“I just rested and basked,” said Dean Wolcott, gratefully, “but I must be off now, for I won’t make Post’s before nine o’clock and—” he stopped aghast—“good heavens, my horse! I’ve left him standing in the fog, when he was—”
“Oh, but I put him up, directly I went out,” said his hostess, easily. “Of course you’re going to stop the night with us. What do you suppose Mateo—with his traditions of Spanish hospitality—would say to me if I confessed to having you here and letting you go? We can put you up quite nicely, and you can fancy what it means to us to have a house guest! Should you like to go to your room, now?”
She did not wait for him to answer but stepped briskly toward another door. “This way—and a step down! My funny little house is on four different levels, but I like it. Some day, when our ship comes in, we mean to have sleeping porches—but it takes a long time for a ship to come in, on this foggy coast—and to come ashore as high as this!” She laughed with entire contentment. “Hot water in the pitcher, and towels there, do you see? Perhaps I’d better light your candle—these tiny windows let in very little light after the sun sets.” She lighted a candle in a satiny brass candlestick and went away, and left him to the comfort of hot water and rough, clean towels, and presently he heard a hail from without and her glad answer, and then exchange of rippling Spanish.
Mateo Golinda was a rather small, middle-aged Spaniard with piercing eyes and a fine aquiline nose, and his welcome was as picturesque and colorful as if it had been given in his father’s native Valencia. Dean Wolcott remembered now, the things the doctor had told him of this household, and he drank the wine of astonishment. Margaret Burton had come into the Big Sur country on a sketching trip; she had left it only long enough to go home and tell her aghast and staggered family that she was to marry a Spanish rancher who spoke almost no English, to live with him on his difficult ranch, fifteen high and winding miles from a telephone. The young man had seen a generous portion of the world considering his years, and he came to regard this as the most remarkable marriage he had ever known; it could not, he felt, have succeeded so signally if either Margaret Burton or Mateo Golinda had brought less to it. They worked out-of-doors like peasants, both of them, like pioneers, but when they came into the silver-gray house they left the toil behind them; they came into a gentle world of candlelight and firelight, of shining brass and thin, old silver spoons, of limber-covered ancient Spanish books; probably nothing else would so have completed the picture for Dean Wolcott as to find the current number of the Atlantic Monthly in one of the Chinese chairs.
The supper was excellent and a beautiful and dignified dog sat a little withdrawn, watching his master worshipfully.
“Mateo,” said Mrs. Golinda, after Dean had noticed and commented upon him, “let us show Mr. Wolcott how seriously he takes his position. You see, Mr. Wolcott, Mateo had Lobo before he had me and Lobo wishes that point to be very clear. He likes me—he is even fond of me—but he considers me simply another of his master’s possessions, and a later and less important one.”
“Dame tu mano,” said the Spaniard, softly, reaching his brown and work-hardened hand across the table to his wife, who laid her own within it. Instantly the dog arose, the pupils of his golden eyes contracting, and went close to Margaret Golinda, growling. When she drew her hand away he ceased growling and wagged his plumy tail, slowly, approvingly, and after an instant, to make sure the incident would not be repeated, he returned to his place. “You see?” said his mistress, laughing. “Lobo likes women as many persons like dogs—‘in their place!’”
Dean Wolcott felt his throat tighten, suddenly, but it was not because of Lobo’s jealous fealty; it was because these people who had worked unceasingly for years to win a livelihood from their steep and stubborn acres, who had sometimes seen only each other for weeks on end, whose existence was narrow and circumscribed, according to the ordinary standard, had kept the gleam alight; still said—“Give me your hand.” And—good heavens—how they had given each other a hand, late and early, in good weather and bad weather, in rich seasons and barren seasons; it was sign and symbol. Now the ranch was almost clear; now Mateo Golinda spoke a careful and correct English and his wife a fluent Spanish; now, year by year, something of comfort was added, something of hardship was conquered. It was a thing to have seen; a thing to remember.
They set him on his way in the pearly morning, and not by look or word did Margaret Golinda betray her knowledge of his condition on arriving the day before. When he had tried the second time to explain she had stopped him again. “It was odd that you’d been thinking of that old thing—I expect you learned it in the grammar grades as I did?—for it had come into my mind just a few days ago, when I was watching the sheep for Mateo. One remembers the old things, in places like this!” And when he rode away they called after him to come soon again, to make them a regular port of call. There was no need to urge him; the weathered gray house on the high hill above the sea would always spell sanctuary to him; it would always be what he would have called, twenty years earlier, “King’s X!”
That afternoon he wrote to an old Harvard friend who lived in San Francisco and was ardently interested in a troop of Boy Scouts in one of the poorer portions of the city; he had stopped over with him for two days on his way to Monterey.