Instead, he drew her tighter. She could not see his face; but as she
struck, madly, blindly, at its dim whiteness, his laugh, heartless,
cynical, came out of the dusk, "Kick, bite, scratch all you want, my
little beauty," he said, forcing his face against hers, "your struggles
are sweet as caresses."
Yet, withal his boast, he found it difficult to hold her. Twice she
broke his grip and almost leaped from the sleigh; and as she fought his
face away, her hand suddenly touched the reins that were looped over his
arm.
In the black confusion he was unable to specify just what happened
thereafter. He knew that, alarmed by the scuffling, the ponies had
burst into a gallop; but, though he felt her relax, he could not see her
throw all of her weight into a sudden jerk on the left rein. Ensued a
heaving, tumultuous moment. Pulled from the trail, the ponies plunged
into deep drift. The cutter bucked like a live thing, and as it dropped
from the high trail a runner cracked with a pistol report.
Simultaneously they were thrown out into deep, cold snow.
They fell clear of each other, and Helen heard Rhodes swearing as he ran
to the ponies' heads. The sound spurred her to action. She could only
count on a minute, and, rising, she ran, stumbling, falling headlong
into drifts to rise and plunge on, in her heart the terror of the hunted
thing. Each second she expected to hear his pursuing foot. But he had
to tie the ponies to a prairie poplar, and by that time she had gained a
bluff two hundred yards away, and was crouched like a chased hare in its
heart.
That poor covert would not have sufficed against a frontiersman.
Tracking by the fainter whiteness of broken snow, he would soon have
flushed the trembling game, but it was ample protection from Rhodes's
inefficiency. Alarmed when he saw that she was gone, he ran back and
forth, shouting, coupling her name with promises of good behavior. As
her line of flight had angled but slightly from the trail, she heard him
plainly.
"My God! You'll freeze! Mrs. Carter! Oh, Mrs. Carter! Do come out! I
was only joking!"
She did not require his assurance as to the freezing. Already her limbs
were numb, her teeth chattered so loudly she was afraid he would hear.
But she preferred the frost's mercy to his, and so lay, shivering,
until, in despair, he got the ponies back to the trail and drove rapidly
away. Then she came out and headed homeward like a bolting rabbit.
Twice she was scared back into the snow: once when Rhodes turned about
and dashed down and back the trail; again just before she picked
Leslie's voice from passing bells. He was merely talking to his horses,
but never before had his voice fallen so sweetly on pretty ears.
As at some wan ghost, he stared at the dim, draggled figure that came up
to him out of the snows; indeed, half frozen and wholly frightened, she
was little more than the ghost of herself. "The cad!" he stormed,
hearing her story. "I'll punch his head to-morrow!" And he maintained
that rude intention up to the moment that he dropped her at her own
door.
"Don't!" she called after him. "Elinor won't like it." But the caution
was for his own good, and she was not so very much cast down when he
persisted.
"Then she can lump it!" he shouted back.
The proverb gives the trampled worm rather more than due credit when one
remembers that a barrel-hoop can outturn the very fiercest worm, but it
should be remembered in Leslie's favor that he mutinied in the cause of
another. Having all of the obstinacy of his dulness, he went straighter
to his end because it was allied with that narrow, bull-dog vision which
excludes all but one object from the field of sight. Meeting Rhodes,
Chapman, and Newton, with lanterns, at the point where the sleigh had
capsized, he rushed the former and was living in the strict letter of
his intention when the others pulled him away. They could not, however,
dam his indignant speech. On that vast, dark stage, with the lanterns
shedding a golden aureole about Rhodes and his bleeding mouth, he gave
them the undiluted truth, as it is said to flow from the mouths of babes
and sucklings.
Arrived home, moreover, he staggered his wife by his stubborn
opposition. "It is no use talking, Elinor," he said, closing a bitter
argument. "To-morrow I go to the bush for a load of wood, and if that
cad is here when I return I'll break a whip on his back." Then,
ignoring her bitten lips, clinched hands, the bitter fury that was to
produce such woful consequences, he went quietly off to bed.
Of all this, however, Helen remained in ignorance until after the
denouement that came a few days later along with a scattering of new
snow. Those were days of misery for her--of remorseful brooding,
self-reproach, hot shame that set her at bitter introspection that she
might find and root out the germs of wickedness that had brought these
successive insults. As hundreds of good girls before her, as thousands
will after her, she wondered if she were really the possessor of some
unsuspected sensuousness. Comparisons, too, were forced upon her.
Revolting from the rough settler life, she had turned to the English set
only to find that their polished ease was but the veneer of their
degeneracy, analogous to the phosphorescence given off in the dark by a
poisoned fish, and equally indicative of decay. She could not fail to
contrast her husband's sterling worth with their moral and intellectual
leprosy.
The nights were still more trying. She would sit, evenings, and stare
at the lamp as though it were the veritable flame of life, while her
spirit quested after the cause of things and the root of many enigmas.
Why, for instance, is it that pitilessness, ferocity, ruth, which were
good in the youth of the world, should cause such evil in its old age?
For what reason the cause of the lily willed also its blight? Why
conditions make fish of one woman, flesh of another, and fowl of a
third, and wherefore any one of them should be damned for doing what she
couldn't help in following the dictates of her nature? In fact, from
the duration of her reveries, she may have entertained all of the
hundred and odd questions with which the atom pelts the infinite, and,
judging from her dissatisfaction, she received the usual answer--Why?
It is nature's wont to deliver her lessons in parables, from which each
must extract his or her own meanings; and a momentous page was turned in
Helen's lesson the day that she rode over to Leslie's to verify a rumor
which Nels had brought from the post-office.
As sleighing was practically over and wheeling not yet begun, she went
horseback. As aforesaid, a scattering of new snow covered the prairies,
and she rode through a bitter prospect. Everywhere yellow grass
tussocks or tall brown weeds thrust through the scant whiteness to wave
in the chill wind. Under the sky's enormous gray, scrub and bluff and
blackened drifts stood out, harsh studies in black and white. Nature
was in the blues, and all sentient things shared her dull humor.
Winging north, in V or harrow formations, the wild ducks quacked their
discontent. Peevish snipe cursed the weather as they dipped from slough
to slough. A lone coyote complained that the season transcended his
experience, then broke off his plaint to chase a rabbit, of whose red
death Helen was shuddering witness.
The settlement was even less cheerful. Such houses as she passed rose
like dirty smudges from the frozen mud of their dooryards. Moreover,
the looks of the few settlers she met were not conducive of better
spirits. MacCloud, a bigoted Presbyterian of the old Scotch-Canadian
school, gave her a malignant grin in exchange for her nod. Three Shinn
boys, big louts, burst into a loud guffaw as their wagon rattled by her
at the forks of Leslie's trail. Their comment, "Guess she hain't
heard!" increased her apprehension.
She could now see the house, smokeless, apparently lifeless, frowning
down from a snow-clad ridge. But when, a minute later, she knocked,
Leslie answered, and she entered. The living-room, with its
associations of gayety, was dank, cold, cheerless. Ash littered the
fireless stove; the floor was unswept; the air gave back her breath in a
steamy cloud. Through the bedroom door she saw drawers and boxes wide
open, their contents tossed and tumbled as though some one had rummaged
them for valuable contents. And amid these ruins of a home Leslie sat,
head bowed in his hands.
"You poor man!" she cried. "You poor, poor man!"
He turned up his face, and its sick misery reminded her of a worm
raising its mangled head from under a passing wheel as though questing a
reason for its sudden taking off. His words strengthened the
impression: "I couldn't seem to satisfy her, and she was angry because I
took your part against him. Of course she isn't so much to blame. I
did as well as I could, but I'm neither clever nor ornamental, like
Rhodes. But I tried to treat her well, didn't I? You shall judge."
"You did--of course you did, poor man!" she sobbed.
"Then why did she leave me?"
Somehow his blind questioning raised the prairie tragedy in her mind.
The rabbit's death-scream was equally sincere in its protest against
inscrutable fate in the coyote's green eyes. Its innocence was
blameless as this. Yet--how could she answer problems as unsolvable as
her own?
"I have been a fool," he went on; and his next words helped to lessen
the astonishment, though not the pain, which his calamity had brought
her. "A blind fool! When we used to drive out to Regis last summer it
was going on--I can see it now. They did their billing and cooing under
my very eyes. Yet they were not so clever, after all, were they? I
trusted her--with my honor, expecting her to protect it as I would have
defended her virtue. Was I at fault? If a man can't trust his wife,
what can he do? Surely not lock her up. What could I do?"
Puzzled, she stood and looked down upon him. But under its delicate
complexities the feminine mind is ever practical, and her attention
quickly turned to his physical welfare. He must be taken away--weaned
from his sick brooding, blind questioning. "Have you eaten to-day?" she
asked. "Not for _three_ days! Go out and harness your ponies at once,
and come home with me to supper." Anticipating objection, she added,
"Really, you must, for I am too tired to ride back again."
Her little fiction was hardly necessary, he found it so easy to let her
do his thinking. He obeyed as one in a trance; and not till they drove
away, leading her pony behind, did action dissipate his lethargy. Then
he began to display some signs of animation.
It was a silent and uncomfortable drive. Instead of the usual lively
jingle, pole and harness rattled dully, the light snow hushed the merry
song of the wheels to a slushy dirge. The raw air, bleak sky, slaty
grays of the dull prospect were eminently oppressive. Nature had shed
her illusions and, fronting her cold materialism, there was no dodging
issues. Facts thrust themselves too rudely upon consciousness. Leslie
spoke but once, and the remark proved that the chill realities had set
him again at the riddle of life.
"I shall sell out," he said, as the ponies swung in on Carter's trail.
"Go to South Africa. My brother is a mining superintendent on the
Rand."