Chapter Nine
“I know something about the theater,” Gray commented, as they waited for Royal and Peggy to return.
He leaned back against a tree trunk and watched Hannah lift her face to the afternoon sun, “And believe me, you were never meant to play a chaperon, except maybe, in some French farce. Because they couldn’t have one looking the way you do, unless they wanted to make a point about the stupidity of trying to protect a healthy young man from a healthy young woman.
Don’t look at me like that, I’m only stating facts. Don’t you folks cast to type?”
“Sometimes we play against type,” Hannah said, raising her parasol over her face as though she were trying to prevent freckles, not blushes, “so as to make a stronger point. Be that as it may. I’ve no intention of playing what you want me to.
So might we forget it, please?” she asked, with more of a plea in her voice than she’d intended.
“I’d like Peggy to have her moment, as you suggested, but I will not stand here and be insulted. ”
“Well, it was praised you were being, and I think you know it, but all right,” Gray said. He then added with interest, “What would you like to stand here and be?”
“Informed,” she said, after thinking about it for a moment and smiling at the thought, added, “Kyle—Mr. Harper, said you were as at home in New York as you are out here. You do seem to know and love the theater—for whatever reasons,” she added with a grin, “so why do you stay out here?”
“Just what my big brother keeps asking me,” Gray answered, staring upward as if for inspiration, before he absently snatched a leaf from the tree he was under and pointed up to the sky.
“Mostly because of that. Can you see anything like that in New York? If I could have western days and eastern nights, I guess I’d be in heaven.
Literally. Because that’s the only place they’d have that.
I love this country, I was born here—but my big brother grew up in the East, our family was originally from New York, that’s why he loves it so much, I guess. ”
“But you were educated in the East,” she prompted, as he fell still.
At that, he left off studying the sky and looked at her and smiled again.
“Right again. Educated to a turn. Just enough to make me realize what I was missing culturally—here, and aesthetically, there. No, I know not many cowboys toss around ten-dollar words. But then again, not many stockbrokers start itching for the wilds after a week of desk work, either. My education fair ruined me,” he said, shaking his head.
“But my brother meant the best by it. What else would you like to know while we wait for Peggy to have her moment?” he asked quizzically.
“Well,” he went on before she could think what to ask, as he smoothed the leaf between his long fingers.
“As far as the basics go, I’m a rancher; I’ve got a good bit of land decorated with some highly bred cattle, due west and north of here.
I fool around with investments, and horses, too.
I’m a bachelor. But unlike Royal, fixing to remain so for a little while longer; my brother’s preserving the family name just fine by himself—well, not exactly by himself, you understand, my sister-in-law’s helping him considerable with that. ”
He looked for her reaction, and saw she was smiling.
“Your brother must mean a great deal to you,” she said, curiously pleased at how often he’d mentioned him.
Perhaps it was because she knew that a man who had no respect for a woman would never discuss his family with her, perhaps because she sensed he was being more honest with her than he’d intended.
That would mean she wasn’t the only one to feel this odd sense of friendship, along with the undeniable, frightening lure of more.
He nodded. “Funny thing, that,” he said softly, cocking his head to the side as he saw how raptly Hannah was listening to him.
“He’s on my mind a lot these days. I guess I’m feeling guilty, and not just because I’m not working.
But because he’s stepping up his campaign to have me come East—for good. ”
“You say that with such finality,” she commented.
“I suppose I do,” he agreed as he stripped a bit of leaf, his head down as he did, so that the brim of his Stetson shaded his eyes.
“But that’s the way I think of it— like an ending, not a beginning.
And that can make a man feel considerably tom up, as m’ friend Royal says.
I’d like to please my brother as well as myself.
He gave up his youth to work for the family, now he’s the only family I’ve got.
But for all I love him for it and more, it’s damned hard to live a life in his shadow.
He’s rich as the devil and made our fortune twice over, but he’s as kind as he’s clever, and that’s something.
Sometimes I think…Sorry,” he said quickly when he saw her expression change at his words, “for the profanity…and the monologue. But you must be used to that in the theater—soliloquies, I mean. But not on the subject of me. Lord, who started this?” he asked, looking up as though he’d just realized where he was.
“It’s your fault, you know,” he said after a second, gazing at her, surprised and amused that what he’d thought would be a light flirtation had turned to something very different.
“Lord, you listen as well as you talk,” he explained with a pronounced and satirical drawl.
“Must be your training. People on the stage are fun to watch when someone else is talking to them; folks in real life fidget or tear up bits of paper, or leaves, like I’m doing now,” he laughed.
“But a good actress just listens the stuffing out a conversation, doesn’t she? ”
“I suppose she does,” Hannah said, “but I’m not an actress. I teach acting. I really was listening—and envying you.”
“There you go!” he said, nodding. “That’s just it.
Multiply what you said by as many people as you meet in a lifetime.
Do you know what it’s like to have everyone telling you about the silver spoon in your mouth, as if you didn’t know you had one there?
Especially when it’s one your brother gave you? It can near choke you.”
“Oh, that’s not what I meant,” Hannah said in consternation.
“It’s not the money I envied, we weren’t rich—but I never went without, I assure you.
But I never had a brother or sister, and I would’ve liked one.
Father claimed it was on purpose, because he believed a tree grows straightest where there’s no shade.
He said trees must twist and turn to reach the sun if they’re all crowded in together, and children grow up just as twisted if they have to compete for a place in the sunlight.
All he wanted, he always said, was one perfect one.
Poor man,” she said on a too bright laugh, “all he got was me.”
“Didn’t want you to go into the theater, eh?
” Gray asked sympathetically, thinking of how he’d feel if his daughter took to a life on the stage, and then wondered if he’d lost his mind.
It was bizarre to be thinking about the shame of daughters at the same time he was wondering just when he could take advantage of the fact that this lovely, curving lady was in just such a deliciously disreputable profession.
“Oh, no,” she answered, laughing outright. “He would’ve wanted me to go further into it, if anything. My father is Blayne Darling,” she said softly.
That shocked him. He dropped the leaf he’d been playing with and straightened.
“Blayne Darling?” he said, remembering the times he’d paid top dollar for a ticket to see the man tear up the stage in a fine passion.
He stared at her and shook his head at how blindly he’d been staring at her since he’d met her.
There was the inky hair, the fine, sculpted features, the remarkable eyes that had such fire, depth, and feeling.
Only the sulky, pouting mouth was hers alone.
That, and the lavishly curved body, of course.
“Then, what in h…What are you doing here? Alone. In a troupe like Harper’s?” he asked incredulously. And then was instantly sorry he had, wondering what dark low sins she must have committed to make even such a sophisticated man of the theater as Blayne Darling decide to cast her off.
She lifted her chin at the tone of his voice, and then somewhat higher at the look in his eyes.
“Silver spoons are capable of choking people of both genders,” she said coldly. “I can grow just as tired of hearing, ‘You’re his daughter?’ I suppose, as you do of hearing, ‘You’re his brother?’ ”
But while he was thinking about that, she added in an altogether more subdued tone, “And then, too, I’m not a very good actress, you see, and so I couldn’t just keep living with him and envying him for the rest of my life.”
That recalled him to her, and there was a new expression in his bright eyes when he gazed at her—a different sort of admiration than the one she was used to seeing there, and possibly an even more dangerous one. Because there was fellow feeling in it.
“Oh, that I do understand,” he said. “Darn near broke my neck when I was young, trying to prove I was as good as he was. Let me tell you, it’s not necessary.
A father can provide as much shade as a big brother, I guess, but the point is that your daddy was wrong.
The straightest trees make the best lumber, sure.
But timber isn’t everything. Artists go for the more interestingly shaped trees, and a bird doesn’t care what shape its home is in.
Now you’ve got me doing it!” he complained, grinning at his foolishness.
“The point is that a man’s not a tree,” he said seriously, “and you can’t live by what other people think. ”