“It is my right to know,” the girl said.
Her voice was firm-fibred with determination. There was no hint of
pleading in it, yet it was the determination that is reached through a
long period of pleading. But in her case it had been pleading, not of
speech, but of personality. Her lips had been ever mute, but her face
and eyes, and the very attitude of her soul, had been for a long time
eloquent with questioning. This the man had known, but he had never
answered; and now she was demanding by the spoken word that he answer.
“It is my right,” the girl repeated.
“I know it,” he answered, desperately and helplessly.
She waited, in the silence which followed, her eyes fixed upon the light
that filtered down through the lofty boughs and bathed the great redwood
trunks in mellow warmth. This light, subdued and colored, seemed almost
a radiation from the trunks themselves, so strongly did they saturate
it with their hue. The girl saw without seeing, as she heard, without
hearing, the deep gurgling of the stream far below on the canyon bottom.
She looked down at the man. “Well?” she asked, with the firmness which
feigns belief that obedience will be forthcoming.
She was sitting upright, her back against a fallen tree-trunk, while
he lay near to her, on his side, an elbow on the ground and the hand
supporting his head.
“Dear, dear Lute,” he murmured.
She shivered at the sound of his voice—not from repulsion, but from
struggle against the fascination of its caressing gentleness. She had
come to know well the lure of the man—the wealth of easement and rest
that was promised by every caressing intonation of his voice, by the
mere touch of hand on hand or the faint impact of his breath on neck
or cheek. The man could not express himself by word nor look nor touch
without weaving into the expression, subtly and occultly, the feeling as
of a hand that passed and that in passing stroked softly and soothingly.
Nor was this all-pervading caress a something that cloyed with too great
sweetness; nor was it sickly sentimental; nor was it maudlin with love’s
madness. It was vigorous, compelling, masculine. For that matter, it was
largely unconscious on the man’s part. He was only dimly aware of it.
It was a part of him, the breath of his soul as it were, involuntary and
unpremeditated.
But now, resolved and desperate, she steeled herself against him. He
tried to face her, but her gray eyes looked out to him, steadily, from
under cool, level brows, and he dropped his head upon her knee. Her hand
strayed into his hair softly, and her face melted into solicitude and
tenderness. But when he looked up again, her gray eyes were steady, her
brows cool and level.
“What more can I tell you?” the man said. He raised his head and met
her gaze. “I cannot marry you. I cannot marry any woman. I love you—you
know that—better than my own life. I weigh you in the scales against
all the dear things of living, and you outweigh everything. I would
give everything to possess you, yet I may not. I cannot marry you. I can
never marry you.”
Her lips were compressed with the effort of control. His head was
sinking back to her knee, when she checked him.
“You are already married, Chris?”
“No! no!” he cried vehemently. “I have never been married. I want to
marry only you, and I cannot!”
“Then—”
“Don’t!” he interrupted. “Don’t ask me!”
“It is my right to know,” she repeated.
“I know it,” he again interrupted. “But I cannot tell you.”
“You have not considered me, Chris,” she went on gently.
“I know, I know,” he broke in.
“You cannot have considered me. You do not know what I have to bear from
my people because of you.”
“I did not think they felt so very unkindly toward me,” he said
bitterly.
“It is true. They can scarcely tolerate you. They do not show it to you,
but they almost hate you. It is I who have had to bear all this. It was
not always so, though. They liked you at first as ... as I liked you. But
that was four years ago. The time passed by—a year, two years; and then
they began to turn against you. They are not to be blamed. You spoke no
word. They felt that you were destroying my life. It is four years, now,
and you have never once mentioned marriage to them. What were they to
think? What they have thought, that you were destroying my life.”
As she talked, she continued to pass her fingers caressingly through his
hair, sorrowful for the pain that she was inflicting.
“They did like you at first. Who can help liking you? You seem to draw
affection from all living things, as the trees draw the moisture from
the ground. It comes to you as it were your birthright. Aunt Mildred and
Uncle Robert thought there was nobody like you. The sun rose and set in
you. They thought I was the luckiest girl alive to win the love of a man
like you. ‘For it looks very much like it,’ Uncle Robert used to say,
wagging his head wickedly at me. Of course they liked you. Aunt Mildred
used to sigh, and look across teasingly at Uncle, and say, ‘When I think
of Chris, it almost makes me wish I were younger myself.’ And Uncle
would answer, ‘I don’t blame you, my dear, not in the least.’ And then
the pair of them would beam upon me their congratulations that I had won
the love of a man like you.
“And they knew I loved you as well. How could I hide it?—this great,
wonderful thing that had entered into my life and swallowed up all my
days! For four years, Chris, I have lived only for you. Every moment was
yours. Waking, I loved you. Sleeping, I dreamed of you. Every act I have
performed was shaped by you, by the thought of you. Even my thoughts
were moulded by you, by the invisible presence of you. I had no end,
petty or great, that you were not there for me.”
“I had no idea of imposing such slavery,” he muttered.
“You imposed nothing. You always let me have my own way. It was you
who were the obedient slave. You did for me without offending me. You
forestalled my wishes without the semblance of forestalling them, so
natural and inevitable was everything you did for me. I said, without
offending me. You were no dancing puppet. You made no fuss. Don’t you
see? You did not seem to do things at all. Somehow they were always
there, just done, as a matter of course.
“The slavery was love’s slavery. It was just my love for you that made
you swallow up all my days. You did not force yourself into my thoughts.
You crept in, always, and you were there always—how much, you will
never know.
“But as time went by, Aunt Mildred and Uncle grew to dislike you. They
grew afraid. What was to become of me? You were destroying my life. My
music? You know how my dream of it has dimmed away. That spring, when I
first met you—I was twenty, and I was about to start for Germany. I
was going to study hard. That was four years ago, and I am still here in
California.
“I had other lovers. You drove them away—No! no! I don’t mean that. It
was I that drove them away. What did I care for lovers, for anything,
when you were near? But as I said, Aunt Mildred and Uncle grew afraid.
There has been talk—friends, busybodies, and all the rest. The time
went by. You did not speak. I could only wonder, wonder. I knew you
loved me. Much was said against you by Uncle at first, and then by Aunt
Mildred. They were father and mother to me, you know. I could not defend
you. Yet I was loyal to you. I refused to discuss you. I closed up.
There was half-estrangement in my home—Uncle Robert with a face like
an undertaker, and Aunt Mildred’s heart breaking. But what could I do,
Chris? What could I do?”
The man, his head resting on her knee again, groaned, but made no other
reply.
“Aunt Mildred was mother to me, yet I went to her no more with my
confidences. My childhood’s book was closed. It was a sweet book, Chris.
The tears come into my eyes sometimes when I think of it. But never
mind that. Great happiness has been mine as well. I am glad I can talk
frankly of my love for you. And the attaining of such frankness has been
very sweet. I do love you, Chris. I love you ... I cannot tell you how.
You are everything to me, and more besides. You remember that Christmas
tree of the children?—when we played blindman’s buff? and you caught
me by the arm so, with such a clutching of fingers that I cried out
with the hurt? I never told you, but the arm was badly bruised. And such
sweet I got of it you could never guess. There, black and blue, was the
imprint of your fingers—your fingers, Chris, your fingers. It was
the touch of you made visible. It was there a week, and I kissed the
marks—oh, so often! I hated to see them go; I wanted to rebruise the
arm and make them linger. I was jealous of the returning white that
drove the bruise away. Somehow,—oh! I cannot explain, but I loved you
so!”
In the silence that fell, she continued her caressing of his hair, while
she idly watched a great gray squirrel, boisterous and hilarious, as
it scampered back and forth in a distant vista of the redwoods. A
crimson-crested woodpecker, energetically drilling a fallen trunk,
caught and transferred her gaze. The man did not lift his head. Rather,
he crushed his face closer against her knee, while his heaving shoulders
marked the hardness with which he breathed.
“You must tell me, Chris,” the girl said gently. “This mystery—it is
killing me. I must know why we cannot be married. Are we always to be
this way?—merely lovers, meeting often, it is true, and yet with the
long absences between the meetings? Is it all the world holds for you
and me, Chris? Are we never to be more to each other? Oh, it is good
just to love, I know—you have made me madly happy; but one does get so
hungry at times for something more! I want more and more of you, Chris.
I want all of you. I want all our days to be together. I want all the
companionship, the comradeship, which cannot be ours now, and which will
be ours when we are married—” She caught her breath quickly. “But we
are never to be married. I forgot. And you must tell me why.”
The man raised his head and looked her in the eyes. It was a way he had
with whomever he talked, of looking them in the eyes.
“I have considered you, Lute,” he began doggedly. “I did consider you at
the very first. I should never have gone on with it. I should have gone
away. I knew it. And I considered you in the light of that knowledge,
and yet ... I did not go away. My God! what was I to do? I loved you.
I could not go away. I could not help it. I stayed. I resolved, but
I broke my resolves. I was like a drunkard. I was drunk of you. I was
weak, I know. I failed. I could not go away. I tried. I went away—you
will remember, though you did not know why. You know now. I went away,
but I could not remain away. Knowing that we could never marry, I came
back to you. I am here, now, with you. Send me away, Lute. I have not
the strength to go myself.”
“But why should you go away?” she asked. “Besides, I must know why,
before I can send you away.”
“Don’t ask me.”
“Tell me,” she said, her voice tenderly imperative.
“Don’t, Lute; don’t force me,” the man pleaded, and there was appeal in
his eyes and voice.
“But you must tell me,” she insisted. “It is justice you owe me.”
The man wavered. “If I do ...” he began. Then he ended with
determination, “I should never be able to forgive myself. No, I cannot
tell you. Don’t try to compel me, Lute. You would be as sorry as I.”
“If there is anything ... if there are obstacles ... if this mystery does
really prevent....” She was speaking slowly, with long pauses, seeking
the more delicate ways of speech for the framing of her thought. “Chris,
I do love you. I love you as deeply as it is possible for any woman to
love, I am sure. If you were to say to me now ‘Come,’ I would go with
you. I would follow wherever you led. I would be your page, as in the
days of old when ladies went with their knights to far lands. You are my
knight, Chris, and you can do no wrong. Your will is my wish. I was once
afraid of the censure of the world. Now that you have come into my life
I am no longer afraid. I would laugh at the world and its censure for
your sake—for my sake too. I would laugh, for I should have you, and
you are more to me than the good will and approval of the world. If you
say ‘Come,’ I will—”
“Don’t! Don’t!” he cried. “It is impossible! Marriage or not, I cannot
even say ‘Come.’ I dare not. I’ll show you. I’ll tell you.”
He sat up beside her, the action stamped with resolve. He took her hand
in his and held it closely. His lips moved to the verge of speech. The
mystery trembled for utterance. The air was palpitant with its presence.
As if it were an irrevocable decree, the girl steeled herself to hear.
But the man paused, gazing straight out before him. She felt his hand
relax in hers, and she pressed it sympathetically, encouragingly. But
she felt the rigidity going out of his tensed body, and she knew that
spirit and flesh were relaxing together. His resolution was ebbing. He
would not speak—she knew it; and she knew, likewise, with the sureness
of faith, that it was because he could not.
She gazed despairingly before her, a numb feeling at her heart, as
though hope and happiness had died. She watched the sun flickering down
through the warm-trunked redwoods. But she watched in a mechanical,
absent way. She looked at the scene as from a long way off, without
interest, herself an alien, no longer an intimate part of the earth and
trees and flowers she loved so well.
So far removed did she seem, that she was aware of a curiosity,
strangely impersonal, in what lay around her. Through a near vista she
looked at a buckeye tree in full blossom as though her eyes encountered
it for the first time. Her eyes paused and dwelt upon a yellow cluster
of Diogenes’ lanterns that grew on the edge of an open space. It was the
way of flowers always to give her quick pleasure-thrills, but no thrill
was hers now. She pondered the flower slowly and thoughtfully, as a
hasheesh-eater, heavy with the drug, might ponder some whim-flower
that obtruded on his vision. In her ears was the voice of the stream—a
hoarse-throated, sleepy old giant, muttering and mumbling his somnolent
fancies. But her fancy was not in turn aroused, as was its wont; she
knew the sound merely for water rushing over the rocks of the deep
canyon-bottom, that and nothing more.
Her gaze wandered on beyond the Diogenes’ lanterns into the open
space. Knee-deep in the wild oats of the hillside grazed two horses,
chestnut-sorrels the pair of them, perfectly matched, warm and golden
in the sunshine, their spring-coats a sheen of high-lights shot through
with color-flashes that glowed like fiery jewels. She recognized, almost
with a shock, that one of them was hers, Dolly, the companion of her
girlhood and womanhood, on whose neck she had sobbed her sorrows and
sung her joys. A moistness welled into her eyes at the sight, and
she came back from the remoteness of her mood, quick with passion and
sorrow, to be part of the world again.
The man sank forward from the hips, relaxing entirely, and with a groan
dropped his head on her knee. She leaned over him and pressed her lips
softly and lingeringly to his hair.
“Come, let us go,” she said, almost in a whisper.
She caught her breath in a half-sob, then tightened her lips as she
rose. His face was white to ghastliness, so shaken was he by the
struggle through which he had passed. They did not look at each other,
but walked directly to the horses. She leaned against Dolly’s neck while
he tightened the girths. Then she gathered the reins in her hand and
waited. He looked at her as he bent down, an appeal for forgiveness in
his eyes; and in that moment her own eyes answered. Her foot rested in
his hands, and from there she vaulted into the saddle. Without speaking,
without further looking at each other, they turned the horses’ heads and
took the narrow trail that wound down through the sombre redwood aisles
and across the open glades to the pasture-lands below. The trail became
a cow-path, the cow-path became a wood-road, which later joined with a
hay-road; and they rode down through the low-rolling, tawny California
hills to where a set of bars let out on the county road which ran
along the bottom of the valley. The girl sat her horse while the man
dismounted and began taking down the bars.
“No—wait!” she cried, before he had touched the two lower bars.
She urged the mare forward a couple of strides, and then the animal
lifted over the bars in a clean little jump. The man’s eyes sparkled,
and he clapped his hands.
“You beauty! you beauty!” the girl cried, leaning forward impulsively
in the saddle and pressing her cheek to the mare’s neck where it burned
flame-color in the sun.
“Let’s trade horses for the ride in,” she suggested, when he had led
his horse through and finished putting up the bars. “You’ve never
sufficiently appreciated Dolly.”
“No, no,” he protested.
“You think she is too old, too sedate,” Lute insisted. “She’s only
sixteen, and she can outrun nine colts out of ten. Only she never cuts
up. She’s too steady, and you don’t approve of her—no, don’t deny it,
sir. I know. And I know also that she can outrun your vaunted Washoe
Ban. There! I challenge you! And furthermore, you may ride her yourself.
You know what Ban can do; so you must ride Dolly and see for yourself
what she can do.”
They proceeded to exchange the saddles on the horses, glad of the
diversion and making the most of it.
“I’m glad I was born in California,” Lute remarked, as she swung
astride of Ban. “It’s an outrage both to horse and woman to ride in a
sidesaddle.”
“You look like a young Amazon,” the man said approvingly, his eyes
passing tenderly over the girl as she swung the horse around.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“All ready!”
“To the old mill,” she called, as the horses sprang forward. “That’s
less than a mile.”
“To a finish?” he demanded.
She nodded, and the horses, feeling the urge of the reins, caught the
spirit of the race. The dust rose in clouds behind as they tore along
the level road. They swung around the bend, horses and riders tilted at
sharp angles to the ground, and more than once the riders ducked low to
escape the branches of outreaching and overhanging trees. They clattered
over the small plank bridges, and thundered over the larger iron ones to
an ominous clanking of loose rods.
They rode side by side, saving the animals for the rush at the finish,
yet putting them at a pace that drew upon vitality and staying power.
Curving around a clump of white oaks, the road straightened out before
them for several hundred yards, at the end of which they could see the
ruined mill.
“Now for it!” the girl cried.
She urged the horse by suddenly leaning forward with her body, at the
same time, for an instant, letting the rein slack and touching the neck
with her bridle hand. She began to draw away from the man.
“Touch her on the neck!” she cried to him.
With this, the mare pulled alongside and began gradually to pass the
girl. Chris and Lute looked at each other for a moment, the mare still
drawing ahead, so that Chris was compelled slowly to turn his head. The
mill was a hundred yards away.
“Shall I give him the spurs?” Lute shouted.
The man nodded, and the girl drove the spurs in sharply and quickly,
calling upon the horse for its utmost, but watched her own horse forge
slowly ahead of her.
“Beaten by three lengths!” Lute beamed triumphantly, as they pulled into
a walk. “Confess, sir, confess! You didn’t think the old mare had it in
her.”
Lute leaned to the side and rested her hand for a moment on Dolly’s wet
neck.
“Ban’s a sluggard alongside of her,” Chris affirmed. “Dolly’s all right,
if she is in her Indian Summer.”
Lute nodded approval. “That’s a sweet way of putting it—Indian Summer.
It just describes her. But she’s not lazy. She has all the fire and none
of the folly. She is very wise, what of her years.”
“That accounts for it,” Chris demurred. “Her folly passed with her
youth. Many’s the lively time she’s given you.”
“No,” Lute answered. “I never knew her really to cut up. I think the
only trouble she ever gave me was when I was training her to open gates.
She was afraid when they swung back upon her—the animal’s fear of the
trap, perhaps. But she bravely got over it. And she never was vicious.
She never bolted, nor bucked, nor cut up in all her life—never, not
once.”
The horses went on at a walk, still breathing heavily from their run.
The road wound along the bottom of the valley, now and again crossing
the stream. From either side rose the drowsy purr of mowing-machines,
punctuated by occasional sharp cries of the men who were gathering the
hay-crop. On the western side of the valley the hills rose green and
dark, but the eastern side was already burned brown and tan by the sun.
“There is summer, here is spring,” Lute said. “Oh, beautiful Sonoma
Valley!”
Her eyes were glistening and her face was radiant with love of the
land. Her gaze wandered on across orchard patches and sweeping vineyard
stretches, seeking out the purple which seemed to hang like a dim smoke
in the wrinkles of the hills and in the more distant canyon gorges. Far
up, among the more rugged crests, where the steep slopes were covered
with manzanita, she caught a glimpse of a clear space where the wild
grass had not yet lost its green.
“Have you ever heard of the secret pasture?” she asked, her eyes still
fixed on the remote green.
A snort of fear brought her eyes back to the man beside her. Dolly,
upreared, with distended nostrils and wild eyes, was pawing the air
madly with her fore legs. Chris threw himself forward against her neck
to keep her from falling backward, and at the same time touched her with
the spurs to compel her to drop her fore feet to the ground in order to
obey the go-ahead impulse of the spurs.
“Why, Dolly, this is most remarkable,” Lute began reprovingly.
But, to her surprise, the mare threw her head down, arched her back as
she went up in the air, and, returning, struck the ground stiff-legged
and bunched.
“A genuine buck!” Chris called out, and the next moment the mare was
rising under him in a second buck.
Lute looked on, astounded at the unprecedented conduct of her mare, and
admiring her lover’s horsemanship. He was quite cool, and was himself
evidently enjoying the performance. Again and again, half a dozen times,
Dolly arched herself into the air and struck, stiffly bunched. Then she
threw her head straight up and rose on her hind legs, pivoting about and
striking with her fore feet. Lute whirled into safety the horse she was
riding, and as she did so caught a glimpse of Dolly’s eyes, with the
look in them of blind brute madness, bulging until it seemed they must
burst from her head. The faint pink in the white of the eyes was gone,
replaced by a white that was like dull marble and that yet flashed as
from some inner fire.
A faint cry of fear, suppressed in the instant of utterance, slipped
past Lute’s lips. One hind leg of the mare seemed to collapse, and for a
moment the whole quivering body, upreared and perpendicular, swayed back
and forth, and there was uncertainty as to whether it would fall forward
or backward. The man, half-slipping sidewise from the saddle, so as to
fall clear if the mare toppled backward, threw his weight to the front
and alongside her neck. This overcame the dangerous teetering balance,
and the mare struck the ground on her feet again.
But there was no let-up. Dolly straightened out so that the line of the
face was almost a continuation of the line of the stretched neck;
this position enabled her to master the bit, which she did by bolting
straight ahead down the road.
For the first time Lute became really frightened. She spurred Washoe Ban
in pursuit, but he could not hold his own with the mad mare, and dropped
gradually behind. Lute saw Dolly check and rear in the air again, and
caught up just as the mare made a second bolt. As Dolly dashed around a
bend, she stopped suddenly, stiff-legged. Lute saw her lover torn out of
the saddle, his thigh-grip broken by the sudden jerk. Though he had lost
his seat, he had not been thrown, and as the mare dashed on Lute saw him
clinging to the side of the horse, a hand in the mane and a leg across
the saddle. With a quick cavort he regained his seat and proceeded to
fight with the mare for control.
But Dolly swerved from the road and dashed down a grassy slope yellowed
with innumerable mariposa lilies. An ancient fence at the bottom was
no obstacle. She burst through as though it were filmy spider-web and
disappeared in the underbrush. Lute followed unhesitatingly, putting Ban
through the gap in the fence and plunging on into the thicket. She lay
along his neck, closely, to escape the ripping and tearing of the trees
and vines. She felt the horse drop down through leafy branches and into
the cool gravel of a stream’s bottom. From ahead came a splashing of
water, and she caught a glimpse of Dolly, dashing up the small bank and
into a clump of scrub-oaks, against the trunks of which she was trying
to scrape off her rider.
Lute almost caught up amongst the trees, but was hopelessly outdistanced
on the fallow field adjoining, across which the mare tore with a fine
disregard for heavy ground and gopher-holes. When she turned at a sharp
angle into the thicket-land beyond, Lute took the long diagonal, skirted
the ticket, and reined in Ban at the other side. She had arrived first.
From within the thicket she could hear a tremendous crashing of brush
and branches. Then the mare burst through and into the open, falling
to her knees, exhausted, on the soft earth. She arose and staggered
forward, then came limply to a halt. She was in lather-sweat of fear,
and stood trembling pitiably.
Chris was still on her back. His shirt was in ribbons. The backs of his
hands were bruised and lacerated, while his face was streaming blood
from a gash near the temple. Lute had controlled herself well, but now
she was aware of a quick nausea and a trembling of weakness.
“Chris!” she said, so softly that it was almost a whisper. Then she
sighed, “Thank God.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” he cried to her, putting into his voice all the
heartiness he could command, which was not much, for he had himself been
under no mean nervous strain.
He showed the reaction he was undergoing, when he swung down out of
the saddle. He began with a brave muscular display as he lifted his
leg over, but ended, on his feet, leaning against the limp Dolly for
support. Lute flashed out of her saddle, and her arms were about him in
an embrace of thankfulness.
“I know where there is a spring,” she said, a moment later.
They left the horses standing untethered, and she led her lover into the
cool recesses of the thicket to where crystal water bubbled from out the
base of the mountain.
“What was that you said about Dolly’s never cutting up?” he asked, when
the blood had been stanched and his nerves and pulse-beats were normal
again.
“I am stunned,” Lute answered. “I cannot understand it. She never did
anything like it in all her life. And all animals like you so—it’s not
because of that. Why, she is a child’s horse. I was only a little girl
when I first rode her, and to this day—”
“Well, this day she was everything but a child’s horse,” Chris broke in.
“She was a devil. She tried to scrape me off against the trees, and to
batter my brains out against the limbs. She tried all the lowest and
narrowest places she could find. You should have seen her squeeze
through. And did you see those bucks?”
Lute nodded.
“Regular bucking-bronco proposition.”
“But what should she know about bucking?” Lute demanded. “She was never
known to buck—never.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Some forgotten instinct, perhaps,
long-lapsed and come to life again.”
The girl rose to her feet determinedly. “I’m going to find out,” she
said.
They went back to the horses, where they subjected Dolly to a
rigid examination that disclosed nothing. Hoofs, legs, bit, mouth,
body—everything was as it should be. The saddle and saddle-cloth were
innocent of bur or sticker; the back was smooth and unbroken. They
searched for sign of snake-bite and sting of fly or insect, but found
nothing.
“Whatever it was, it was subjective, that much is certain,” Chris said.
“Obsession,” Lute suggested.
They laughed together at the idea, for both were twentieth-century
products, healthy-minded and normal, with souls that delighted in
the butterfly-chase of ideals but that halted before the brink where
superstition begins.
“An evil spirit,” Chris laughed; “but what evil have I done that I
should be so punished?”
“You think too much of yourself, sir,” she rejoined. “It is more likely
some evil, I don’t know what, that Dolly has done. You were a mere
accident. I might have been on her back at the time, or Aunt Mildred, or
anybody.”
As she talked, she took hold of the stirrup-strap and started to shorten
it.
“What are you doing?” Chris demanded.
“I’m going to ride Dolly in.”
“No, you’re not,” he announced. “It would be bad discipline. After what
has happened I am simply compelled to ride her in myself.”
But it was a very weak and very sick mare he rode, stumbling and
halting, afflicted with nervous jerks and recurring muscular spasms—the
aftermath of the tremendous orgasm through which she had passed.
“I feel like a book of verse and a hammock, after all that has
happened,” Lute said, as they rode into camp.
It was a summer camp of city-tired people, pitched in a grove of
towering redwoods through whose lofty boughs the sunshine trickled down,
broken and subdued to soft light and cool shadow. Apart from the main
camp were the kitchen and the servants’ tents; and midway between was
the great dining hall, walled by the living redwood columns, where fresh
whispers of air were always to be found, and where no canopy was needed
to keep the sun away.
“Poor Dolly, she is really sick,” Lute said that evening, when they had
returned from a last look at the mare. “But you weren’t hurt, Chris, and
that’s enough for one small woman to be thankful for. I thought I knew,
but I really did not know till to-day, how much you meant to me. I could
hear only the plunging and struggle in the thicket. I could not see you,
nor know how it went with you.”
“My thoughts were of you,” Chris answered, and felt the responsive
pressure of the hand that rested on his arm.
She turned her face up to his and met his lips.
“Good night,” she said.
“Dear Lute, dear Lute,” he caressed her with his voice as she moved away
among the shadows.
* * *
“Who’s going for the mail?” called a woman’s voice through the trees.
Lute closed the book from which they had been reading, and sighed.
“We weren’t going to ride to-day,” she said.
“Let me go,” Chris proposed. “You stay here. I’ll be down and back in no
time.”
She shook her head.
“Who’s going for the mail?” the voice insisted.
“Where’s Martin?” Lute called, lifting her voice in answer.
“I don’t know,” came the voice. “I think Robert took him along
somewhere—horse-buying, or fishing, or I don’t know what. There’s
really nobody left but Chris and you. Besides, it will give you an
appetite for dinner. You’ve been lounging in the hammock all day. And
Uncle Robert must have his newspaper.”
“All right, Aunty, we’re starting,” Lute called back, getting out of the
hammock.
A few minutes later, in riding-clothes, they were saddling the horses.
They rode out on to the county road, where blazed the afternoon sun,
and turned toward Glen Ellen. The little town slept in the sun, and the
somnolent storekeeper and postmaster scarcely kept his eyes open long
enough to make up the packet of letters and newspapers.
An hour later Lute and Chris turned aside from the road and dipped along
a cow-path down the high bank to water the horses, before going into
camp.
“Dolly looks as though she’d forgotten all about yesterday,” Chris said,
as they sat their horses knee-deep in the rushing water. “Look at her.”
The mare had raised her head and cocked her ears at the rustling of
a quail in the thicket. Chris leaned over and rubbed around her ears.
Dolly’s enjoyment was evident, and she drooped her head over against the
shoulder of his own horse.
“Like a kitten,” was Lute’s comment.
“Yet I shall never be able wholly to trust her again,” Chris said. “Not
after yesterday’s mad freak.”
“I have a feeling myself that you are safer on Ban,” Lute laughed. “It
is strange. My trust in Dolly is as implicit as ever. I feel confident
so far as I am concerned, but I should never care to see you on her
back again. Now with Ban, my faith is still unshaken. Look at that neck!
Isn’t he handsome! He’ll be as wise as Dolly when he is as old as she.”
“I feel the same way,” Chris laughed back. “Ban could never possibly
betray me.”
They turned their horses out of the stream. Dolly stopped to brush a fly
from her knee with her nose, and Ban urged past into the narrow way of
the path. The space was too restricted to make him return, save with
much trouble, and Chris allowed him to go on. Lute, riding behind, dwelt
with her eyes upon her lover’s back, pleasuring in the lines of the bare
neck and the sweep out to the muscular shoulders.
Suddenly she reined in her horse. She could do nothing but look, so
brief was the duration of the happening. Beneath and above was the
almost perpendicular bank. The path itself was barely wide enough for
footing. Yet Washoe Ban, whirling and rearing at the same time, toppled
for a moment in the air and fell backward off the path.
So unexpected and so quick was it, that the man was involved in the
fall. There had been no time for him to throw himself to the path. He
was falling ere he knew it, and he did the only thing possible—slipped
the stirrups and threw his body into the air, to the side, and at the
same time down. It was twelve feet to the rocks below. He maintained an
upright position, his head up and his eyes fixed on the horse above him
and falling upon him.
Chris struck like a cat, on his feet, on the instant making a leap
to the side. The next instant Ban crashed down beside him. The animal
struggled little, but sounded the terrible cry that horses sometimes
sound when they have received mortal hurt. He had struck almost squarely
on his back, and in that position he remained, his head twisted partly
under, his hind legs relaxed and motionless, his fore legs futilely
striking the air.
Chris looked up reassuringly.
“I am getting used to it,” Lute smiled down to him. “Of course I need
not ask if you are hurt. Can I do anything?”
He smiled back and went over to the fallen beast, letting go the girths
of the saddle and getting the head straightened out.
“I thought so,” he said, after a cursory examination. “I thought so at
the time. Did you hear that sort of crunching snap?”
She shuddered.
“Well, that was the punctuation of life, the final period dropped at
the end of Ban’s usefulness.” He started around to come up by the path.
“I’ve been astride of Ban for the last time. Let us go home.”
At the top of the bank Chris turned and looked down.
“Good-by, Washoe Ban!” he called out. “Good-by, old fellow.”
The animal was struggling to lift its head. There were tears in Chris’s
eyes as he turned abruptly away, and tears in Lute’s eyes as they met
his. She was silent in her sympathy, though the pressure of her hand was
firm in his as he walked beside her horse down the dusty road.
“It was done deliberately,” Chris burst forth suddenly. “There was no
warning. He deliberately flung himself over backward.”
“There was no warning,” Lute concurred. “I was looking. I saw him. He
whirled and threw himself at the same time, just as if you had done it
yourself, with a tremendous jerk and backward pull on the bit.”
“It was not my hand, I swear it. I was not even thinking of him. He was
going up with a fairly loose rein, as a matter of course.”
“I should have seen it, had you done it,” Lute said. “But it was all
done before you had a chance to do anything. It was not your hand, not
even your unconscious hand.”
“Then it was some invisible hand, reaching out from I don’t know where.”
He looked up whimsically at the sky and smiled at the conceit.
Martin stepped forward to receive Dolly, when they came into the stable
end of the grove, but his face expressed no surprise at sight of Chris
coming in on foot. Chris lingered behind Lute for moment.
“Can you shoot a horse?” he asked.
The groom nodded, then added, “Yes, sir,” with a second and deeper nod.
“How do you do it?”
“Draw a line from the eyes to the ears—I mean the opposite ears, sir.
And where the lines cross—”
“That will do,” Chris interrupted. “You know the watering place at the
second bend. You’ll find Ban there with a broken back.”
* * *
“Oh, here you are, sir. I have been looking for you everywhere since
dinner. You are wanted immediately.”
Chris tossed his cigar away, then went over and pressed his foot on its
glowing fire.
“You haven’t told anybody about it?—Ban?” he queried.
Lute shook her head. “They’ll learn soon enough. Martin will mention it
to Uncle Robert to-morrow.”
“But don’t feel too bad about it,” she said, after a moment’s pause,
slipping her hand into his.
“He was my colt,” he said. “Nobody has ridden him but you. I broke him
myself. I knew him from the time he was born. I knew every bit of him,
every trick, every caper, and I would have staked my life that it was
impossible for him to do a thing like this. There was no warning, no
fighting for the bit, no previous unruliness. I have been thinking it
over. He didn’t fight for the bit, for that matter. He wasn’t unruly,
nor disobedient. There wasn’t time. It was an impulse, and he acted upon
it like lightning. I am astounded now at the swiftness with which it
took place. Inside the first second we were over the edge and falling.
“It was deliberate—deliberate suicide. And attempted murder. It was a
trap. I was the victim. He had me, and he threw himself over with me.
Yet he did not hate me. He loved me ... as much as it is possible for a
horse to love. I am confounded. I cannot understand it any more than you
can understand Dolly’s behavior yesterday.”
“But horses go insane, Chris,” Lute said. “You know that. It’s merely
coincidence that two horses in two days should have spells under you.”
“That’s the only explanation,” he answered, starting off with her. “But
why am I wanted urgently?”
“Planchette.”
“Oh, I remember. It will be a new experience to me. Somehow I missed it
when it was all the rage long ago.”
“So did all of us,” Lute replied, “except Mrs. Grantly. It is her
favorite phantom, it seems.”
“A weird little thing,” he remarked. “Bundle of nerves and black
eyes. I’ll wager she doesn’t weigh ninety pounds, and most of that’s
magnetism.”
“Positively uncanny ... at times.” Lute shivered involuntarily. “She
gives me the creeps.”
“Contact of the healthy with the morbid,” he explained dryly. “You will
notice it is the healthy that always has the creeps. The morbid never
has the creeps. It gives the creeps. That’s its function. Where did you
people pick her up, anyway?”
“I don’t know—yes, I do, too. Aunt Mildred met her in Boston, I
think—oh, I don’t know. At any rate, Mrs. Grantly came to California,
and of course had to visit Aunt Mildred. You know the open house we
keep.”
They halted where a passageway between two great redwood trunks gave
entrance to the dining room. Above, through lacing boughs, could be seen
the stars. Candles lighted the tree-columned space. About the table,
examining the Planchette contrivance, were four persons. Chris’s gaze
roved over them, and he was aware of a guilty sorrow-pang as he paused
for a moment on Lute’s Aunt Mildred and Uncle Robert, mellow with ripe
middle age and genial with the gentle buffets life had dealt them. He
passed amusedly over the black-eyed, frail-bodied Mrs. Grantly, and
halted on the fourth person, a portly, massive-headed man, whose gray
temples belied the youthful solidity of his face.
“Who’s that?” Chris whispered.
“A Mr. Barton. The train was late. That’s why you didn’t see him at
dinner. He’s only a capitalist—water-power-long-distance-electricity
transmitter, or something like that.”
“Doesn’t look as though he could give an ox points on imagination.”
“He can’t. He inherited his money. But he knows enough to hold on to it
and hire other men’s brains. He is very conservative.”
“That is to be expected,” was Chris’s comment. His gaze went back to the
man and woman who had been father and mother to the girl beside him. “Do
you know,” he said, “it came to me with a shock yesterday when you told
me that they had turned against me and that I was scarcely tolerated. I
met them afterwards, last evening, guiltily, in fear and trembling—and
to-day, too. And yet I could see no difference from of old.”
“Dear man,” Lute sighed. “Hospitality is as natural to them as the act
of breathing. But it isn’t that, after all. It is all genuine in their
dear hearts. No matter how severe the censure they put upon you when
you are absent, the moment they are with you they soften and are all
kindness and warmth. As soon as their eyes rest on you, affection and
love come bubbling up. You are so made. Every animal likes you.
All people like you. They can’t help it. You can’t help it. You are
universally lovable, and the best of it is that you don’t know it. You
don’t know it now. Even as I tell it to you, you don’t realize it, you
won’t realize it—and that very incapacity to realize it is one of the
reasons why you are so loved. You are incredulous now, and you shake
your head; but I know, who am your slave, as all people know, for they
likewise are your slaves.
“Why, in a minute we shall go in and join them. Mark the affection,
almost maternal, that will well up in Aunt Mildred’s eyes. Listen to the
tones of Uncle Robert’s voice when he says, ‘Well, Chris, my boy?’ Watch
Mrs. Grantly melt, literally melt, like a dewdrop in the sun.
“Take Mr. Barton, there. You have never seen him before. Why, you will
invite him out to smoke a cigar with you when the rest of us have gone
to bed—you, a mere nobody, and he a man of many millions, a man of
power, a man obtuse and stupid like the ox; and he will follow you
about, smoking; the cigar, like a little dog, your little dog, trotting
at your back. He will not know he is doing it, but he will be doing it
just the same. Don’t I know, Chris? Oh, I have watched you, watched you,
so often, and loved you for it, and loved you again for it, because you
were so delightfully and blindly unaware of what you were doing.”
“I’m almost bursting with vanity from listening to you,” he laughed,
passing his arm around her and drawing her against him.
“Yes,” she whispered, “and in this very moment, when you are laughing at
all that I have said, you, the feel of you, your soul,—call it what you
will, it is you,—is calling for all the love that is in me.”
She leaned more closely against him, and sighed as with fatigue. He
breathed a kiss into her hair and held her with firm tenderness.
Aunt Mildred stirred briskly and looked up from the Planchette board.
“Come, let us begin,” she said. “It will soon grow chilly. Robert, where
are those children?”
“Here we are,” Lute called out, disengaging herself.
“Now for a bundle of creeps,” Chris whispered, as they started in.
Lute’s prophecy of the manner in which her lover would be received
was realized. Mrs. Grantly, unreal, unhealthy, scintillant with frigid
magnetism, warmed and melted as though of truth she were dew and he sun.
Mr. Barton beamed broadly upon him, and was colossally gracious. Aunt
Mildred greeted him with a glow of fondness and motherly kindness, while
Uncle Robert genially and heartily demanded, “Well, Chris, my boy, and
what of the riding?”
But Aunt Mildred drew her shawl more closely around her and hastened
them to the business in hand. On the table was a sheet of paper. On the
paper, rifling on three supports, was a small triangular board. Two of
the supports were easily moving casters. The third support, placed at
the apex of the triangle, was a lead pencil.
“Who’s first?” Uncle Robert demanded.
There was a moment’s hesitancy, then Aunt Mildred placed her hand on the
board, and said: “Some one has always to be the fool for the delectation
of the rest.”
“Brave woman,” applauded her husband. “Now, Mrs. Grantly, do your
worst.”
“I?” that lady queried. “I do nothing. The power, or whatever you care
to think it, is outside of me, as it is outside of all of you. As to
what that power is, I will not dare to say. There is such a power. I
have had evidences of it. And you will undoubtedly have evidences of
it. Now please be quiet, everybody. Touch the board very lightly, but
firmly, Mrs. Story; but do nothing of your own volition.”
Aunt Mildred nodded, and stood with her hand on Planchette; while the
rest formed about her in a silent and expectant circle. But nothing
happened. The minutes ticked away, and Planchette remained motionless.
“Be patient,” Mrs. Grantly counselled. “Do not struggle against any
influences you may feel working on you. But do not do anything yourself.
The influence will take care of that. You will feel impelled to do
things, and such impulses will be practically irresistible.”
“I wish the influence would hurry up,” Aunt Mildred protested at the end
of five motionless minutes.
“Just a little longer, Mrs. Story, just a little longer,” Mrs. Grantly
said soothingly.
Suddenly Aunt Mildred’s hand began to twitch into movement. A mild
concern showed in her face as she observed the movement of her hand and
heard the scratching of the pencil-point at the apex of Planchette.
For another five minutes this continued, when Aunt Mildred withdrew her
hand with an effort, and said, with a nervous laugh:
“I don’t know whether I did it myself or not. I do know that I was
growing nervous, standing there like a psychic fool with all your solemn
faces turned upon me.”
“Hen-scratches,” was Uncle Robert’s judgement, when he looked over the
paper upon which she had scrawled.
“Quite illegible,” was Mrs. Grantly’s dictum. “It does not resemble
writing at all. The influences have not got to working yet. Do you try
it, Mr. Barton.”
That gentleman stepped forward, ponderously willing to please, and
placed his hand on the board. And for ten solid, stolid minutes he stood
there, motionless, like a statue, the frozen personification of the
commercial age. Uncle Robert’s face began to work. He blinked, stiffened
his mouth, uttered suppressed, throaty sounds, deep down; finally he
snorted, lost his self-control, and broke out in a roar of laughter.
All joined in this merriment, including Mrs. Grantly. Mr. Barton laughed
with them, but he was vaguely nettled.
“You try it, Story,” he said.
Uncle Robert, still laughing, and urged on by Lute and his wife, took
the board. Suddenly his face sobered. His hand had begun to move, and
the pencil could be heard scratching across the paper.
“By George!” he muttered. “That’s curious. Look at it. I’m not doing it.
I know I’m not doing it. Look at that hand go! Just look at it!”
“Now, Robert, none of your ridiculousness,” his wife warned him.
“I tell you I’m not doing it,” he replied indignantly. “The force has
got hold of me. Ask Mrs. Grantly. Tell her to make it stop, if you want
it to stop. I can’t stop it. By George! look at that flourish. I didn’t
do that. I never wrote a flourish in my life.”
“Do try to be serious,” Mrs. Grantly warned them. “An atmosphere of
levity does not conduce to the best operation of Planchette.”
“There, that will do, I guess,” Uncle Robert said as he took his hand
away. “Now let’s see.”
He bent over and adjusted his glasses. “It’s handwriting at any rate,
and that’s better than the rest of you did. Here, Lute, your eyes are
young.”
“Oh, what flourishes!” Lute exclaimed, as she looked at the paper. “And
look there, there are two different handwritings.”
She began to read: “This is the first lecture. Concentrate on this
sentence: ‘I am a positive spirit and not negative to any condition.’
Then follow with concentration on positive love. After that peace and
harmony will vibrate through and around your body. Your soul—The other
writing breaks right in. This is the way it goes: Bullfrog 95, Dixie 16,
Golden Anchor 65, Gold Mountain 13, Jim Butler 70, Jumbo 75, North Star
42, Rescue 7, Black Butte 75, Brown Hope 16, Iron Top 3.”
“Iron Top’s pretty low,” Mr. Barton murmured.
“Robert, you’ve been dabbling again!” Aunt Mildred cried accusingly.
“No, I’ve not,” he denied. “I only read the quotations. But how the
devil—I beg your pardon—they got there on that piece of paper I’d like
to know.”
“Your subconscious mind,” Chris suggested. “You read the quotations in
to-day’s paper.”
“No, I didn’t; but last week I glanced over the column.”
“A day or a year is all the same in the subconscious mind,” said Mrs.
Grantly. “The subconscious mind never forgets. But I am not saying that
this is due to the subconscious mind. I refuse to state to what I think
it is due.”
“But how about that other stuff?” Uncle Robert demanded. “Sounds like
what I’d think Christian Science ought to sound like.”
“Or theosophy,” Aunt Mildred volunteered. “Some message to a neophyte.”
“Go on, read the rest,” her husband commanded.
“This puts you in touch with the mightier spirits,” Lute read. “You
shall become one with us, and your name shall be ‘Arya,’ and you
shall—Conqueror 20, Empire 12, Columbia Mountain 18, Midway 140—and,
and that is all. Oh, no! here’s a last flourish, Arya, from Kandor—that
must surely be the Mahatma.”
“I’d like to have you explain that theosophy stuff on the basis of the
subconscious mind, Chris,” Uncle Robert challenged.
Chris shrugged his shoulders. “No explanation. You must have got a
message intended for some one else.”
“Lines were crossed, eh?” Uncle Robert chuckled. “Multiplex spiritual
wireless telegraphy, I’d call it.”
“It IS nonsense,” Mrs. Grantly said. “I never knew Planchette to behave
so outrageously. There are disturbing influences at work. I felt them
from the first. Perhaps it is because you are all making too much fun of
it. You are too hilarious.”
“A certain befitting gravity should grace the occasion,” Chris agreed,
placing his hand on Planchette. “Let me try. And not one of you must
laugh or giggle, or even think ‘laugh’ or ‘giggle.’ And if you dare
to snort, even once, Uncle Robert, there is no telling what occult
vengeance may be wreaked upon you.”
“I’ll be good,” Uncle Robert rejoined. “But if I really must snort, may
I silently slip away?”
Chris nodded. His hand had already begun to work. There had been no
preliminary twitchings nor tentative essays at writing. At once his hand
had started off, and Planchette was moving swiftly and smoothly across
the paper.
“Look at him,” Lute whispered to her aunt. “See how white he is.”
Chris betrayed disturbance at the sound of her voice, and thereafter
silence was maintained. Only could be heard the steady scratching of the
pencil. Suddenly, as though it had been stung, he jerked his hand away.
With a sigh and a yawn he stepped back from the table, then glanced with
the curiosity of a newly awakened man at their faces.
“I think I wrote something,” he said.
“I should say you did,” Mrs. Grantly remarked with satisfaction, holding
up the sheet of paper and glancing at it.
“Read it aloud,” Uncle Robert said.
“Here it is, then. It begins with ‘beware’ written three times, and in
much larger characters than the rest of the writing. BEWARE! BEWARE!
BEWARE! Chris Dunbar, I intend to destroy you. I have already made two
attempts upon your life, and failed. I shall yet succeed. So sure am I
that I shall succeed that I dare to tell you. I do not need to tell you
why. In your own heart you know. The wrong you are doing—And here it
abruptly ends.”
Mrs. Grantly laid the paper down on the table and looked at Chris, who
had already become the centre of all eyes, and who was yawning as from
an overpowering drowsiness.
“Quite a sanguinary turn, I should say,” Uncle Robert remarked.
“I have already made two attempts upon your life,” Mrs. Grantly read
from the paper, which she was going over a second time.
“On my life?” Chris demanded between yawns. “Why, my life hasn’t been
attempted even once. My! I am sleepy!”
“Ah, my boy, you are thinking of flesh-and-blood men,” Uncle Robert
laughed. “But this is a spirit. Your life has been attempted by unseen
things. Most likely ghostly hands have tried to throttle you in your
sleep.”
“Oh, Chris!” Lute cried impulsively. “This afternoon! The hand you said
must have seized your rein!”
“But I was joking,” he objected.
“Nevertheless ...” Lute left her thought unspoken.
Mrs. Grantly had become keen on the scent. “What was that about this
afternoon? Was your life in danger?”
Chris’s drowsiness had disappeared. “I’m becoming interested myself,”
he acknowledged. “We haven’t said anything about it. Ban broke his back
this afternoon. He threw himself off the bank, and I ran the risk of
being caught underneath.”
“I wonder, I wonder,” Mrs. Grantly communed aloud. “There is something
in this.... It is a warning.... Ah! You were hurt yesterday riding Miss
Story’s horse! That makes the two attempts!”
She looked triumphantly at them. Planchette had been vindicated.
“Nonsense,” laughed Uncle Robert, but with a slight hint of irritation
in his manner. “Such things do not happen these days. This is the
twentieth century, my dear madam. The thing, at the very latest, smacks
of mediaevalism.”
“I have had such wonderful tests with Planchette,” Mrs. Grantly began,
then broke off suddenly to go to the table and place her hand on the
board.
“Who are you?” she asked. “What is your name?”
The board immediately began to write. By this time all heads, with the
exception of Mr. Barton’s, were bent over the table and following the
pencil.
“It’s Dick,” Aunt Mildred cried, a note of the mildly hysterical in her
voice.
Her husband straightened up, his face for the first time grave.
“It’s Dick’s signature,” he said. “I’d know his fist in a thousand.”
“‘Dick Curtis,’” Mrs. Grantly read aloud. “Who is Dick Curtis?”
“By Jove, that’s remarkable!” Mr. Barton broke in. “The handwriting in
both instances is the same. Clever, I should say, really clever,” he
added admiringly.
“Let me see,” Uncle Robert demanded, taking the paper and examining it.
“Yes, it is Dick’s handwriting.”
“But who is Dick?” Mrs. Grantly insisted. “Who is this Dick Curtis?”
“Dick Curtis, why, he was Captain Richard Curtis,” Uncle Robert
answered.
“He was Lute’s father,” Aunt Mildred supplemented. “Lute took our name.
She never saw him. He died when she was a few weeks old. He was my
brother.”
“Remarkable, most remarkable.” Mrs. Grantly was revolving the message
in her mind. “There were two attempts on Mr. Dunbar’s life. The
subconscious mind cannot explain that, for none of us knew of the
accident to-day.”
“I knew,” Chris answered, “and it was I that operated Planchette. The
explanation is simple.”
“But the handwriting,” interposed Mr. Barton. “What you wrote and what
Mrs. Grantly wrote are identical.”
Chris bent over and compared the handwriting.
“Besides,” Mrs. Grantly cried, “Mr. Story recognizes the handwriting.”
She looked at him for verification.
He nodded his head. “Yes, it is Dick’s fist. I’ll swear to that.”
But to Lute had come a visioning. While the rest argued pro and con and
the air was filled with phrases,—“psychic phenomena,” “self-hypnotism,”
“residuum of unexplained truth,” and “spiritism,”—she was reviving
mentally the girlhood pictures she had conjured of this soldier-father
she had never seen. She possessed his sword, there were several
old-fashioned daguerreotypes, there was much that had been said of him,
stories told of him—and all this had constituted the material out of
which she had builded him in her childhood fancy.
“There is the possibility of one mind unconsciously suggesting to
another mind,” Mrs. Grantly was saying; but through Lute’s mind was
trooping her father on his great roan war-horse. Now he was leading
his men. She saw him on lonely scouts, or in the midst of the yelling
Indians at Salt Meadows, when of his command he returned with one man
in ten. And in the picture she had of him, in the physical semblance she
had made of him, was reflected his spiritual nature, reflected by her
worshipful artistry in form and feature and expression—his bravery,
his quick temper, his impulsive championship, his madness of wrath in
a righteous cause, his warm generosity and swift forgiveness, and his
chivalry that epitomized codes and ideals primitive as the days of
knighthood. And first, last, and always, dominating all, she saw in the
face of him the hot passion and quickness of deed that had earned for
him the name “Fighting Dick Curtis.”
“Let me put it to the test,” she heard Mrs. Grantly saying. “Let Miss
Story try Planchette. There may be a further message.”
“No, no, I beg of you,” Aunt Mildred interposed. “It is too uncanny.
It surely is wrong to tamper with the dead. Besides, I am nervous. Or,
better, let me go to bed, leaving you to go on with your experiments.
That will be the best way, and you can tell me in the morning.” Mingled
with the “Good-nights,” were half-hearted protests from Mrs. Grantly, as
Aunt Mildred withdrew.
“Robert can return,” she called back, “as soon as he has seen me to my
tent.”
“It would be a shame to give it up now,” Mrs. Grantly said. “There is no
telling what we are on the verge of. Won’t you try it, Miss Story?”
Lute obeyed, but when she placed her hand on the board she was conscious
of a vague and nameless fear at this toying with the supernatural. She
was twentieth-century, and the thing in essence, as her uncle had said,
was mediaeval. Yet she could not shake off the instinctive fear that
arose in her—man’s inheritance from the wild and howling ages when
his hairy, apelike prototype was afraid of the dark and personified the
elements into things of fear.
But as the mysterious influence seized her hand and sent it meriting
across the paper, all the unusual passed out of the situation and she
was unaware of more than a feeble curiosity. For she was intent on
another visioning—this time of her mother, who was also unremembered
in the flesh. Not sharp and vivid like that of her father, but dim and
nebulous was the picture she shaped of her mother—a saint’s head in an
aureole of sweetness and goodness and meekness, and withal, shot
through with a hint of reposeful determination, of will, stubborn and
unobtrusive, that in life had expressed itself mainly in resignation.
Lute’s hand had ceased moving, and Mrs. Grantly was already reading the
message that had been written.
“It is a different handwriting,” she said. “A woman’s hand. ‘Martha,’ it
is signed. Who is Martha?”
Lute was not surprised. “It is my mother,” she said simply. “What does
she say?”
She had not been made sleepy, as Chris had; but the keen edge of her
vitality had been blunted, and she was experiencing a sweet and pleasing
lassitude. And while the message was being read, in her eyes persisted
the vision of her mother.
“Dear child,” Mrs. Grantly read, “do not mind him. He was ever quick of
speech and rash. Be no niggard with your love. Love cannot hurt you.
To deny love is to sin. Obey your heart and you can do no wrong. Obey
worldly considerations, obey pride, obey those that prompt you against
your heart’s prompting, and you do sin. Do not mind your father. He is
angry now, as was his way in the earth-life; but he will come to see
the wisdom of my counsel, for this, too, was his way in the earth-life.
Love, my child, and love well.—Martha.”
“Let me see it,” Lute cried, seizing the paper and devouring the
handwriting with her eyes. She was thrilling with unexpressed love for
the mother she had never seen, and this written speech from the grave
seemed to give more tangibility to her having ever existed, than did the
vision of her.
“This IS remarkable,” Mrs. Grantly was reiterating. “There was never
anything like it. Think of it, my dear, both your father and mother here
with us to-night.”
Lute shivered. The lassitude was gone, and she was her natural self
again, vibrant with the instinctive fear of things unseen. And it
was offensive to her mind that, real or illusion, the presence or the
memorized existences of her father and mother should be touched by these
two persons who were practically strangers—Mrs. Grantly, unhealthy and
morbid, and Mr. Barton, stolid and stupid with a grossness both of
the flesh and the spirit. And it further seemed a trespass that these
strangers should thus enter into the intimacy between her and Chris.
She could hear the steps of her uncle approaching, and the situation
flashed upon her, luminous and clear. She hurriedly folded the sheet of
paper and thrust it into her bosom.
“Don’t say anything to him about this second message, Mrs. Grantly,
please, and Mr. Barton. Nor to Aunt Mildred. It would only cause them
irritation and needless anxiety.”
In her mind there was also the desire to protect her lover, for she knew
that the strain of his present standing with her aunt and uncle would
be added to, unconsciously in their minds, by the weird message of
Planchette.
“And please don’t let us have any more Planchette,” Lute continued
hastily. “Let us forget all the nonsense that has occurred.”
“‘Nonsense,’ my dear child?” Mrs. Grantly was indignantly protesting
when Uncle Robert strode into the circle.
“Hello!” he demanded. “What’s being done?”
“Too late,” Lute answered lightly. “No more stock quotations for you.
Planchette is adjourned, and we’re just winding up the discussion of the
theory of it. Do you know how late it is?”
* * *
“Well, what did you do last night after we left?”
“Oh, took a stroll,” Chris answered.
Lute’s eyes were quizzical as she asked with a tentativeness that was
palpably assumed, “With—a—with Mr. Barton?”
“Why, yes.”
“And a smoke?”
“Yes; and now what’s it all about?”
Lute broke into merry laughter. “Just as I told you that you would do.
Am I not a prophet? But I knew before I saw you that my forecast had
come true. I have just left Mr. Barton, and I knew he had walked with
you last night, for he is vowing by all his fetishes and idols that you
are a perfectly splendid young man. I could see it with my eyes shut.
The Chris Dunbar glamour has fallen upon him. But I have not finished
the catechism by any means. Where have you been all morning?”
“Where I am going to take you this afternoon.”
“You plan well without knowing my wishes.”
“I knew well what your wishes are. It is to see a horse I have found.”
Her voice betrayed her delight, as she cried, “Oh, good!”
“He is a beauty,” Chris said.
But her face had suddenly gone grave, and apprehension brooded in her
eyes.
“He’s called Comanche,” Chris went on. “A beauty, a regular beauty, the
perfect type of the Californian cow-pony. And his lines—why, what’s the
matter?”
“Don’t let us ride any more,” Lute said, “at least for a while. Really,
I think I am a tiny bit tired of it, too.”
He was looking at her in astonishment, and she was bravely meeting his
eyes.
“I see hearses and flowers for you,” he began, “and a funeral oration; I
see the end of the world, and the stars falling out of the sky, and the
heavens rolling up as a scroll; I see the living and the dead gathered
together for the final judgement, the sheep and the goats, the lambs and
the rams and all the rest of it, the white-robed saints, the sound of
golden harps, and the lost souls howling as they fall into the Pit—all
this I see on the day that you, Lute Story, no longer care to ride a
horse. A horse, Lute! a horse!”
“For a while, at least,” she pleaded.
“Ridiculous!” he cried. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?—you who
are always so abominably and adorably well!”
“No, it’s not that,” she answered. “I know it is ridiculous, Chris, I
know it, but the doubt will arise. I cannot help it. You always say I
am so sanely rooted to the earth and reality and all that, but—perhaps
it’s superstition, I don’t know—but the whole occurrence, the messages
of Planchette, the possibility of my father’s hand, I know not how,
reaching, out to Ban’s rein and hurling him and you to death, the
correspondence between my father’s statement that he has twice attempted
your life and the fact that in the last two days your life has twice
been endangered by horses—my father was a great horseman—all this, I
say, causes the doubt to arise in my mind. What if there be something in
it? I am not so sure. Science may be too dogmatic in its denial of the
unseen. The forces of the unseen, of the spirit, may well be too
subtle, too sublimated, for science to lay hold of, and recognize, and
formulate. Don’t you see, Chris, that there is rationality in the very
doubt? It may be a very small doubt—oh, so small; but I love you too
much to run even that slight risk. Besides, I am a woman, and
that should in itself fully account for my predisposition toward
superstition.
“Yes, yes, I know, call it unreality. But I’ve heard you paradoxing upon
the reality of the unreal—the reality of delusion to the mind that is
sick. And so with me, if you will; it is delusion and unreal, but to me,
constituted as I am, it is very real—is real as a nightmare is real, in
the throes of it, before one awakes.”
“The most logical argument for illogic I have ever heard,” Chris smiled.
“It is a good gaming proposition, at any rate. You manage to embrace
more chances in your philosophy than do I in mine. It reminds me of
Sam—the gardener you had a couple of years ago. I overheard him and
Martin arguing in the stable. You know what a bigoted atheist Martin is.
Well, Martin had deluged Sam with floods of logic. Sam pondered awhile,
and then he said, ‘Foh a fack, Mis’ Martin, you jis’ tawk like a house
afire; but you ain’t got de show I has.’ ‘How’s that?’ Martin asked.
‘Well, you see, Mis’ Martin, you has one chance to mah two.’ ‘I don’t
see it,’ Martin said. ‘Mis’ Martin, it’s dis way. You has jis’ de
chance, lak you say, to become worms foh de fruitification of de cabbage
garden. But I’s got de chance to lif’ mah voice to de glory of de Lawd
as I go paddin’ dem golden streets—along ‘ith de chance to be jis’
worms along ‘ith you, Mis’ Martin.’”
“You refuse to take me seriously,” Lute said, when she had laughed her
appreciation.
“How can I take that Planchette rigmarole seriously?” he asked.
“You don’t explain it—the handwriting of my father, which Uncle Robert
recognized—oh, the whole thing, you don’t explain it.”
“I don’t know all the mysteries of mind,” Chris answered. “But I believe
such phenomena will all yield to scientific explanation in the not
distant future.”
“Just the same, I have a sneaking desire to find out some more from
Planchette,” Lute confessed. “The board is still down in the dining
room. We could try it now, you and I, and no one would know.”
Chris caught her hand, crying: “Come on! It will be a lark.”
Hand in hand they ran down the path to the tree-pillared room.
“The camp is deserted,” Lute said, as she placed Planchette on the
table. “Mrs. Grantly and Aunt Mildred are lying down, and Mr. Barton has
gone off with Uncle Robert. There is nobody to disturb us.” She placed
her hand on the board. “Now begin.”
For a few minutes nothing happened. Chris started to speak, but she
hushed him to silence. The preliminary twitchings had appeared in her
hand and arm. Then the pencil began to write. They read the message,
word by word, as it was written:
There is wisdom greater than the wisdom of reason. Love proceeds not out
of the dry-as-dust way of the mind. Love is of the heart, and is
beyond all reason, and logic, and philosophy. Trust your own heart,
my daughter. And if your heart bids you have faith in your lover, then
laugh at the mind and its cold wisdom, and obey your heart, and have
faith in your lover.—Martha.
“But that whole message is the dictate of your own heart,” Chris
cried. “Don’t you see, Lute? The thought is your very own, and your
subconscious mind has expressed it there on the paper.”
“But there is one thing I don’t see,” she objected.
“And that?”
“Is the handwriting. Look at it. It does not resemble mine at all. It
is mincing, it is old-fashioned, it is the old-fashioned feminine of a
generation ago.”
“But you don’t mean to tell me that you really believe that this is a
message from the dead?” he interrupted.
“I don’t know, Chris,” she wavered. “I am sure I don’t know.”
“It is absurd!” he cried. “These are cobwebs of fancy. When one dies, he
is dead. He is dust. He goes to the worms, as Martin says. The dead? I
laugh at the dead. They do not exist. They are not. I defy the powers of
the grave, the men dead and dust and gone!
“And what have you to say to that?” he challenged, placing his hand on
Planchette.
On the instant his hand began to write. Both were startled by the
suddenness of it. The message was brief: