Her father, that stolid Scot, had died while she was a hearty and unimaginative child; Aleck, her only brother, killed on the last day of fighting in the Great War, had been her pal and play-fellow, as were, in lesser and varying degrees, the young ranchers of the miles-wide neighborhood, while the vaqueros and old Estrada, mayordomo of her cattle ranch, were her henchmen, loyal, admiring, unquestioning. Always she had been able to divide the men of her world unhesitatingly into two classes—her equals, her inferiors.
Dean Wolcott was different. He was framed in mystery and hallowed by grief, coming to her—almost like a visitant from another world—in the dawn of a Christmas Day she had vowed not to keep, bringing her the word of her dead brother for which she had thirsted, and a stained and crumpled letter in Aleck’s own hand. It was the first shred of information she had had since the official communication, nearly four months after the armistice. That had come on a delicate day of early California spring; the rains had been late and the hills were only faintly brushed with green, but the wild flowers were out, brilliant, arresting, and the oaks were vocal with linnets and orioles; meadow larks sank liltingly on the low ground; the narrow little creek was lively and vehement, and the air was honey and wine. Everything was awake and alive except Aleck, and Aleck was dead. The grave official statement regretted to inform her that Lieutenant Alexander McVeagh was dead. Dead; not alive any more; never coming back to Dos Pozos; never to ride with her over the range again.
Something in Virginia Valdés McVeagh died likewise. When Aleck was there she had seemed less than her age; now she was more. She ceased at once to be “Ginger.” Swiftly, almost, it seemed, with a single motion, she grew up. She had always been cognizant of every detail of enterprise on the big cattle ranch, and now, with Estrada’s help, she took competent charge. She rode with him over the rolling hills on Aleck’s horse, brought in her cattle from remote pastures, saw to the planting of her alfalfa crops and the harvesting of her wheat, held rodeos, marketed her stock. Leaving off the mellow corduroys which toned alluringly with her skin and eyes and hair, and the brave scarlet sweaters and wine-red velvet dresses which sharply underlined her Spanish coloring, she swathed herself in black as bitterly as her Valdés grandmother would have done. She knew that it cut her beauty in two and she was glad: there had been flagelantes on her mother’s side of the house, three generations earlier.
The slow and difficult year had crawled away; February ... December. Virginia had refused to go to relatives in Los Angeles or San Francisco and asked them not to come to her. This first black Christmas (the one a year earlier had been vibrant with hope) she must be allowed to spend alone, in the luxury of uninterrupted and unconsoled grief. Even the servants—Estrada and his men, old Manuela, the housekeeper, Ling, the moon-faced Chinese cook—were banished to San Luis Obispo on the morning of the twenty-fourth, not to return until the twenty-sixth, but her gift to herself of solitude had been snatched away from her. Dos Pozos was five miles off the highway, but in good weather motorists often took the dirt road for a short cut. This year Virginia had neglected to have it kept up; the bridge, half a mile from the house, was a frail and ancient structure. Aleck had meant to replace it with a permanent one of concrete, and Estrada had begged her to carry out the young señor’s plan, but she would not. Later, perhaps; for the present, she was thankful for anything which made for isolation.
And then, ironically enough, the very thing which was to have kept the world away, brought it to her. It rained in torrents, lavish, riotous California rain; the road sank down into a batter of soft mud; the bridge whined in the storm; at seven o’clock on Christmas Eve four machines and ten persons, wailing children among them, were stranded and helpless. The telephone line was down; the vaqueros spending their holiday in town; and tradition was rigid; no one, gentle or simple, ever lifted the latch of Dos Pozos in vain. Grudgingly, with unadorned civility, Virginia had taken them into the old adobe ranch house and prepared to give them camp fare, for there was no way in which she could summon her servants.
It immediately appeared, however, that her servants did not require summoning; they were already there. The good creatures had merely driven round the turn of the road in the morning, waited until she had ridden off in the rain, and crept back again, hiding themselves discreetly in their quarters. Their idea had been to feed her as the ravens fed the prophet and to keep out of her sight, for they were on intimate terms with her temper and her tongue. When the house party enforced descended upon their mistress they had come boldly forth, rather giving themselves airs; what—they wanted respectfully to know—would she have done without them?
So it fell out that two brisk and cheerful school-teachers and a forlorn widower and his shabby children and a couple of Stanford students and a personage in a limousine made philosophically merry beneath the roof which had fully intended to cover nothing but desolate grief and decent silence, and Ling plied happily between his table and his glowing range, his queue snapping smartly out behind him, and old Manuela built fires and made up beds in the guest rooms, and Estrada rode into San Luis Obispo to send telegrams to distracted families.
When she went to bed at midnight Virginia had worked out something of her rebellion in weariness. She had resurrected toys for the pinched children, helped the school-teachers and the Stanford students to trim a tree for them and to decorate the big rooms with snowberries and scarlet toyon—spurred herself to a civil semblance of hospitality. As she fell asleep she was aware of a feeling she had sometimes had when she was a rather bad and turbulent child—that, having been good, unusually, laboriously good—something good should and must come to her.
It came at sunrise, when Estrada wakened her, calling excitedly in front of her window. She slipped her feet into Indian moccasins and threw a serape about her and padded down the long corridor and out on to the veranda. She heard people stirring as she passed the guest rooms; one of the children was whimpering with eagerness to be dressed and allowed to hunt for its Christmas stocking.
Behind the mayordomo stood a tall man in uniform: for one mad moment her heart stood still and her eyes dilated and blurred and the figure in khaki swam dizzily in the keen morning light.