A Touch of Sun and Other Stories Part 5

Mr. Thorne had changed his seat, and the sound of a fresh chair creaking under his comfortable weight was a touch of commonplace welcomed by his wife with her usual laugh, half amused and half apologetic.

"Why do you go off there, Henry? Do you expect us to follow you?"

"There's a breeze around the corner of the house!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed fervently.

"Go and find it, then; we do not need you. Do we?"

"_I_ need him," said the girl in her sweetest tones. "He helped me once, without a word. It helps me now to have him sitting there"--

"Without a word!" Mrs. Thorne irrepressibly supplied.

"Why can't we let her finish?" Thorne demanded, hitching his chair into an att.i.tude of attention.

It was impossible for Miss Benedet to take up her story in the key in which she had left off. She began again rather flatly, allowing for the chill of interruptions:--

"To go back to that summer; I was in my sixteenth year, and the policy of expansion was to have begun. But father's health broke, and mama was traveling with him and a cortege of nurses, trying one change after another. It was duller than ever at the ranch. We sat down three at table in a dining-room forty feet long, Aunt Isabel Dwight, Fraulein Henschel, and myself. Fraulein was the resident governess. She was a great, soft-hearted, injudicious creature, a ma.s.s of German interjections, but she had the grand style on the piano. There had been weeks of such weather as we are having now. Exercise was impossible till after sundown. I had dreamed of a breath of freedom, but instead of the open door I was in straiter bonds than ever.

"I revolted first against keeping hours. I would not get up to breakfast, I refused to study, it was too hot to practice. I took my own head about books, and had my first great orgy of the Russians. I used to lie beside a c.h.i.n.k of light in the darkened library and read while Fraulein in the music-room held orgies of her own. She had just missed being a great singer; but she was a master of her instrument, and her accompaniments were divine. What voice she had was managed with feeling and a pure method, and where voice failed her the piano thrilled and sobbed, and broke in chords like the sea.

"I can give you no idea of the effect that Tolstoi, combined with Fraulein's music, had upon me. My heart hung upon the pauses in her song; it beat, as I read, as if I had been running. I would forget to breathe between the pages. One day Fraulein came in and found me in the back chapters of 'Anna Karenina.' She had been playing one of Lizst's rhapsodies--the twelfth. Waves of storm and pa.s.sion had been thundering through the house, with keen little rifts of melody between, too sweet almost to be endured. She was very negligee, as the weather obliged us to be. Her great white arms were bare above the elbow, and as wet as if she had been over the wash-tub.

"'That is not a book for a _jeune fille_,' she said.

"I was in a rapture of excitement; the interruption made me wild. 'All the books are for me,' I told her. 'I will read what I please.'

"'You will go mad!'

"I went on reading.

"'You have no way to work it off. You will not study, you cannot sing, you write no letters, the mother does not believe'--

"'Do go away!' I cried.

"'--in the duty to the neighbor. Ach! what will you do with the whole of Tolstoi and Turgenieff shut up within you?'

"'I can ride,' I said. 'If you don't want me to go mad, leave me in the evenings to myself. Take my place in the carriage with Aunt Isabel, and let me ride alone.'

"Fraulein had lived in bonds herself, and she had the soul of an artist.

She knew what it is, for days together, to have barely an hour to one's own thoughts; never to step out alone of a summer night, after a long, hot, feverish day. She let me go with old Manuel, the head groom, as my escort.

He was no more hindrance to solitude than a pine-tree or a post.

"The reading and the music and the heat went on. I was in a fever of emotion such as I had never known. Fraulein perceived it. She recommended 'My Religion' as an antidote to the romances. I did not want his religion.

I wanted his men and women, his reading of the human soul, the largeness of incident, the sense of time and s.p.a.ce, the intricacy of family life, the problems of race, the march of nations across the great world-canvas.

"I rode--not alone, but with the high-strung beings that lived between the pages of my books: men and women who knew no curb, who stopped at nothing, and who paid the price of their pa.s.sionate mistakes. Old Manuel, standing by the horses, looked strange to me. I spoke to him dramatically, as the women I read of would have spoken. Nothing could have added to or detracted from his own manner. He was of the old Spanish stock, but for the first time I saw his picturesqueness. I liked him to call me 'the Nina,' and address me in the third person with his eyes upon the ground.

"All this was preparatory. It is part of my defense; but do not forget the heat, the imprisonment, the sense of relief when the sun went down, the wild, bounding rapture of those night rides.

"One evening it was not Manuel who stood by the horses in the white track between the laurels. It was a figure as statuesque as his, but younger, and the pose was not that of a servant. It was the stand-at-ease of a soldier, or of an Indian wrapped in his blanket in the city square. This man was conscious of being looked at, but his training, of whatever sort, would not permit him to show it. Plainly the training had not been that of a groom.

I was obliged to send him to the stables for his coat, and remind him that his place was behind. He took the hint good-humoredly, with the nonchalance of a big boy condescending to be taught the rules of some childish game. As we were riding through the woods later, I caught the scent of tobacco. It was my groom smoking. I told him he could not smoke and ride with me. He threw away his cigarette and straightened himself in the saddle with such a smile as he might have bestowed on the whims of a child. He obeyed me exactly in everything, with an exaggerated ironical precision, and seemed to find amus.e.m.e.nt in it. I questioned him about Manuel. He had gone to one of the lower ranches, would not be back for weeks. By whose orders was he attending me? By Manuel's, he said. He must then have had qualifications.

"'What is one to call you?' I asked him.

"He hesitated an instant. 'Jim is what I answer to around here,' said he.

"'What is your _name_?' I repeated.

"'The lady can call me anything she likes,'--he spoke in a low, lazy voice,--'but d.i.c.k Malaby is my name.'

"We have better heroes now than the Cheyenne cowboys, but I felt as a girl to-day would feel if she discovered she had been telling one of the men of the Merrimac to ride behind!"

"They would not need to be told," Mrs. Thorne interjected.

"No, that is the difference; but discipline did not appeal to me then; recklessness did. Every man on the place had taken sides on the Wyoming question; feeling ran high. Some of them had friends and relatives among the victims. Yet this man in hiding had tossed me his name to play with, not even asking for my silence, though it was the price of his life, and all in a light-hearted contempt for the curious ways of the 'tony set,' as he would have called us.

"I signed to him one evening to ride up. 'I want you to talk to me,' I said. 'Tell me about the cattle war.'

"'Miss Benedet forgets--my place is behind.' He touched his hat and fell back again. Lesson for lesson--we were quits. I made no further attempt to corrupt my own pupil.

"We rode in silence after that, but I was never without the sense of his ironical presence. I was conscious of showing off before him. I wished him to see that I could ride. Fences and ditches, rough or smooth, he never interfered with my wildest pace. I could not extract from him a look of surprise, far less the admiration that I wanted. What was a girl's riding to him? He knew a pace--all the paces--that I could never follow. I felt the absurdity of our mutual position, its utter artificiality, and how it must strike him.

"In the absence of words between us, externals spoke with greater force.

He had the Greek line of head and throat, and he sat his horse with a dare-devil repose. The eloquence of his mute att.i.tudes, his physical mastery of the conditions, his strength repressed, tied to my silly freaks and subject to my commands, while his thoughts roamed free! That was the beginning. It lasted through a week of starlight and a week of moonlight--lyric nights with the hot, close days between; and each night an increasing interest attached to the moment when he was to put me on my horse. I make no apology for myself after that.

"One evening we approached a gate at the farther end of our longest course, and the gate stood open. He rode on to close it. I stopped him. 'I am going out,' I said. It was a resolution taken that moment. He held up his watch to the light, which made me angry.

"'Go back to the stables,' I said, 'if you are due there. _I_ don't want to know the time.'

"He brought his horse alongside. 'Where is Miss Benedet going, please?'

"'Anywhere,' I said, 'where it will be cool in the morning.'

"'Miss Benedet will have a long ride. Does she wish for company?'

"I did not answer. Something drove me forward, though I was afraid.

"'Outside that gate,' he went on quietly, '_I_ shall set the pace, and I do not ride behind.' Still I did not answer. 'Is that the understanding?'

"'Ride where you please,' I said.

"After that he took command, not roughly or familiarly, but he no longer used the third person, as I had instructed him, in speaking to me. The first time he said 'you' it sent the blood to my face. We were far up the mountain then, and morning was upon us.

"I wish to be definite here. From the moment I saw him plainly face to face the illusion was gone. Before, I had seen him by every light but daylight, and generally in profile. The profile is not the man. It is the plan in outline, but the eyes, the mouth, tell what he has made of himself. So att.i.tude is not speech. As a shape in the moonlight he had been eloquent, but once at my side, talking with me naturally--I need not go on! From that moment our journey was to me a dream of horror, a series of frantic plans for escape.

"All fugitives on the coast must put to sea. The Oakland ferry would have answered my purpose. I would never have been seen with him in the city--alive.

"But at Colfax we met your husband. He knows--you know--the rest."