XVII
After breakfast Trennahan lay in a long chair on the verandah and smokedundisturbed. Mrs. Yorba was busy, and Magdalena sat up in her room,longing to go down, but fearing to weary him. She recalled the earlyhours with vivid pleasure. For the first time in her life she was almostpleased with herself. She took out her writing materials; but herbeloved art would not hold her. She went to the window and unfastenedthe shutter softly. Trennahan was not talking to himself nor evenwalking up and down the hard boards below, but the aroma of his cigargave evidence that he was there. It mingled with the perfume of the pinkand white roses swarming over the roof of the verandah almost to herwindow.
She experienced her first impulse to decorate herself, to gather ahandful of those roses and place them in her hair. Her aunt had neverbeen without that national adornment, worn with the grace of her slendergirlhood.
She stepped over the sill, catching her breath as the tin roof crackedbeneath her feet, but gathered the roses and returned to her mirror.With the nimble fingers of her race she arranged the roses at one sideof her head, above and behind the ear. Certainly they were becoming. Shealso discovered that she had her aunt's turn of the head, her gracefulway of raising her hand to her ear.
But it is so little, she thought with a sigh; if I could only have therest!
Her mind wandered back to the heroines of her aunt's tales. If she buthad the beauty of those wondrous girls, Trennahan would have taken firein the hour that he met her, as their caballeros had done. The thoughtmade her sigh again, not with a woman's bitterness,--she had lived toolittle for that,--but with a girl's romantic sadness. Why had she beendefrauded of her birthright? She recalled something Colonel Belmont hadonce said about "cross-breeding being death on beauty in nine cases outof ten." Why could not her father have married another woman of hisrace? She dismissed these reflections as unfilial and wicked, andreturned to her work; but it was only to bite the end of her pen-holderand dream.
Meanwhile Trennahan fell asleep and dreamed that his Menlo house caughtfire one night and that all the maidens of his new acquaintance came ina body to extinguish the flames. Miss Montgomery played a hoseconsiderably larger round than her neck, with indomitable energy andpersistence. Miss Brannan, in a dashing red cap and jacket, danced likea bacchante on the roof, albeit manipulating large buckets of water.Mrs. Washington was also there, and, swinging in a hammock, encouragedthe workers with her characteristic optimism expressed in picturesqueAmerican. Magdalena, in a suit of her father's old clothes, was handinghis books through the library window to Miss Folsom. Miss Geary wasscrambling up the ladder, a hose coiled about her like a python. Theleader of the company stood on the roof directly above the front door,giving orders with imperious voice and gesture. But although the flamesleaped high about her, starting the leaves of a neighbouring tree intosharp relief, he could not see her face.