William H. Wharton - "Texas"

Victor Appleton - "Tom Swift And His Big Tunnel"

William Shakespeare - "The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus"

Unkown - "Grettir The Strong"

Sisters

K >> Kathleen Norris >> Sisters




Young Lloyd and Peter had walked home with her. But if Anne was
right in her maidenly suspicions of Lloyd's intentions, then it
must have been Peter who surprised little Cherry with a sudden
embrace. Lloyd had been hurrying for a train, too; the case looked
clear for Peter.

And as he came to his conclusions, a certain relief crept into the
old man's heart. Peter was an odd fellow; he was ten years too old
for the child. But Peter was a lover of books and gardens and
woods and music, after all, and Peter's father and this old man
musing by the fire had been "Lee" and "Paul" to each other since
boyhood. Peter might give Cherry a kiss as innocently as a
brother; in any case, Peter would wait for her, would be all
consideration and tenderness when he did win her.

"But I think perhaps she might go down to the San Jose school for
half a term," her father reflected. "Six months there did wonders
for Alix. No use precipitating things--the next few years are
pretty important for all the girls. We mustn't let her fancy that
the first man who turns her head with compliments is the right
partner for life! Alix, now--somehow she wasn't like Cherry, at
eighteen."

He smiled at a sudden memory of Alix, who was chicken-farming at
that age, and generally unpleasantly redolent of incubators,
chopped feed, and mire. He seemed to remember Alix shouting that
if Peter Joyce was going to LIVE in their house, she would move
somewhere else! Cherry was different.

Cherry, he reflected fearfully, was as pretty as her mother had
been at eighteen, with the same rounded chin and apricot cheeks,
and the same shadowed innocent blue eyes with a film of corn-
coloured hair blown across them. She had the strange, the
indefinable quality that without words, almost without glances,
draws youth toward youth, draws admiration and passion, draws life
and all its pain. Her father for the first time to-night
formulated in his heart the thought that she might be happily
married--

Married--nonsense! Why, what did she know of life, of submission
and courage and sacrifice? At the first strain, at the first real
test, she would want to run home to her Daddy again, to "stop
playing"--! It would be years, many years, before the snowy
frills, and the pale gold head, and the firm, brown little hand
would be ready for that!

Not many hours after he went slowly up to bed morning began to
creep into the little valley. The redwoods turned gray, and then
dark green, the fog stirred, and a first shaft of bright sunlight
struck across a shoulder of the hills, and pierced the shadows
about the brown bungalow. Alix, at her early bath, heard quail
calling, and looked out to see the last of the fog vanishing at
eight o'clock, and to get a wet rush of fragrance from the Persian
lilac, blooming this year for the first time. At half-past eight
she came out into the garden, to find her father somewhat ruefully
studying the tumbled ruins of the yellow banksia rose. The garden
was still wet, but warming fast; she picked a plume of dark and
perfumed heliotrope, and began to fasten it in his coat lapel
while she kissed him.

"We'll never get that back on the roof, my dear boy," Alix said
maternally.

Her father pursed his lips, shook his head doubtfully. The rose, a
short, week ago, had been spreading fan-like branches well toward
the ridge-pole, a story and a half above their heads. But the
great wind of yestereve that had ended the spring and brought in
the summer had dragged it from its place and flung it, a jumble of
emerald leaves and sweet clusters of creamy blossoms, across the
path and the steps of the porch. Alix looked up at the outward
curve of the reversed branches, bent almost to the splitting point
in the unfamiliar direction, and whistled. She tentatively tugged
at a loose spray, and stood biting her thumb.

"Why it should have kept its place for fifteen years and then
suddenly flopped, is a mystery to me!" she observed resentfully.

"Well, the truth is," her father confessed, "you were quite right
last night. When I pruned it, a week ago, I may have undermined
it."

"You never will listen to reason!" his daughter remarked absently,
her attention distracted by the setter puppy who came clumsily
gambolling toward her. "Hello, old Bumpydoodles!" she added, with
rich affection, kissing the dog's silky head, and burying both
hands in his feathered collar. "Hello, old Buck!"

"Alexandra, for heaven's sake stop handling that brute!" said
Peter Joyce disgustedly, coming up the path. "I dare say you've
not had your breakfast, either. Go wash your hands! 'Morning,
Doctor!"

Father and daughter turned to smile upon him, a tall, lean man,
with a young face and a finely groomed head, and with touches of
premature silver at his temples. He was very much at home here,
had been their closest friend for many years.

He was a bachelor, just entering his thirties, a fastidious,
critical, exacting man by reputation, but showing his best side to
the Stricklands. They had a vague idea that he was rich, according
to their modest standard, but he apparently had no extravagant
tastes, and lived as quietly, or more quietly, than they did. He
had a brown cabin, up on the mountain, where two or three
Portuguese boys and an old, fat Chinese cook managed his affairs,
and he sometimes spoke of friends at the club, or brought two or
three men home with him for a visit. But for the most part he
liked solitude, books, music, dogs, and his fireside. The old
doctor's one social enjoyment was in visiting Peter, and the
younger man went to no other place so steadily as he came to the
old house under the redwoods.

The girls accepted him unquestioningly, sometimes resenting his
frank criticism, sometimes grateful for the entertaining he
delighted to do for them, but most often ignoring him, as if he
had been an uncle whose place and standing in the domestic circle
was unquestioned, but who did not really enter into their young
plans and lives. He was whimsically, good-naturedly disapproving
of Alexandra, and he frankly did not like Anne, but he had always
been especially indulgent to Cherry, and had taken the subject of
Cherry's schooling and development very seriously. And Cherry
treated him, in return, as if she had been his demure and
mischievous and affectionate daughter.

"'Morning, Peter!" said Doctor Strickland now, smiling at him.
"Have you had yours?"

"My house," said Mr. Joyce fastidiously, "is a well-managed
place."

"Of course," Alix said, panting from her welcome to the dog, and
laughing at the newcomer without resentment, "of course it is, for
the President Emeritus of the Maiden Ladies' Guild is running it!"

"Don't be insulting," Peter answered, in the same mood. "Say," he
added, pursing his lips to whistle, as he looked at the rose tree,
"did Tuesday's wind do that?"

"Tuesday's wind and Dad," Alix answered. "Will it go back, Peter?"

"I--I don't know!" he mused, walking slowly about the wreck. "If
we had a lever down here, and some fellow on the roof with a rope,
maybe."

"Mr. Lloyd is coming over!" Alix announced. Peter nodded absently,
but the mention of Martin Lloyd reminded him that they had all
dined at his house on the very evening when the mysterious gale
had commenced, and with interest he asked:

"Cherry catch cold coming home Tuesday night?"

"No; she squeezed in between Dad and me, and was as warm as
toast!" Alix answered casually. "How'd you like Mr. Lloyd?" she
added.

"Nice fellow!" Peter answered. Alix grinned. She had before this
accused Peter of violent partisanship with his own sex. He
criticized women severely; the Strickland girls had often been
angry and resentful at his comments upon the insincerity,
extravagance, and ignorance of their own sex, but with Peter, all
men were worthy of respect, until otherwise proved.

"He's awfully nice," Alix agreed.

"Who is he?" Peter asked curiously. "Where are his people and all
that?"

"His people live in Portland," the girl answered. "He's a mining
engineer, and he's waiting now to be called to El Nido; he's to be
at a mine there. He's lots of fun--when you know him, really!"

"Talking of the new Prince Charming, of course," Anne said,
joining them, and linking an arm in her Uncle's and in Alix's arm.
"Don't bring that puppy in, Alix, please! Breakfast, Uncle Lee.
Come and have another cup of coffee, Peter!"

"Prince Charming, eh?" Peter echoed thoughtfully, as they all
turned toward a delicious drift of the odour of bacon and coffee,
and crossed the porch to the dining room. "I was going down for
the mail, but now I'll have to stay and see this rose matter
through! Thanks, Anne, but I'll watch you."

"Afraid of getting fatter?" Alix speculated, shaking out her
napkin. "You ARE fatter," she added, with a calm conviction.

"Do you always say the thing that will give the most offence?"
Peter asked, annoyed. "Where's Cherry?" he added, glancing about.

Cherry answered the question herself by trailing in in a Japanese
wrapper, and beginning to drink her coffee with bare, slender arms
resting on the table. Nobody protested, the adored youngest was
usually given her way. Alix's indifference to the niceties of her
toilet had been seriously combated, years ago, but Cherry was so
young, and so pretty in any dress or undress, that it was
impossible to regard her little lapses with any gravity. Moreover,
the family realized perfectly that Alix would have clipped her
thick hair, and taken to bloomers or knickerbockers outright, at
the slightest encouragement, and would gladly have breakfasted in
a wrapper, or in her petticoats, or while about the woods with her
dogs, whereas nobody could know Cherry and not know that every
weakness of which the feminine heart is capable, for frills and
toilet waters, creams and laces, was dormant under the childish
negligence.

"I heard you all laughing, under the window and it--woke--me--up!"
Cherry said dreamily.

"It seems to me," Anne, who had been eying her uneasily, said
lightly, "that someone I know is getting pretty old to come
downstairs in that rig when strangers are here!"

"It seems to me this is just as decent as lots of things--bathing
suits, for instance!" Cherry returned instantly, gathering the
robe about her, and giving Anne a resentful glance over her blue
cup.

"Peter, are you a stranger?" Alix said. "If Peter's a stranger,"
she added animatedly, "what is an intimate friend? Peter walks
through this house at all hours; you can't wash your hair or do a
little ironing without having Peter under your feet; he borrows
money from me; he bullies Hong about wasting butter--"

"Also you borrow money from me, my child, don't forget that,"
Peter interrupted serenely, peeling an apple. "I don't come to see
YOU, Alix."

"I have a rope somewhere--" the doctor ruminated. "Where did I put
that long rope--what did I have it for, in the first place--"

"You had it to guy the apple tree," Alix reminded him. "Don't you
remember you got a regular ship's cable to tie that tree, and it
never worked? The tree that died after all--"

"Ah, yes!" said her father, his attentive face brightening. "Ah,
yes! Now WHERE is that rope?" But even as Alix observed that she
had seen it somewhere, and advanced a tentative guess as to the
cellar, his eyes fell upon Cherry, and went from Cherry's absorbed
face--for she was dreaming over her breakfast--to Peter, and he
wondered if Peter HAD kissed her.

"Come on, let's get at it!" Alix exclaimed with relish. She loved
a struggle of any description, had prepared for this one with
sleeves rolled to the elbows, and had put on heavy shoes and her
briefest skirt. "Come on, Sweetums," she added, to the dog, who
had somehow wormed his way into the dining room, and was beating
the floor with an obsequious tail. She caught his forepaws, and he
whipped his beautiful tail between his legs, and looked about with
agonized eyes while she dragged him through a clumsy dance. "He's
the darlingest pup we ever had!" Alix stated to Cherry, who was
departing for the upper regions and a complete costume.

"He needs a bath," Anne observed coldly, and Peter's abrupt shout
of laughter made Alix flush angrily.

"Bring your cigarette out here, Peter," the old doctor said,
crossing the garden to look in the abandoned greenhouse for his
rope. "We're in no hurry," he said. "We may as well wait until
Lloyd comes along; the fellow's arms are like flails. You---" the
old man opened a reluctant door, peered into a glassed space
filled with muddy shelves and empty flower-pots and spiderwebs.
"It's not here," he stated. Then he began again, "You brought
Cherry home last night?" he asked.

"As a matter of fact, I didn't," Peter answered, in his quick,
precise tones. "I came with Lloyd and Cherry as far as the bridge,
then I cut up the hill. Why?" he added sharply. "What's up?"

"Nothing's up," Doctor Strickland said slowly. "But I think that
Lloyd admires--or is beginning to admire--her," he said.

"Who--Cherry!" Peter exclaimed, with distaste and incredulity in
his tone.

"You don't think so?" the doctor, looking at him wistfully, asked
eagerly.

"Why, certainly not!" Peter said quickly. "Certainly not," he
added, frowning, with his eyes narrowed, and his look fixed upon
the vista of woodland.

"I had a fancy that he might have been putting notions into her
head," her father said, anxious to be reassured.

"But--great Scott!" Peter said, his face very red, "she's much
younger than Anne and Alix--"

"It doesn't always go by that," the doctor suggested.

"No, I know it doesn't," Peter answered in his quick, annoyed
fashion.

"I should be sorry," Cherry's father admitted.

"Sorry!" Peter echoed impatiently. "But it's quite out of the
question, of course! It's quite out of the question. You mustn't--
we mustn't--let ourselves get scared about the first man that
looks at her. She--she wouldn't consider him for an instant," he
suddenly decided in great satisfaction. "You mustn't forget that
she has something to do with it! Very fastidious, Cherry. She's
not like other girls!"

"That's true--that's true!" Doctor Strickland agreed, in great
relief. They turned back toward the garden, in time to meet Alix
and several dogs streaming across the clearing. Over the girl's
shoulder was coiled the great rope; she leaped various logs and
small bushes as she came, and the dogs barked madly and leaped
with her. Breathless, she stumbled and fell into her father's
arms, and both men had the same thought, one that made them smile
upon her tomboyishness indulgently: "If this is twenty-one--
eighteen is three long years younger and less responsible!"




CHAPTER II


Immediately they gathered by the fallen rose vine, all talking and
disputing at once. Alix and the dogs added only noise to the
confusion; the men debated, measured, and doubted; Anne, busy with
household duties, came and went smilingly. About them stretched
the forest, wrapped in the summer morning stillness that is really
compounded of a thousand happy sounds. There was no fog now; warm
spokes of sunshine fell brightly into the dim, glowing heart of
the woods; bees and birds murmured on short journeys; aromatic
sweetness drifted on the air.

They had known a thousand such mornings, the doctor and his girls,
still, exquisite, happy, dedicated to some absurd undertaking.
They had built chicken pens, they had dammed or cleared the creek,
they had felled bay-trees, and lopped the lower branches of the
redwoods, they had built roaring bonfires, or painted the porch
floor, and many times they had roasted chops or potatoes at the
brick oven, and feasted royally in the open forest.

A light rope was tied; an experimental tug broke it like a string,
tumbling Alix violently in a sitting position, and precipitating
her father into a loamy bed. Anne, who was bargaining with a
Chinese fruit vendor frankly interested in their undertaking, had
called that she would help them in a second, when behind Alix, who
was still sitting on the ground, another voice offered help.

A young man had come into the doctor's garden; work was stopped
for a few minutes while they welcomed Martin Lloyd.

He was tall and fair, broad, but with not an ounce of extra
weight, with brown eyes always laughing, and a ready friendliness
always in evidence. He was dressed becomingly to-day, in a brown
army shirt open at the throat, and shabby golf trousers that met
his thick woollen stockings at the knee. Anne's heart gave a throb
of approval as she studied him; Alix flushed furiously, scowled a
certain boyish approval; Cherry had not come down.

"Can you help us?" The doctor echoed his question doubtfully. "I
don't know that it can be done!" he admitted.

"This shameless old man has just confessed that he gouged the
heart out of the poor tree a week ago," Alix said, getting to her
feet. "That's the first use he put his birthday knife to! And Anne
stood here and abetted him, as far as I can find out!"

"How you garble things, Alix!" Anne said, giving her hand to
Martin. "I came out here to find my uncle busily pruning and
chopping the dead underwood away, but I had no more to do with it
than you had!"

"What's that you're eating--an apricot?" Martin said to Anne, in
his laughing way. "I was going to say that if it was a peach, you
are a cannibal!"

"Oh, help!" Alix ejaculated, with a look of elaborate scorn.

"No, but where were you last night?" Martin added in a lower tone
when he and Anne could speak unnoticed. The happy colour flooded
her face.

"I have to take care of my family SOMETIMES!" she reminded him
demurely. "Wasn't Cherry a good substitute?"

"Cherry's adorable!" he agreed heartily.

"Isn't she sweet?" Anne asked enthusiastically. "She's only a
little girl, really, but she's a little girl who is going to have
a lot of attention some day!" she added, in her most matronly
manner.

Martin did not answer, but turning briskly toward the doctor, he
devoted himself to the business in hand. Peter had climbed on an
inverted barrel, to inspect and advise. Alix dashed upstairs for
nails and hammer; the doctor whittled pegs; Martin measured the
comparative strength of ropes and branches with a judicial eye and
hand. Anne flitted about, suggesting, commenting, her pretty
little head tipped to one side.

They were all deep in the first united tug, each person placed
carefully by the doctor, and guys for the rope driven at intervals
decided by Martin, when there was an interruption for Cherry's
arrival on the scene. With characteristic coquetry she did not
approach, as the others had, by means of the front porch and the
garden path, but crept from the study window into a veritable
tunnel of green bloom, and came crawling down it, as sweet and
fragrant, as lovely and as fresh, as the roses themselves. She
wore a scant pink gingham that had been a dozen times to the tub,
and was faded and small; it might have been a regal mantle and
diadem without any further enhancing her extraordinary beauty. Her
bright head was hidden by a blue sunbonnet, assumed, she explained
later, because the thorns tangled her hair; but as, laughing and
smothered with roses, she crept into view, the sunbonnet slipped
back, and the lovely, flushed little face, with tendrils of gold
straying across the white forehead, and mischief gleaming in the
blue, blue eyes was framed only in loosened pale gold hair.

Years afterward Alix remembered her so, as Martin Lloyd helped her
to spring free of the branches, and she stood laughing at their
surprise and still clinging to his hand. "The day we raised the
rose tree" had a place of its own in Alix's memory, as a time of
carefree fun and content, a time of perfume and sunshine--perhaps
the last time of its kind that any one of them was to know.

Cherry looked at Martin daringly as she joined the labourers; her
whole being was thrilling to the excitement of his glance; she was
hardly conscious of what she was doing or saying. Under her
father's direction she tied ropes, presently was placed with her
arms clasped tightly about a great sheaf of vines, ready for the
united tug. Martin came close to her, in the general confusion.

"How's my little sweetheart this morning?"

Cherry looked up, her throat contracted, she looked down again,
unable to speak. She had been waiting for his first word; now that
it had come it seemed so far richer and sweeter than her wildest
dream.

"How can I see you a minute?" Martin murmured, snapping his big
knife shut.

"I have to walk down for the mail--" stammered Cherry, conscious
only of Martin and herself.

Both Peter and her father were watching her with an uneasiness and
suspicion that had sprung into being full-blown. Both men were
asking themselves what they knew of this strange young man who was
suddenly a part of their intimate little world.

He was simply a man; not unusual in any apparent way. He was ready
with his words, fairly good-looking, clean and muscular, his
evident lack of polish in languages and letters atoned for by his
quick wit, and by a certain boyish artlessness and ingenuousness.
He represented himself as about to receive an excellent salary at
the mine at El Nido, two thousand a year, but also admitted
cheerfully that he was always "broke." He had distinguished
himself at college, but had left it after only two years, upon
being offered a promising position. There was nothing especially
to admire in him, nothing especially to blame; under other
circumstances Peter and the doctor might have pronounced him as
one of the least interesting of human specimens. The beauty of
childhood and adolescence were gone, the ripeness given by years
and suffering was wanting; Martin Lloyd was just, as he himself
laughingly remarked, "one of the fellers."

Peter had secretly criticized him because he used the words
"'phone" and "photo" and "'Frisco," but in justice he had to admit
to himself that there was no particular significance to the
criticism. He also, in his secret heart, had a vague, dissatisfied
feeling that Lloyd was a man who held women, as a class, rather in
disrespect, and had probably had his experiences with them, but
there was no way of expressing, much less governing, his conduct
toward Martin by so purely speculative a prejudice. The young man
had dined at his house a few nights ago, had shown an admiration,
if not an appreciation, for music, had talked with sufficient
intelligence about political matters, mining, and--what else?
photography, and pullman cars, and the latest wreck off Bolinas--
just the random conversation that was apt to trail through a
country dinner. He had told a Chinese joke well, and essayed an
Irish joke not so successfully. Peter, somewhat appalled, in the
sunny garden, struggling with the banksia, decided that this was
not much to know of a person who might have the audacity to fall
in love with an exquisite and innocent Cherry. After all, she
would not be a little girl forever, some man would want to take
that little corn-coloured head and that delicious little pink-clad
person away with him some day, to be his wife--

And suddenly Peter was torn by a stab of pure pain, and he stood
puzzled and sick, in the garden bed, wondering what was happening
to him.

"Listen--want a drink?" Alix asked, coming out with a tin dipper
that spilled a glittering sheet of water down on the thirsty
nasturtiums. "Rest a few minutes, Peter. Dad wanted a pole, and
Mr. Lloyd has gone up into the woods to cut one."

"And where's Cherry?" Peter asked, drinking deep.

"She went along--just up in the woods here!" Alix answered. "Dad
had to answer the telephone, but they're going to yell if they
need help! WELL!" and Alix, panting, sat down on a log, "are we
going to do it?"

"We ought to go up and help Lloyd," Peter decreed. "Which way did
he go?"

"I don't know, darling!" Alix answered, leaning back, crossing her
ankles, and yawning. "But they'll be back before you could get
there. They've been gone five minutes!"

Only five minutes, but they were enough to take Cherry and her
lover out of sight of the house, enough to have him put his arm
about her, and to have her raise her lips confidently, and yet
shyly, again to his. They kissed each other deeply, again and
again. The girl was a little confused and even a little uneasy as
he continued the tight grip on his arm about her, and her upward
look found his eyes close to her own.

Their talk was incoherent. Cherry was still playing, coquetting
and smiling, her words few, and Martin, having her so near, could
only repeat the endearing phrases that attempted to express to her
his love and fervour.

"You darling! Do you know how I love you? You darling--you little
exquisite beauty! Do you love me--do you love me?" Martin
murmured, and Cherry answered breathlessly:

"You know I do--but you know I do!"

Presently he selected the sapling redwood, and brought it down
with two blows of his axe. The girl seated herself beside him,
helped him strip the trunk, their hands constantly touching, the
man once or twice delaying her for one more snatched and laughing
kiss.

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