Chapter Fifteen
BY THE TIME CHRISTMAS DAY came around, on a Tues day this year, there was a big change at the Tremayne ranch house. Nora had forsaken her stylish eastern dresses for plainer clothing, and she was doing most of the cooking and all the housework. Not that Helen and Melly and Chester treated her like a domestic; she was still one of the family and joined them at the table and in the parlor. But in all other respects, she lived befitting her new status in life.
She had become adept at ironing. Her hands were equally nimble at milking cows and churning the milk to butter. She could kill a chicken, and clean it—that had been a shattering experience, but with Helen’s guidance, she conquered her squeamishness and did what she had to. She no longer had qualms about get ting dirty, something she had once had a horror of. She helped plan a spring wedding for Jacob and Melly, and she was slowly learning how to sew.
Acquiring these skills had worked another change in her. She was less nervous and high-strung. She felt different, free of the shackles of her parents’ attitudes and rigid social class mentality. Helen had changed her attitude as well. She felt bad about her previous prejudice against Jacob Langhorn, and he and his son were now welcome at the ranch.
Melly was giving Nora riding lessons. She still wasn’t good at it, but she could stay on the animal’s back. Often she thought of Cal and wondered where he was, how he was. He had not tried to contact her after she had sent him away. Of course, she had told him she was going back to Virginia so he would not know she was still with her aunt and uncle. She worried about where he was, and how he was making his living.
She felt some guilt over costing him a job he had enjoyed. She wondered if he blamed her because she hadn’t told him the truth about her condition. Melly had remarked that Cal was shattered when her mother gave him her cold message. Her only thought had been for her own pain. She was sorry now that she’d refused to see him. As Melly had said, it was Cal’s baby, too. He would have felt sad about that loss and probably guilty, coming home to find Nora in that terrible condition after their argument.
He was not a heartless man, as she knew so well. Possibly he had not meant many of the things he said. Her aunt had caught him on the raw with her comments about Nora’s lack of help and with her well-meant interference in cabling Nora’s parents. But Nora missed her husband more than she thought she ever might. Her life had never been so empty. All the wealth and status in the world meant nothing now. If her parents had still wanted her, she doubted she would have gone back to them. In her heart she couldn’t stop hoping that Cal might come back one day.
Finally driven to desperation by the lack of news, she asked her aunt about him. “Have you heard from Cal?” Nora wondered as they laid out Christmas dinner.
The apparent nonchalance of that question didn’t fool Helen. “Why, yes,” she said.
Nora’s hands shook. She put the plates down carefully. “How is he?”
“He’s with his family,” Helen told her quietly, pausing to set the dressing in its pretty china bowl on the table. “He said that he hoped you had recovered and that you were regaining your strength.”
Nora’s eyes brightened. For the first time since her ordeal, she looked alive. “Did he?”
“My dear,” Helen said gently. “Do you miss him so much?”
Nora bit her lip and averted her eyes. “I was not fair to him. He knew nothing of my condition, and I had been too proud to tell him. We had a vicious quarrel before he left. I remembered too well some of the cruel things he said to me, and I refused to listen when he tried to speak to me. I was hurt.”
“Of course you were.”
She straightened the tablecloth. “There’s something you don’t know,” she said. “The real reason we were married.”
“Because of the baby?”
Nora’s eyes came up, startled but resigned, a second later. “Yes.”
“As I thought.”
“He didn’t love me,” she said dully. “He told me so, before he left. He said that our marriage was a mistake. He was ashamed of me. So ashamed that he had not even told his family about me.” Her eyes closed as she remembered how he had said it, the coldness of his deep voice outlining her faults for her. “Perhaps he was right. I felt very superior to other people.” She smiled wanly as she looked up. “I have learned a painful lesson. Decency cannot be measured in dollars.”
Helen’s eyes sparkled. “I had to learn the same lesson when I came here to live with Chester. I, too, came from the stock of European royalty, and I behaved as if I had. It’s only recently that I’ve learned to accept people without looking first at their clothing and social status.”
“My father will always judge people that way,” Nora said sadly. “And my mother will never question anything he does. I miss my parents. But I miss Cal, oh, so much more.”
“It is sad that you could not write to him,” Helen replied, trying not to remember her part in their problems. She had meant well, but her interference had been costly to her niece.
Nora looked at her, thinking. “But perhaps I could write to him….”
“I meant that his letter had no return address at all,” Helen replied with a sad smile. “And a postmark that was not even legible.”
“Oh.” Nora lifted a saucer and polished it with the clean cloth in her apron until it shone. Her heart felt heavy in her chest as she realized that she might never see Cal again. “Do you think he might write again?” she ventured.
“He did send the name of his attorney,” Helen said reluctantly. “You see…he thought you might need it—to divorce him.”
NORA DIDN’T EAT. She couldn’t manage a single bite of the delicious turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce, with all the trimmings. She tried to smile and pretended to be gay, so that she wouldn’t upset the huge family gathering that even included Jacob and Bruce Langhorn. But her heart wasn’t in a festive mood. It was worse than she’d ever thought it could get. Cal wanted to get rid of her. He wanted her to divorce him. He had meant it when he said their marriage was a mistake. He had never loved her, and now there was no chance that he ever would.
She listened absently to the discussion of news after they ate, saddened by the reports out of Galveston that typhoid and malarial fevers were rampant there. The city still had not recovered from the devastating flood in September.
A more humorous note was struck by a news item out of Montana, about a dozen cowboys allegedly being chased for twenty miles by two outlaws. The incident was reported tongue in cheek, and the writer bewailed the passing of the brave “knights of the plain” of days past.
Chester had read the item to them out of an El Paso newspaper that had come for Cal Barton, who was no longer in residence.
“Interesting, this,” he mused, having turned to the personal notes page. “The paper notes that all three sons of the Culhane family are together with their parents at Christmas for the first time in several years.” He looked up. “That’s the old West Texas ranching family I mentioned to you, the one that heads the combine that owns this ranch. The eldest son, King, and his wife had a boy of their own just recently.”
“Why did Cal subscribe to an El Paso paper?” Nora asked with idle curiosity.
“Well, he and I did want to keep tabs on the Culhanes, if you must know,” Chester said sheepishly. “It never hurts to know what they’re up to, and whatever they do makes news in El Paso.”
“There has been no further contact from them,” Helen ventured. “They must be satisfied with the changes Mr. Barton helped you make.”
“Apparently so,” Chester said, smiling, “which makes this Christmas truly a blessed one for me.” He glanced at Helen. “You haven’t given Eleanor her letter.”
Helen grimaced. “Chester…”
“Go on,” he instructed firmly.
Nora’s face brightened. Why, Cal had written to her! He must not have meant it after all, about the divorce.
Helen got up to produce a letter from a table in the parlor and came back with it, but she was slow in handing it to her niece.
Nora’s face was full of hope until she saw the postmark. Her smile faded.
“Open it,” Chester advised gently.
Nora looked at him fearfully.
“I had your aunt write again and tell them of your terrible illness,” he said quietly. “They are not heartless, Nora.”
Nora hesitated only for a moment before she opened the envelope. It was a Christmas card, gaily decorated, very expensive. She opened it and recognized her mother’s handwriting immediately.
“We are sorry to hear that you have been so ill,” her mother wrote. “If you would like to come home, your father is willing to accept your apology. Do write him, dear. Love from Mother and Father.”
Nora breathed normally for a moment. Then she slowly got up and walked to the stove in the kitchen, opened the eye and tossed the card in. She slammed the cover back on and put the lifter back on its peg.
“I…see,” Chester murmured.
Nora rejoined the others, sitting down very primly in her chair. “My father wishes me to apologize,” she explained. “I didn’t mention before that he slapped me when we told him we were going to be married. He took exception to my choice of husbands.”
Chester scowled. “My dear! I had no idea, or I would never have…!”
She held up her hand with a faint smile. “I have kept far too many secrets.”
“To slap a woman in your condition!” Chester was outraged. “And what did Cal do?”
“He knocked my father onto the floor and dared him to touch me again,” Nora recalled wistfully. “I was quite taken aback at first. So was my father.”
“Good for Cal,” Melly muttered, and her shocked mother nodded her own assent.
“My father had never been spoken to in such a way,” Nora continued. “I expect it still festers inside him that he was bested by a man of such low social status.” Nora’s eyes twinkled. “If you could but have seen it! Cal was wearing a pistol at his side, and that fringed buckskin jacket with his boots and that tattered old black hat.” She laughed softly, her eyes bright with love as she remembered how Cal had looked that day, so handsome that her heart ached with the memory. “My mother asked if he was a desperado!”
They all laughed at that, and Nora began to relax and throw off the pain the card had brought.
“Surely you won’t apologize, will you?” Helen asked suddenly.
“Apologize! For what?” Nora asked. “For losing my child, and my husband, and almost my life?” She shook her head. “My father cannot change, but I have. I do not wish to apologize, nor do I wish to go back to Virginia. Why, I have a job, after all!”
They laughed even louder at the smug, mischievous look on her face. She didn’t add that she had one other reason for not wanting to go back East. If Cal Barton ever came back this way, she was going to still be here, waiting for him. He was going to be a trial to her all her life if he did, but she loved him with all her heart, and it didn’t matter if his boots were filthy and he had to work cattle forever. She only wished that he would come back, so that she could tell him so.
CAL MOONED AROUND AT LATIGO for two more days, wishing that he could have put a return address on the letter he wrote to the Tremaynes. His family attorney, old Walpole, hadn’t heard a word from Nora or her parents. That might be good or bad. She could be ill again. The fever had a tendency to recur, the doctor said. It worried him that she might be sick even now, and he wouldn’t know.
“It’s time I left,” he told his family at the midday meal the next day. There had been a quiet celebration, in which he hardly figured. He felt like an outsider, with his heart back in Tyler Junction.
“Back to the oil fields, I guess?” Alan asked with a grin. He’d come home from Baton Rouge very secretive and poised to return. “I’ll go along with you and catch a train from Beaumont on to Baton Rouge.”
“She must be some lady,” King mused.
“She is,” Alan said. “I’ll bring her home with me in the spring.”
That took everyone’s mind off Cal’s announcement and spared him the inevitable questions. But they came anyway, from King, later.
The older man propped his boot on the lower rung of the corral while they watched the wrangler break a new horse. He smoked his cigarette quietly for a minute before he spoke.
“You’ve hurt her, haven’t you?” King asked.
Cal glanced at him, not surprised by his perception. He and King were much alike, not only in build, but in temperament. It had led to some terrible fistfights in their youth, but now created a special bond between them.
“Yes,” he admitted. “I said some unforgivable things.”
“And you’re afraid to go back, because she might not want you.”
Cal chuckled without humor. “I suppose I am.”
King flicked an ash from his cigarette. “I know more than I’ll ever tell you about being in the wrong with a woman. I’ve played hell myself and, fortunately, been forgiven. I almost lost Amelia. It changed me.”
Cal rolled himself a cigarette while he chose his words. “This has changed me,” he said finally when he’d finished and lit it. “I never thought I wanted marriage or children before. But I’d give anything to have a second chance.”
“Go to her,” King advised quietly. “Find out how she feels.”
Cal smiled ruefully at his brother. “Her father will probably meet me at the door with the local constable. I hit him pretty hard.”
“This time,” King said, “dress like a gentleman. And act like one!”
“I thought that clothes and background wouldn’t matter, if she loved me.”
King scowled as he remembered the way it had been with Amelia, before they married. She had clung to him, adored him. It wouldn’t have mattered to her if he’d been a sheepherder, she loved him so much. She still did.
His silence brought Cal’s eyes to him, narrowed in thought. “It wouldn’t have mattered. Would it?” he pressed.
King averted his eyes. “Go and see her before you make choices. It’s always better to know for sure.”
Cal finished his cigarette and dropped it to the ground. He pressed it into the dirt under the heel of his boot. “You got lucky,” he said abruptly.
King’s eyes were wistful. “Not at once,” he said. “It was a rocky path, and for a while, she hated me. Those were hard days.” He laughed softly. “But now… Now I don’t envy any man alive. God, how I love her!”
The emotion in that deep voice made Cal envious. A blind man could see that Amelia worshipped her husband equally. He hoped that they would have years and years together.
“I’ll buy a ticket to Virginia,” Cal said presently. He arched an eyebrow at his brother. “One way.”
“I’d buy two, for the return trip,” King murmured dryly. “And carry her kicking and screaming to the train. So would you have, before this thing laid you low.”
Cal burst out laughing. He and King were so much alike. The two of them swamped poor Alan. It was just as well that he had a totally different career in mind than throwing in with either of his brothers. Alone, he stood a better chance of being self-reliant.
King clapped his brother on the back and turned him toward the house. “I’ll ride into town with you and bring your horse back.”
“It sounds as if I’m leaving,” he remarked.
King nodded. “Since you’ll be going through Tyler Junction anyway, stop and see how Tremayne’s doing. Tell him you heard we’re pleased with his progress. That should reassure him.”
“It’s all vaguely deceitful, you know,” Cal remarked.
King shrugged. “All for a good cause.”
“I suppose so.” Cal relented, but reluctantly. He wasn’t best pleased with the idea of seeing the Tremaynes again after the way they’d parted company. And the memories of Nora in that house were going to tear him apart. For himself, he’d just as soon send them a telegram as go out there and deliver a message in person.
BUT IN THE END, he left Alan on the train as it pulled out of Tyler Junction en route to Louisiana, hired a horse and rode out to the Tremayne ranch.
It was cold, as December often was, even in East Texas. He saw the fields spreading out bare and lifeless before him, but the cattle had feed, thanks to that new combine and the tractors Tremayne had bought at Cal’s insistence. Everywhere he could see the benefits of the improvements, and he thought that his father and brother were going to be pleased.
He’d cabled Pike in Beaumont and heard that the part had come in early. Pike already had the derrick put up and they were drilling. They had a problem with mud seeping into the shaft, but they’d been given some advice by another wildcatter and had solved it with a valve. Some oil and gas pockets had been found in Gladys City, but there was the possibility of a real strike on Spindletop Hill, where some serious drilling was being conducted despite the advice of one well-known geologist. Pike, like Cal, refused to listen to him. Cal had good friends at the large oil field in Corsicana, and they had invested in his several-hundred-acre tract of land. He refused to believe that they were going to find any more dry holes. This time, he told himself, they would find oil. He knew they would. He planned to swing by Beaumont on his way to Virginia and check that drill and the new valve before he left Texas. He’d worked with the men in Corsicana long enough to understand drilling, although he and Pike had a contractor who knew the business better than either of them.
The Tremayne house was quiet when he rode up and left his horse with the stableboy. He walked onto the porch and knocked.
To say that Chester was shocked to see him was an understatement. Cal looked different in his dark suit and string tie and dressy black Stetson and boots. He looked like a businessman more than the ranch foreman who’d left several weeks before. Cal’s hand was shaken profusely and he was greeted like a long-lost son.
“We’re just sitting down to dinner! Come in, come in, and join us. How have you been?” Chester enthused.
“I’ve been well. Things look good here,” he added. “Very profitable.”
“You’d think so if you saw the balance sheets. Sure you don’t want your old job back?” the older man coaxed as they entered the living room, where Helen sat alone at the dinner table. “I haven’t hired anyone else.”
“No, I have other irons in the fire now,” Cal said in a subdued tone. He swept off his hat and smiled at Helen as he greeted her.
She was staring as if she’d seen a ghost. She made a gesture to Chester, but he ignored it and told Cal to sit down.
A minute later, oblivious to their guest, a harried Nora, in a stained apron and a faded dress, swept in the door sideways with a huge platter of beef in one hand and a plate of biscuits in the other. She set the containers on the table with an apology when one almost spilled, and only then looked up and saw Cal across the table.
She went alternately white and red, and then began to tremble as her heart raced uncontrollably.
Cal’s jaw clamped shut. He got slowly to his feet, made aware by the way she was dressed and what she was doing that she’d been reduced to the status of a servant here. He was all but trembling with rage as he looked at Chester.
“Would you care to explain this?” he asked curtly, with an arrogance and authority that made everyone suddenly nervous.
“Why don’t you ask me?” Nora broke in, straightening as she struggled to regain her composure. She smoothed her stained apron and stared at him levelly.
“I’m working to earn my keep. I didn’t want to go home.”
That bit of welcome news didn’t stifle Cal’s outrage at her changed status. “You’re still my wife,” Cal said furiously.
Her eyebrows arched. “I am? Imagine that, and here I thought you’d vanished off the face of the earth!”
“You had the address of my attorney,” he said coldly.
“I’ve been too busy to use it,” she lied. Her chin came up. “Why are you here?”
“Not to see you,” he said with a cool smile. “I stopped to ask Chester about his progress. And to tell him that the combine thinks he’s doing a fine job. I, uh, saw one of its representatives in my travels.”
Chester beamed. “How fortuitous!”
Nora brushed off her apron. “If you’ll sit down,” she invited her erstwhile husband coolly, “I’ll finish serving.”
She went back into the kitchen. Cal got up and followed her, without a query or an apology.
She was putting biscuits into a big bowl, but she turned as he entered the room and closed the door behind him. “I’m busy,” she said bluntly.
He leaned against the counter to study her. She was still thin, but she looked remarkably fit. She was just as pretty as she had been. His eyes fed on the sight of her, and he felt at peace for the first time since he’d walked out of this house the night she started to recover.
“Has the fever been kept at bay?” he asked.
She nodded curtly, and kept putting biscuits in the bowl. “I’m much better. I didn’t want to go home and I didn’t want to embarrass my people by getting a job with someone else. I do the housework and the cooking, and I stay in the house with them. Melly is getting married in the spring. She’s gone to town with Mr. Langhorn and his son to shop.”
“Good for Melly.” He folded his arms across his chest. “I’m going to Beaumont,” he said, neglecting to add that he’d planned to go on to Virginia in search of her. She wasn’t very receptive. Not that he’d expected anything else. There were open wounds in her heart that he’d put there.
“Are you? Why?” she asked.
“I have some leases on a prospective oil field,” he said honestly. “It’s where I went on weekends. I have a partner. We’re drilling our third hole. The first two were dry. We’re hoping to hit oil this time.”
She frowned. “The Beaumont paper has mentioned some minor successes there, but one of the better-known geologists says there is no major oil field there,” she said.
“And I tell you there is,” he said easily. “I worked in the oil fields in Corsicana before I started looking in Beaumont over a year ago. I have leases on several hundred acres of land, and a crew hard at work even now.”
She was surprised. She had known less about him than she realized. She didn’t want to ask how he was affording this expensive venture. Presumably his partner was rich.
She went to fetch the butter from the small icebox, where it was wrapped in a cloth next to the huge block of ice they had delivered from the plant in town.
“Are you staying to dinner?” she asked politely.
He nodded. “If it’s convenient.”
“You must ask my aunt, not me. I only work for her.”
His cheekbones went ruddy. “You’re my wife, by God,” he said curtly. “I don’t want you working as an unpaid domestic!”
She turned to him, her pretty face composed, her blue eyes eloquent. “I am not unpaid. I work for my keep. You walked out and left me,” she reminded him calmly.
His jaw tautened. “I’m very well aware of the condition you were in when I left. And I will remind you that you told me to leave,” he added curtly. “You gave me no opportunity to tell you anything.”
“You didn’t try!” she returned hotly.
He leaned back against the pantry door. “I was too upset. You had told me nothing about your health, except that you were carrying my child. I came back to find that you had miscarried and were at death’s door. How do you think I felt?”
She grimaced. “I can imagine that you were shocked.”
“Devastated,” he corrected. “I knew that I had done you no service by bringing you here, to a life of drudgery and hard labor. You were too fragile for it. I was eaten up with guilt. Leaving seemed the kindest thing to do. I didn’t blame you for not wanting to see me, Nora.”
She saw the pain in his face, and her eyes softened. “You gave me the best life you could manage,” she said gently, and wondered at the way he winced. “What made me angriest was my own inability to do the simplest things. I couldn’t cook or clean.” She laughed softly. “I find that I do both very well now. I’m no longer helpless. I’ve grown strong from my troubles.”
“You should never have had to bear so many,” he said sadly. “After you refused to speak to me, I went out to a tavern and got royally drunk. On the way back, it occurred to me that there would be little purpose served in staying around the ranch. You would recover more rapidly without me, I imagined, so I got on the next train to Beaumont. I thought that you would immediately return to your family in Virginia and divorce me.”
As she had guessed. No wonder he hadn’t tried to contact her. She sighed. “My father would allow me to come home if I apologized,” she told him ruefully. “Since I did not think that I had anything to apologize for, here I still am.”
His face hardened. “Any apologies owed were on his side, not yours. Your father is a disgrace to his sex.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Indeed,” she said. “And he works so hard at it.”
It took him a minute to recognize the dry humor. When he did, a faint smile turned up the corners of his disciplined mouth. “So he does.”
She covered the biscuits in their bowl so that they would stay warm. She felt equally warm, having Cal close again, being able to look at him. Life had become beautiful once more. “I should have told you about the fever,” she said apologetically. Her eyes lifted to his. “If I had done so, if I had been honest from the start, you would have been spared so much sorrow.”
“Neither of us has been particularly candid with the other, Nora,” he said quietly.
She stared at his eyes and saw the new lines around them, and in his lean face. He was thinner. He had aged, somehow. Yes, he had suffered, too.
“Why did you hide the true state of your health?” he asked.
“At first because I didn’t know you well enough to share such an intimate confidence. And afterward, because it seemed so harsh, to tell a new bridegroom with a pregnant wife that she had a disease which, if it did not kill her, would certainly plague her all her life.” She lifted her face sadly. “You could barely keep us both on what you earned, and there was already the baby to provide for when it came,” she said painfully. “I hoped to spare you…any more burdens.”
His eyes closed. He turned away from her, to hide the anguish those words produced.
“Your parents…they knew you were ill and still would not relent after you lost the baby?” he asked with quiet guilt.
“They knew. I am an outcast.” She smiled suddenly. “But I can iron a shirt!” she announced brightly. “And I can cook biscuits that do not bounce, and steak that melts in the mouth!”
Her radiance caught him unawares. He searched her bright blue eyes hungrily. “It was not the things you couldn’t do that bothered me,” he said huskily. “It was the fact that if you had truly cared for me, it would not have mattered to you how I made my living or what I had,” he concluded. His eyes averted. “But you were contemptuous, of my station in life, of my work, even the way I dressed. I was cruel because it hurt me that you said you had married beneath you.”
She didn’t know what to say. He made accusations that were truthful. She had said those things, and felt them. But now…looking at him, her heart melted in her chest. She loved him, wanted him, needed him. She didn’t care if he was a pauper, if she had to work as a laundress or a cook just to stay with him. The discovery was not even shocking. She loved him so much that nothing else seemed to matter. But the difficulty was in trying to express it, after all the painful things that had happened. She had no idea how to begin.