To-night, Olsen was waiting to know whether she thought that the ten rows of Moor Parks were ready for picking; he had just finished the first crop of the Judge’s Royals and a small gang would be without pressing work on Monday morning. So they walked over the orchard together, pressing a golden ball here and there, and decided that the fruit was ripe and ready. Eleanor summoned Antonio for directions about boxes and ladders. The hen-house had to be inspected, for Eleanor 65 was fumigating against the pip, brought into the Santa Lucia by an importation of fancy Eastern chickens. To-morrow’s menu of the housekeeper was to be looked after. The things kept her busy until her solitary Sunday evening supper.
Eleanor had dined alone so much that she had quite recovered from any self-pity on that score. Like the daughter of convent manners that she was, she kept up her self-respect by a little ceremony at this meal. She dressed for it usually; at least she put on fresh ribbons and flowers, gave a touch here and there to the table, held Maria to the refinements of service.
However, as she opened her napkin that evening the rush and emotional strain of the day brought a certain flash of introspection. It came first when she lifted her eyes and caught sight of herself in the mirror—dewy eyed, fresh, a pink rose in her hair, a pink ribbon at her throat. What was she, so young, so feminine, doing there, supping alone in state? She remembered the invitation of Lars Wark in Munich; he and his wife, living the life artistic away over there, had sent to ask her that she visit them and share their winter in the studio or their summer on the coast of Brittany. 66 Why, in the face of that alluring invitation, did she suffer her soul to keep her in such prisons as this? She could afford it; there was no question of money. According to the books she had read, that solitary state belonged to old, disappointed bachelors, old maids, faded people generally. Here she sat, a picture unseen, playing at age—and she less than twenty-two. There was a kind of delicate incongruity about it all. And watching her own grey eyes, as they faced her in the mirror, she half comprehended why she continued to live so, even after her father died and took away the reason for her old solitude. She had been under the hypnotic suggestion of an event, an impression. That moment on Montgomery street, when she found her father lying drunk, when tragedy and responsibility came together—that moment had stretched itself out to six years. She had lived by it; was living by it now.
In some unaccountable fashion, that picture would intertwine itself with the impression, so new and vivid, which she had received that afternoon. Momentarily, both united to produce one emotion—profound disgust and dislike for the coarseness, the brutality, of male 67 humanity, which had laid her father out on the pavement for the sport of a mob, which had made this perturbing young man trample on all considerations and delicacies.
“You need not mind about dessert, Maria,” she called out suddenly. She rose, hurried out of doors, tore into the inspection of fruit crates for to-morrow’s picking.
Night, falling with little twilight, as always in those climes, found her still ranging the house and barnyard, the rose incongruously in her hair, the ribbon at her throat. When it was too dark to find employment out of doors, she hurried back to the house, tried to read. But a sense of confinement drove her forth. She started out toward the road, stopped by the hedge gate, sat down finally on a bench under her grape arbor. The leaves and the bunches of swelling fruit hid her from sight of the highway, overshadowed at that point by a great bay tree.
A confusion of voices, masculine and feminine, sounded in the distance. She caught a shrill, rowdy laugh. “The cutting-women and their men,” she thought dimly. That social phenomenon of the picking season, grown accustomed by six years of passing summers 68 and winters, drew no special attention from her. But the noise continued; it became plain that these reveling laborers were making in her direction. Doubtless, they came from the women’s camp at Judge Tiffany’s. The night was bringing her peace and sleep of the soul after a disturbing day; alone, that raucous noise marred the calm.
She peered idly through the leaves. A half a dozen women, their white dresses making them visible in the dusk, a few men whose forms loomed indistinctly against the edge of the sky, noised past her and were gone down the road. One couple, she perceived, lingered behind. They had reached the shade of the bay tree, were so close that she might have reached out and touched them, before she realized the situation. She was about to call out, to cough, when the man spoke.
“No, I won’t hurt you,” he said, “I’m as gentle a little kisser as you ever saw.” The voice was that of Bert Chester.
“Aw, you’re too fresh,” came the voice of the girl. But as they drew into deeper shadow, she was not pulling away from him.