Mitty had already gone in at a little quick step, as though she owned the place, the Indian housekeeper ingratiatingly at her heels.
There was a large central room, entered directly from the veranda, which bisected the rambling, one-story structure. One wing, leading off this, was evidently Mallory’s own quarters.
“Your room is over on this side,” he said, leading them into the other wing. “We’re not very fancy up here. You understand how it is.” He opened a door to reveal a rather shadowy interior, plank-floored and timber-roofed and almost barren but for a decrepit mahogany bed and a truncated chest, topped by a twinkling oil lamp, which cast alternate rays and shafts of shadow around it like the spokes of a wheel.
“Come out when you get hungry,” Mallory said, and withdrew down the hall.
Jones looked around him, and then at her.
It was only slightly more primitive than the hotel, after all. She was taking deep breaths, as though she couldn’t get enough of the air, as though it were something pertaining to her that she had done without for a long time. Unconsciously, her head was even tilted back a little, to be able to draw upon it more freely.
He tried to turn the little wheel of the oil lamp, to bring it up higher. He turned it the wrong way first, and it nearly went out altogether. Then he corrected himself, and brightened it the way he wanted to. The spokes of shadow lessened and the rays widened. Her face came into view more clearly. Her eyes were liquidly vivacious; that lackluster quality that had clouded them so often down on the coast was gone. And her face itself wore that most infrequent of all its expressions, which he had so seldom seen on it before now: She was smiling.
“How’s this?” he said. “Better?”
“Better. Much better.”
He didn’t mean the oil lamp, and he could tell she didn’t either.
Maybe I took the curse out of it, he thought.
Chapter Twelve
There was a fourth place laid at the table, Jones noticed when they came in. He thought for a moment it must be intended for some assistant of Mallory’s, perhaps a foreman or overseer that he had on the place. When the three of them had seated themselves, however, it still remained vacant.
Mallory gave a crooked grin, as if enjoying some little private thought of his own. “Bashful,” he murmured elliptically. “I suppose I’ll have to go in there and — we don’t get to see many people out here, and when you’re alone too much you get sort of skittish of strangers.”
He got up, went over to the door opposite the side from which they had emerged, and called through into some distant and hollow-sounding beyond: “Chris!”
His son, Jones supposed. There had been a note of paternal pride discernible underneath the mock impatience.
There was a wait. The doorway remained empty for a moment longer, while Mallory came back to the table and reseated himself. Then suddenly there was a lovely, slim thing standing in it, confused, uncertain whether to come forward or dart back out of sight again.
The clothing was that of a boy, the form wearing it a girl’s. She may have been eighteen; she looked about sixteen, and acted like fourteen. Her hair was as blonde as Mitty’s was black; her eyes as blue as Mitty’s were dark. There was a little bowknot of freckles high up on each cheek, and they formed a bridge across the top of her nose. But they weren’t very thick or distinct; just a scattering, like gold pollen on the apricot-tan bloom the sun had given her fair complexion.
She was as tall as she would ever be, but she still had to fill out; she had retained a child’s spareness of figure. She looked as though the span of a single hand would have been enough to encompass her waist.
It was her youngness that was so breath-taking, as she stood in that doorway, unconsciously framed there for them to look at. She was youngness itself, in all its awkward grace, all its gauche charm, all its eternal evanescence; abashed, self-conscious, embarrassed, tormented — yet able in an instant, at a smile or a word, to become daring, sure, self-oblivious, ecstatically delighted. And most often being a little of both at one and the same time.
Youngness personified, looking in at them. The number of her years had nothing to do with it; it was her spiritual state.
“Come in, Chris,” her father encouraged. “These people won’t eat you.” He dropped Jones a deprecating wink, on the side of his face away from her.
She came forward faltering, “I couldn’t find my—” She didn’t finish the lame little excuse, which none of them believed anyway. She had probably been ready for hours before, and watching for their arrival from behind the shutters.
“Chris, this is Mr. and Mrs. Jones,” Mallory introduced.
“You promised,” she breathed, in a private little rebuke to him that she tried to keep them from overhearing.
“Oh, I forgot,” he blurted out clumsily. “Excuse me — Christine.”
The apricot tan deepened momentarily to full-fledged rose, then lightened again to what it had been. “Chris is a boy’s name,” she said defensively. “It was all right when I was young, but—”
Mallory nodded in grave accord. “That’s true, I see what you mean; but now that you’re venerable and state—”
“Christine’s a lovely name,” Mitty offered tactfully. “I used to know a girl—” She began to talk to her, to put her at her ease.
Jones, turning his own attention exclusively to Mallory, to permit the effort to proceed even more successfully, but glancing at her occasionally, could see the diffidence melting away like snow in a hot sun. The only regrettable thing about it, he reflected, was that it would never come again, it was gone for good — at least with them. That first minute in the doorway was already gone. They had made her that much older. It was like quicksilver, that quality of being young; even as you looked at it, it had already grown a little older before your very eyes.
Mitty was already up and stirring when he opened his eyes the next morning, although the mists of dawn were still swirling about the place, inside and out. The coolness of the early morning at this altitude was delicious. It smelled of ferns and dew.
“Some improvement, isn’t it?” he greeted her cheerfully. “After that caldron we’ve been stewing in until now. I’m glad I called that doctor fellow in that night.”
“Come on,” she said. “Do you want to come with me for a ride? I’ve been outside already, and that boy that rode up with us yesterday is bringing a couple of the horses around.”
He groped for his shoes along the floor, interrupted himself to plant a hand against his writhing back. “I’m still stiff from yesterday, but I suppose one of the quickest ways of getting rid of it is to get stiff all over again today.”
She shifted weight from foot to foot in the doorway. “Hurry up, don’t take so long. Oh, never mind your tie!”
“That was just habit,” he grinned, casting it behind him. “Gosh, you’re impatient, aren’t you?” He liked to see her that way. It was better than all that broody stuff down on the coast.
The two horses were outside waiting for them, Pascual afoot between them. Early as he’d thought it was, he found Mallory already on the veranda.
“Going for a ride, I see. Want me to send Pascual with you?”
“No, why bother? You might need him around the place here. We’ll just lope out a way, turn around, and come back again.”
She was already mounted. She shook her unbound hair back, like a rippling mane. “Come on, Larry, you take so long to get started.”
“I haven’t got the sleep out of my eyes yet,” he grimaced.