To the right
she turned and pushed open the door of a small room that seemed a
combination of boudoir and oratory, lit by a French window opening to
the garden, and flanked by a large black and white crucifix with a prie
Dieu beneath it. Closing the door behind them she turned and faced
her companion. But it was no longer the face of the woman who had been
sitting in the gallery; it was the face that had looked back at her
from the mirror at Tasajara the night that Grant had left her--eager,
flushed, material with commonplace excitement!
"'Lige Curtis," she said.
"Yes," he answered passionately, "Lige Curtis, whom you thought dead!
'Lige Curtis, whom you once pitied, condoled with and despised! 'Lige
Curtis, whose lands and property have enriched you! 'Lige Curtis, who
would have shared it with you freely at the time, but whom your father
juggled and defrauded of it! 'Lige Curtis, branded by him as a drunken
outcast and suicide! 'Lige Curtis"--
"Hush!" She clapped her little hand over his mouth with a quick but
awkward schoolgirl gesture, inconceivable to any who had known her usual
languid elegance of motion, and held it there. He struggled angrily,
impatiently, reproachfully, and then, with a sudden characteristic
weakness that seemed as much of a revelation as her once hoydenish
manner, kissed it, when she let it drop. Then placing both her hands
still girlishly on her slim waist and curtseying grotesquely before
him, she said: "'Lige Curtis! Oh, yes! 'Lige Curtis, who swore to do
everything for me! 'Lige Curtis, who promised to give up liquor for
me,--who was to leave Tasajara for me! 'Lige Curtis, who was to reform,
and keep his land as a nest-egg for us both in the future, and then
who sold it--and himself--and me--to dad for a glass of whiskey! 'Lige
Curtis, who disappeared, and then let us think he was dead, only that he
might attack us out of the ambush of his grave!"
"Yes, but think what I have suffered all these years; not for the
cursed land--you know I never cared for that--but for YOU,--you,
Clementina,--YOU rich, admired by every one; idolized, held far above
me,--ME, the forgotten outcast, the wretched suicide--and yet the man
to whom you had once plighted your troth.
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