The Romance of a Plain Man Part 58

"Well, one can't have excitement without money, can one? It costs a good deal. Beauchamp sold for sixteen hundred dollars."

"He'd sell for sixteen to-morrow if I had my way."

"But you haven't. He's the only excitement I have and I mean to keep him. I shall go out again with the hounds on Sat.u.r.day."

"If you do, you'll make me miserable, Sally. I shan't be able to do a stroke of work."

"Then you'll be very foolish, Ben," she responded, and when I would have still pressed the point, she ran out of the room with the remark that she must have a hot bath before dinner. "If I don't I'll be too stiff to mount," she called back defiantly as she went up the staircase.

All night I worried over the supremacy of Beauchamp, but on the morrow she was kept in bed by the results of her fall, and before she was up again, George had spirited the horse off somewhere to a farm in the country.

"I'd have turned horse thief before I'd have let her get on him again,"

he said. "I bought the brute, so I had the best right to dispose of him as I wanted to."

"Well, I hope you'll do better next time," I returned. "Sally has got some absurd idea in her head about rivalling Bonny Marshall, but she never will because she isn't built that way."

"No, she isn't built that way," he agreed, "and I'm glad of it. When I want a boy I'd rather have him in breeches than in skirts. Is she out of bed yet?"

"She was up this morning, and on the point of telephoning to the stables when I left the house."

He laughed softly. "Well, my word goes at the stables," he rejoined, "so you needn't worry. I'll not let any harm come to her."

The tone in which he spoke, pleasant as it was, wounded my pride of possession in some inexplicable manner. Sally was safe! It was all taken out of my hands, and the only thing that remained for me was to return with a tranquil mind to my affairs. In spite of myself this constant beneficent intervention of George in my life fretted my temper. If he would only fail sometimes! If he would only make a mistake! If he would only attend to his own difficulties, and leave mine to go wrong if they pleased!

This was on my way up-town in the afternoon, and when I reached home, I found Sally lying on a couch in her upstairs sitting-room, with an uncut novel in her hands.

"Ben, did you sell Beauchamp?" she asked, as I entered, and her tone was full of suppressed resentment, of indignant surprise.

"I'm sorry to say I didn't, dear," I responded cheerfully, "for I should certainly have done so if George hadn't been too quick for me."

"It was George, then," she said, and her voice lost its resentment.

"Yes, it was George--everything is George," I retorted, in an irascible tone.

Her eyebrows arched, not playfully as they were used to do, but in surprise or perplexity.

"He has been very good to me all my life," she answered quietly.

"I know, I know," I said, repenting at once of my temper, "and if you want another horse, Sally, you shall have it--George will find you a gentle one this time."

She shook her head, smiling a little.

"I don't want a gentle one. I wanted Beauchamp, and since he has gone I don't think I care to ride any more. Bonny is right, I suppose, I could never keep up with her."

"Just as you like, sweetheart, but for my part, I feel easier, somehow, when you don't go out with the hounds. I'd rather you wouldn't do such rough riding."

"That's because like most men you have an ideal of a 'faire ladye,'" she answered, mockingly. "I'm not sure, however, that the huntress hasn't the best of it. What an empty existence the 'faire ladye' must have led!"

At first I thought her determination was uttered in jest, and would not endure through the night; but as the weeks and the months went by and she still refused to consider the purchase of the various horses George put through their paces before her, I realised that she really meant, as she had said, to give up her brief dream of excelling Bonny. Then, for a few months in the spring and summer, she turned to gardening with pa.s.sion, and aided by Dr. Theophilus and George, she planted a cart-load of bulbs in our square of ground at the back. When I came up late now, I would find the three of them poring over flower catalogues, with gathered brows and thoughtful, enquiring faces.

"There's nothing like a love of the trowel for making friends," remarked the old man, one May afternoon, when I found them resting from their labours while they drank tea on the porch; "it's a pity you haven't time to take it up, Ben. Now, young George there has developed a most extraordinary talent for gardening that he never knew he possessed until I cultivated it. I shouldn't wonder if it took the place of the horse with him in the end. What do you say, Sally?" he added, turning to where Sally and George were leaning together over the railing, with their eyes on a bed of Oriental poppies. "I was telling Ben that I shouldn't wonder if George's taste for flowers would not finally triumph over his fancy for the horse."

For a minute Sally did not look round, and when at last she turned, her face wore a defiant and reckless expression, as it had done that afternoon when Beauchamp had thrown her.

"I'm not sure, doctor," she answered; "after all flowers are tame sport, aren't they? And George is like me--what he wants is excitement."

"I'm sorry to hear that, my dear, a gentle and quiet pursuit is a source of happiness. You remember what Horace says--"

"Ah, I know, doctor, but did even Horace remember what he said while he was young?"

George was still gazing attentively down on the bed of Oriental poppies at the foot of the steps, and though he had taken no part in the conversation, something in his back, in the rigid look of his shoulders, as though his muscles were drawn and tense, made me say suddenly:

"If George has changed his hobby from horse-racing to flowers, I'll begin to expect the General to start collecting insects."

At this George wheeled squarely upon me, and in his dark, flushed face there was the set look of a man that has taken a high jump.

"It's a bad plan to pin all your pleasure on one thing, Ben," he said.

"If you put all your eggs in one basket you're more than likely to stub your toe."

"Well, a good deal depends upon how wisely you may have chosen your pursuit," commented the doctor, pushing his spectacles away from his eyes to his hair, which was still thick and long; "I don't believe that a man can make a mistake in selecting either flowers or insects for his life's interest. The choice between the two is merely a question of temperament, I suppose, and though I myself confess to a leaning toward plants, I seriously considered once devoting my declining years to the study of the habits of beetles. Your suggestion as to George, however,--old George, I am alluding to,--is a capital one, and I shall call his attention to it the next time I see him. He couldn't do better, I am persuaded, than bend his remaining energies in the direction of insects."

He paused to drink his tea, nodding gently over the rim of his cup to Bonny Marshall and Bessy Dandridge, who came through one of the long windows out upon the porch.

"So you've really stopped for a minute," remarked Bonny merrily, swinging her floating silk train as if it were the skirt of a riding habit, "and even Ben has fallen out of the race long enough to get a glimpse of his wife. Have stocks tripped him up again, poor fellow? Do you know, Sally, it's perfectly scandalous the way you are never seen in public together. At the reception at the Governor's the other night, one of those strange men from New York asked me if George were your husband.

Now, that's what I call positively improper--I really felt the atmosphere of the divorce court around me when he said it--and my grandmama a.s.sures me that if such a thing had happened to _your_ grandmama, Caroline Matilda Fairfax, she would never have held up her head again. 'But neither morals nor manners are what they were when Caroline Matilda and I were young,' she added regretfully, 'and it is due, I suppose, to the war and to the intrusion into society of all these new people that no one ever heard of.' When I mentioned the guests at the two last receptions I'd been to, if you will believe me, she had never heard of a single name,--'all mushrooms,' she declared."

Her eyes, dancing roguishly, met mine over the tea-table, and a bright blush instantly overspread her face, as if a rose-coloured search-light had fallen on her.

The embarra.s.sment which I always felt in her presence became suddenly as acute as physical soreness, and the blush in her face served only to illuminate her consciousness of my difference, of my roughness, of the fact that externally, at least, I had never managed to shake myself free from a resemblance to the market boy who had once brought his basket of potatoes to the door of this very house. The "magnificent animal," I knew, had never appealed to her except as it was represented in horse-flesh; and yet the "magnificent animal" was what in her eyes I must ever remain. I looked at George, leaning against a white column, and his appearance of perfect self-sufficiency, his air of needing nothing, changed my embarra.s.sment into a smothered sensation of anger.

And as in the old days of my first great success, this anger brought with it, through some curious a.s.sociation of impulses, a fierce, almost a frenzied, desire for achievement. Here, in the little world of tradition and sentiment, I might show still at a disadvantage, but outside, in the open, I could respond freely to the l.u.s.t for power, to the pa.s.sion for supremacy, which stirred my blood. Turning, with a muttered excuse about letters to read, I went into the house, and closed my study door behind me with a sense of returning to a friendly and familiar atmosphere.

Through the rest of the year Sally devoted herself with energy to the cultivation of flowers; but when the following spring opened, after a hard winter, she seemed to have grown listless and indifferent, and when I spoke of the garden, she merely shook her head and pointed to an unworked border at the foot of the grey-wall.

"I can't make anything grow, Ben. All those brown sticks down there are the only signs of the bulbs I set out last autumn with my own hands.

Nothing comes up as it ought to."

"Perhaps you need pipes like the doctor," I suggested.

"Oh, no, that would uproot the old shrubs, and besides, I am tired of it, I think."

She was lying on the couch in her sitting-room, a pile of novels on a table beside her, and the delicacy in her appearance, the transparent fineness of her features, of her hands, awoke in me the feeling of anxiety I had felt so often during the year after little Benjamin's death.

"I'm sorry I can't get up to luncheon now, darling, but we are making a big railroad deal. What have you been doing all day long by yourself?"

She looked up at me, and I remembered the face of Miss Matoaca, as I had seen it against the red firelight on the afternoon when Sally and I had gone in to tell her of our engagement.

"I didn't go out," she answered. "It was raining so hard that I stayed by the fire."