us. The second occurred more than a year later, in November, 1918, when we, like many another group of ranchers throughout the country, thought the town hall was on fire when all the time it was only the armistice.
Mr. Markheim, Pinto and Alicia and myself were indoors, an unusually cold snap having offered us the treat of an open fire, a not unmixed pleasure by reason of our being under some anxiety about the trees. But on the whole it was what some modern poet whose name I cannot at the moment recall has termed the end of a perfect day.
To begin with, I had dispatched three pounds of wool to Euphemia, whom Galadia, my only source of information about my sister, had written was doing great work for the Red Cross; her chief natural gift, that of knitting, had suddenly become of immense importance since the outbreak of the war, and she had to her credit and the honor of the family three hundred pair of socks. The achievement appeared almost foreign to me, inasmuch as I had not knitted any socks since that momentous pair at Monte Carlo, a surprising faculty for a more active existence having developed in me during my sojourn on the ranch. At any rate I had sent out the wool, finished my last jar of marmalade, of which I had made an experimental thousand for a market which Mr. Pegg intended the development of, and Mr. Markheim had returned from a visit East in company with Pinto. Peaches had that day succeeded in breaking a pony she had long desired as a saddle horse and had hitherto been unsuccessful with. Mr. Pegg had a special design for the marmalade jars—a crystal orange, of the natural size and shape, the preserved fruit to furnish the color, and he and I were most enthusiastic over it.
Mr. Markheim also credited himself with a successful trip, though from a wholly different cause. It appeared that he had at length contrived to install in his house a picture which he had long coveted, and this picture was none other than the Madonna of the Lamp, for which he had paid five hundred thousand dollars. Since his purchase of it the picture had been stored, and it seemed to me a strange time to trouble with getting it out. But Sebastian Markheim, with the fervor of the true collector and the madness which seems the hall-mark of his kind, was apparently oblivious of this circumstance and became wrapt in his description of it.
"You must have seen it in Vienna," he said. "Good heavens, don't say you have seen photographs of it! You cannot imagine the beauty of the thing itself. I have given directions for the remodeling of the south wall of my library in the Ossining house for its occupancy. It will hang all alone on that wall—it's only a small picture, you know, so I have had Hasbrock, the architect, design some panels to encircle it I hope it is going to please you, Alicia."
"What?" said Mr. Pegg twirling round suddenly from the bowl of ripe olives with which he was occupied. "What's that? Why should Alicia be pleased?"
"She's going to live there with it!" said Markheim. "She promised this afternoon!"
"Oh, no!" I said getting to my feet. But nobody seemed to hear me.