“Of course.” They were approaching Masters and Dr. French, who stood waiting by the train platform. “Late and happy!” she called.
Harry Banks, walking ahead beside Marion Slater, had taken his own wordless rebuke from her. During the train passage, he made the concession of keeping away from Bertram, and grouped himself off in the other double seat. Bertram, sitting with Kate and the engaged couple, spoke but seldom and then languidly. He did not come face to face 132 with Harry Banks again until the buckboards had delivered them at the Masters ranch.
This estate bore the title of “ranch” only by courtesy. Masters himself said that he raised nothing but mild Hell on his forty acres. He did have an olive orchard, a small orange grove flourishing by luck of a warm gorge in the hills, and a little fancy stock. Kate and Masters took possession of the new guest at the gate, and carried him over the estate for inspection. Mainly, Bertram took this entertainment sullenly. He warmed a little at the sight of the cattle. The house, built by Masters’s own design, drew only the comment, “pretty nice.” After that, Bertram was free to go to his room and dispose his belongings. Returning in a marvelously short time, he came out upon the house-party, grouped all in the big, redwood ceiled living-room.
A fire of driftwood snapped with metallic crackling on the hearth. Alice Needham sat with Dr. French beside it; Mrs. Masters, pausing in a flight of supervision, had stopped to speak with them; Alice was looking up at her, presenting her fresh, full-faced view to the gaze of the man on the staircase. 133 Marion Slater stood with Masters by one of the Dutch windows, criticizing the design with a painter’s half-arm gestures. Banks, by another window, sat dividing his time between a book and the valley below.
It happened then, as Bertram stood there, that Alice Needham looked in his direction. It happened, also, that she was smiling. He caught her smile and smiled back.
That smile was half the secret of his physical charm. In the first place, it broke with wholly unexpected force. His face, what with its heaviness of feature, was a little forbidding and severe. As he bent his unillumined gaze, he appeared stern—even angry. Then, with the sudden preliminary vibration of an earthquake, that smile would begin to quiver about his mouth, to start wrinkles about his eyes. Next, as he bent his head forward toward the target of his charms, it drew back the corners of his mouth to show his white teeth, it pulled eyelids and eyebrows into a tiny slit, through which his pupils twinkled like electric sparks. These movements—wholly muscular at that—spiritualized and transformed his face.
Mrs. Masters, looking up at the interruption, 134 was caught in this flood of charm and good will. Harry Banks, feeling a psychic current running about the room, looked up also; and that smile caught him. It carried away the last trace of his perverse mood. And Bertram heaved himself down the stairs and crossed at once to seat himself beside Alice Needham.
“I see at a glance I’m going to like this party,” he said. On other lips there would have been nothing to laugh at in this; but they all did laugh. In a minute more, Harry Banks had dropped his book and crossed over to the fireplace. Bertram, leading the talk now, took him in without a trace of apparent resentment. Kate, emerging from the room, dropped down beside Harry Banks on the floor and joined her cheerful pipe to the symphony of good fellowship. Before luncheon, this find of hers was the centre of the party; events were revolving about him.
In the lazy hour after meat, the engaged couple found chance to slip out into the orange grove. Masters, summoned by his foreman, went to look after a sick cow, Harry Banks went back to his reading, and Alice Needham to a design for a window seat which 135 she was building for the Masters dining-room. These pairings left Bertram and Kate to each other; and presently they were out-of-doors, drawing on into the woods. Masters, from the barn, watched them and noted what a goodly couple, what a faun and dryad in clothes, they were. Kate Waddington was turning over her shoulder her slow and rather lazy smile, which began at her lips and lit her green-grey eyes last of all. That was her best attitude of head. Bertram swung up the trail, making progress by main force—not walking so much as lifting himself on those sturdy, saddle-sprung legs of his. He was making wide, sweeping gestures; and Kate, as he talked, leaned a little toward him now and then, like a woman absorbed.
Momentarily, she had him on the subject of football. He was touching upon the subject of one Bill Graham, Stanford tackle and opponent in two varsity games, whom she knew and whom he was teaching her to know better. Bertram stooped and gathered a handful of pebbles from the trail to show how Bill Graham used to throw sand in his eyes; he thrust his open hand against an alder, bordering the trail, to show how he 136 contravened these tactics by slamming Bill Graham in the face. Even so far did loosen his tongue and spirit that he boasted of his victories and excused his defeats. He went further; he touched upon the most frightful disappointment of his career.