CHAPTER XIII
Just where the Santa Eliza trail commanded sight of the main travelled road, Eleanor sat on a rock watching the hill-shadows lengthen on the valley below, watching a mauve haze deepen on the dark-green tops of redwood trees. The time was approaching when she must hurry back to Mrs. Goodyear’s bungalow for a dinner which she dreaded. Three weeks of perplexity had bred in her a shrinking from people. She had found excuse to wander away alone.
That lazy spring of the North woods, so like to early fall in other climates, had given her at first the healing of spirit which she needed. She wandered hither and yon as her fancy led her, following this trail, pushing into that opening in the chapparal. She had come out upon the Santa Eliza trail and gained sight of the road before she realized with a kind of inner shame the way in which 227 her feet of flesh had been tending, the direction in which she had been turning her eyes of the spirit.
Three miles away on the summit of the next ridge was the Masters ranch, and there rested the centre of her soul-storm. Bertram Chester, she knew by chance, was spending the week-end with the Masters.
She stopped by the rock, then; and immediately nature went out of her heart and the world entered. For three intolerable weeks, this heaviness had been descending upon her as by a whimsy of its own. Like the water of those cupped wheels in her little irrigation plant at the ranch, this black liquid, when it had filled its vessel to the brim, would empty automatically without touch on the spring of her will. When this came, she would feel rested, healed, in a state of dull peace. Now the struggle of thought was on her again. As always before, it began with an arraignment of the facts in the case, a search of memory for any forgotten data which might lead to a conclusion.
The first crisis arrived on the evening when Judge Tiffany came home in a plain mood of disgust, and announced baldly: 228
“Well, Mattie; our young friend did everything I expected of him.”
He went on quite simply with the news. Bertram Chester had left him almost without notice. But that was to be expected. The rest was the worst. Bertram had gone to Senator Northrup—as manager of his real estate interests. The name Northrup was as the name of the devil in that household. Northrup’s operations included not only law and politics but latterly speculative and unprincipled ventures in business. A dying flash of his old fire woke in Judge Tiffany when he spoke as he felt about this young cub who had bitten his caressing hand.
Eleanor left the dinner table as soon as she had a fair excuse. She found herself unable to bear it. Had she remained, she must have defended him. But alone in her living room she look counsel of this treason and agreed in her heart with her uncle. The very manner in which he had done it—never a hint, never a preliminary mention of Northrup—appealed to her as the deepest treason of all.