Heart's Desire by Emerson Hough (best free novels .TXT) 📖

swish of the Donatelli gown, the deep cadence of the Donatelli voice, the restless Donatelli walk, now resumed.

"How dare you!" cried the diva. "How dare you intrude on me?"

"The saints!" cried Signer Peruchini. "What service is zere here? I knock, but you do not hear. Madame, what horror is zis place!"

"Ah, that Blauring!" cried Madame Donatelli, in her rage. "The beast! How dare he bring me here—me!" (she smote her bosom)—"who have sung in the grand in the best houses of the Continent—in Italy, Paris, London, St. Petersburg! I shall not survive this!"

"Perfide!" cried Peruchini, in assent. "Perfide! R-r-rascal! Cochon! Pig unspikkab'!"

"But, madame," he resumed, with gestures and intonations suitable for the scene. "Behole! It is I who have lofe you so long. To lofe—ah, it is so divine! How can you riffuse?"

Madame Donatelli withdrew with proper operatic dignity. "Never!" she cried. "You have sufficiently persecuted me ere this. I bid you go. Begone!"

"Vooman, you mad meh!" cried Peruchini, rushing forward, his hands first extended with palms upward, then clenched, his hair properly tumbled, his eyes correctly rolling. "I vill not be teniet! Your puty, it is too much! Vooman, vooman, ah, have you no harret? Py Heaven, I—"

With a swift motion he grasped her wrists. Color rose to the Donatelli cheek. Her eyes flashed. She was about to sing. She checked herself in time. "Unhand me, sir!" she cried.

The two wrestled back and forth, their hands intertwined. And now the log fire, seeing the lack of better footlights, blazed up loyally to light for them this unusual stage. They did not hear the door open behind them, did not hear the click of high bootheels on the floor, as there came toward them an unbidden spectator, who had by some slack servant been directed thither.

The door did open. In it stood Tom Osby, unannounced. He was dressed in his best, which was not quite so picturesque as his worst, but which did not disguise him nor the region which was his home. His boots were new, sharp at toe and heel. His hat, now removed, was new, but wide and white. His coat was loose, and under it there was no waistcoat, neither did white collar confine his neck.

A quick glance took in the scene before him. A little dark man was contending with a superb female of the most regally imperious beauty that he had ever seen or dreamed. Tom Osby stepped a swift pace into the room. There had come to his ear the note of a rich, deep voice that brought an instant conviction. This—this was the Voice that he had worshipped! This was that divine being whom he had heard and seen in so many sweet imaginings in the hot days and sweet, silent nights afar in the desert lands. She was assailed. She was beset. There swept over him the swift instinct for action which was a part of life in that comer of the world. In a flash his weapon leaped from its scabbard, and an unwavering, shining silver point covered the figure of this little, dark man, now obviously guilty of sacrilege unspeakable.

"Git back, you feller'" cried Tom Osby. "Leggo! What are you doin' there? Break, now, and git out. This ain't right."

And that was all he ever knew of Signer Peruchini, for the latter sprang back and away into an immediate oblivion. Tom Osby from that instant was himself swept on by the glory of this woman's presence. Confronting her, he stood half trembling, at once almost longing for warlike action rather than that now grown needful.

Madame Donatelli, for the first time in years jarred from the standards of her artificial life, and so, suddenly, become woman rather than actress, fell into a seat, turning toward the newcomer a gaze of wide-eyed astonishment. She had read in certain journals wild stories of doings of wild men. Was that sort of thing actually true?

"Sir," she said, "how dare you!" At this, Tom Osby stood upon one leg.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am," said he, at length. "I didn't know anybody was in here. I just come in lookin' for somebody."

She did not answer him, but turned upon him the full glance of a deep, dark eye, studying him curiously.

"I don't live here, ma'am," resumed Tom. "I'm camped down the hill by the spring. I left my compadre there. I—I belong to Heart's Desire, up north of here. I—I come along in here this mornin'. They said there wasn't any one in the parlor—they said there might be some one in the parlor, though, maybe. And I was—I was—ma'am, I was lookin'—I reckon I was lookin' for you!"

He laid his hat and gun upon the table, and stood with one hand against its edge. "Yes, I come down from Heart's Desire," he began again.

"From where?" broke in a low, sweet voice. "From Heart's Desire? What an exquisite name! Where is it? What is it? That sounds like heaven," she said.

"It might be, ma'am," said Tom Osby, simply, "but it ain't. The water supply ain't reg'lar enough. It's just a little place up in the mountains. Heaven, ma'am, I reckon is just now located something like a hundred miles south of Heart's Desire!" And he laughed so sudden and hearty a man's laugh at this that it jostled Alicia Donatelli out of all her artificiality, and set the two at once upon a footing. It seemed to her that, after all, men were pretty much alike, no matter where one found them.

"Sit down," she said, ceasing to bite at her fingertips, as was her habit when perturbed. "Tell me about Heart's Desire."

"Well, Heart's Desire, ma'am," said Tom Osby, "why, it ain't much. It's mostly men."

"But how do you live? What do you do?"

"Well, now, I hadn't ever thought of that. But now you mention it, I can't say I really know. The fellers all seem to get along, somehow."

"But yourself?"

"Me? I drive a freight wagon between Las Vegas and Heart's Desire. There is stores, you know, at Heart's Desire, and a saloon. We held a co'te there, onct. You see, along of cattle wars and killings, for a good many years back, folks has been kind of shy of that part of the country. Most of the men easy scared, they went back home to the States. Some stayed. And it's—why, I can't rightly explain it to you, ma'am—but it's—it's Heart's Desire."

The face of the woman before him softened. "It's a beautiful name," said she. "Heart's Desire!" She said it over and over again, wistfully. The cadence of her tone was the measure of an irrevocable loss. "Heart's Desire!" she whispered—"I wonder—

"Tell me," she cried at length, arising and pacing restlessly, "what do you do at Heart's Desire?"

"Nothing," said Tom Osby. "I just told you, I reckon."

"Do you have any amusements? Are there ever any entertainments?"

"Why, law! no, ma'am!"

She threw back her head and laughed. There rose before her the picture of a primitive world, whose swift appeal clutched at her heart, saturated and sated with unreal things grown banal.

"Besides," went on Tom Osby, "if we had an op'ry house, it wouldn't do no good. Why—I don't want to be imperlite, but I've heard that op'ry singers cost as high as ten dollars a night, or maybe more. We couldn't afford it. Onct we had a singin'-school teacher. Fellow by the name of Dawes come in there from Kansas, and he taught music. He used to sing a song called the 'Sword of Bunker Hill.' Used to have a daughter, and she sung, too. Her favoright song was 'Rosalie, the Prairie Flower.' They made quite a lot of money holdin' singin'-school. The gal, she got married and moved to Tularosa, and that broke up the singin'-school. There ain't been any kind of show at Heart's Desire for five years. But say, ma'am," he interrupted, "about that feller that had hold of you when I come in. Did he hurt you any?"

"That's our leading tenor, Signer Peruchini! He's a great artist." She laughed, a ripple of soft, delicious laughter. "No, don't bother him. We'll need him out on the Coast. Don't you know, we are just here in the mountains for a little while."

"Don't you like these mountings, ma'am?" asked Tom Osby, sinking back into his seat. "I always did. They always remind me of the Smokies, in Car'lina, back South."

"You came from the South?"

"Georgy, ma'am."

"Georgia! So did I! We should be friends," she said, and, smiling, held out her hand. Tom Osby took it.

"Ma'am," said he, gravely, "I'm right glad to see you. I've not been back home for a good many years. I've been all over."

"Nor have I been home," said she, sadly. "I've been all over, too. But now, what brought you here? Tell me, did you want to see me?"

"Yes!" Tom Osby answered simply. "I said that's why I come!"

"You want me to come up to Heart's Desire to sing? Ah, I wish that were not impossible."

"No, there's no one sent me," said Tom Osby. "Though, of course, the boys would do anything for you they could. What we want in Heart's Desire—why, sometimes I think it's nothing, and then, again, everything. Maybe we didn't want any music; and then, again, maybe we was just sick and pinin' for it, and didn't know it."

She looked at him intently as he bent his head, his face troubled. "Listen," said he, at length, "I'll tell you all about it. Up at Vegas I heard a funny sort of singin' machine. It had voices in it. Ma'am, it had a Voice in it. It—it sung—" he choked now.

"And some of the songs?"

Strangely enough, he understood the question of her eyes. She flushed like a girl as he nodded gravely. "'Annie Laurie,'" he said.

"I am very glad," said she, with a long breath. "It reconciles me to selling my art in that way. No, I'm very glad, quite outside of that."

Tom Osby did not quite follow all her thoughts, but he went on.

"It was 'Annie Laurie,'" said he. "I knew you sung it. Ma'am, I played her all the way from Vegas down."

"But why did you come?" She was cruel; but a woman must have her toll. The renewed answer cost courage of Tom Osby.

"Ma'am," said he, "I won't lie to you. I just come to see you, or to hear you, I can't rightly tell which. It must have been both." Now he arose and flung out a hand, rudely but eloquently. "Ma'am," he went on, "I knowed you come from Georgy onct, the same as me. And I knowed that a Georgy girl, someway, somewhere, somehow, would have a soft spot in her heart. I come to hear you sing. There's things that us fellers want, sometimes."

The woman before him drew a deep, long breath.

"I reckon you'll have to sing again," the man went on. "You'll have to sing that there song, 'Annie Laurie,' like I heard it more than onct, before I went away from home."

The soft Georgia speech came back to his tongue, and she followed it herself, unconsciously.

"My friend," said she, "you're right. I reckon I'll have to sing."

"When?" said Tom Osby.

"Now," said Alice Strowbridge. She rose and stepped toward the piano open near the fire.

The color was full on her cheek now; the jewels glanced now above a deep bosom laboring in no counterfeit emotion. A splendid creature, bedecked, bejewelled, sex all over, magnificent, terrible, none the less, although the eyes of Alice Strowbridge shone sombrely, her hands twined together in embarrassment, as they did the first time she sang in public as a child. The very shoulders under the heavy laces caught a plaintive droop, learned in no role of Marguerite in any land. The red rose at her hair—the rose got from some mysterious source—half trembled. Fear, a great fear—the first stage fright known in years—swept over Alice Strowbridge, late artist, and now woman. There sat upon her soul a sense of unpreparedness for this new Public, this