AND HE DID EAT
After the meal he wanted to lie down in the grasses and watch the
clouds sail by, but she would have none of it. She haled him away to
the brookside. There she showed him how to wash dishes by filling them
half full of water in which fine gravel has been mixed, and then
whirling the whole rapidly until the tin is rubbed quite clean. Never
was prosaic task more delightful. They knelt side by side on the bank,
under the dense leaves, and dabbled in the water happily. The ferns
were fresh and cool. Once a redbird shot confidently down from above on
half-closed wing, caught sight of these intruders, brought up with a
swish of feathers, and eyed them gravely for some time from a
neighbouring treelet. Apparently he was satisfied with his inspection,
for after a few minutes he paid no further attention to them, but went
about his business quietly. When the dishes had been washed, Mary
stood over Bennington while he packed them in the bundle and strapped
them on the saddle.
"Now," said she at last, "we have nothing more to think of until we go
home."
She was like a child, playing with exhaustless spirits at the most
trivial games. Not for a moment would she listen to anything of a
serious nature. Bennington, with the heavier pertinacity of men when
they have struck a congenial vein, tried to repeat to some extent the
experience of the last afternoon at the rock. Mary laughed his
sentiment to ridicule and his poetics to scorn. Everything he said she
twisted into something funny or ridiculous. He wanted to sit down and
enjoy the calm peace of the little ravine in which they had pitched
their temporary camp, but she made a quiet life miserable to him. At
last in sheer desperation he arose to pursue, whereupon she vanished
lightly into the underbrush. A moment later he heard her clear laugh
mocking him from some elder thickets a hundred yards away. Bennington
pursued with ardour. It was as though a slow-turning ocean liner were
to try to run down a lively little yacht.
Bennington had always considered girls as weak creatures, incapable of
swift motion, and needing assistance whenever the country departed from
the artificial level of macadam. He had also thought himself fairly
active. He revised these ideas. This girl could travel through the thin
brush of the creek bottom two feet to his one, because she ran more
lightly and surely, and her endurance was not a matter for discussion.
The question of second wind did not concern her any more than it does a
child, whose ordinary mode of progression is heartbreaking. Bennington
found that he was engaged in the most delightful play of his life. He
shouted aloud with the fun of it. He had the feeling that he was
grasping at a sunbeam, or a mist-shape that always eluded him.
He would lose her utterly, and would stand quite motionless, listening,
for a long time. Suddenly, without warning, an exaggerated leaf crown
would fall about his neck, and he would be overwhelmed with ridicule at
the outrageous figure he presented. Then for a time she seemed
everywhere at once. The mottled sunlight under the trees danced and
quivered after her, smiling and darkening as she dimpled or was grave.
The little whirlwinds of the gulches seized the leaves and danced with
her too, the birches and aspens tossed their hands, and rising ever
higher and wilder and more elf-like came the mocking cadences of her
laughter.
After a time she disappeared again. Bennington stood still, waiting for
some new prank, but he waited in vain. He instituted a search, but the
search was fruitless. He called, but received no reply. At last he made
his way again to the dell in which they had lunched, and there he found
her, flat on her back, looking at the little summer clouds through
wide-open eyes.
Her mood appeared to have changed. Indeed that seemed to be
characteristic of her; that her lightness was not so much the lightness
of thistle down, which is ever airy, the sport of every wind, but
rather that of the rose vine, mobile and swaying in every breeze, yet
at the same time rooted well in the wholesome garden earth. She cared
now to be silent. In a little while Bennington saw that she had fallen
asleep. For the first time he looked upon her face in absolute repose.
Feature by feature, line by line, he went over it, and into his heart
crept that peculiar yearning which seems, on analysis, half pity for
what has past and half fear for what may come. It is bestowed on little
children, and on those whose natures, in spite of their years, are
essentially childlike. For this girl's face was so pathetically young.
Its sensitive lips pouted with a child's pout, its pointed chin was
delicate with the delicacy that is lost when the teeth have had often
to be clenched in resolve; its cheek was curved so softly, its long
eyelashes shaded that cheek so purely. Yet somewhere, like an
intangible spirit which dwelt in it, unseen except through its littlest
effects, Bennington seemed to trace that subtle sadness, or still more
subtle mystery, which at times showed so strongly in her eyes. He
caught himself puzzling over it, trying to seize it. It was most like a
sorrow, and yet like a sorrow which had been outlived. Or, if a
mystery, it was as a mystery which was such only to others, no longer
to herself. The whole line of thought was too fine-drawn for
Bennington's untrained perceptions. Yet again, all at once, he realized
that this very fact was one of the girl's charms to him; that her mere
presence stirred in him perceptions, intuitions, thoughts--yes, even
powers--which he had never known before. He felt that she developed
him. He found that instead of being weak he was merely latent; that now
the latent perceptions were unfolding. Since he had known her he had
felt himself more of a man, more ready to grapple with facts and
conditions on his own behalf, more inclined to take his own view of the
world and to act on it. She had given him independence, for she had
made him believe in himself, and belief in one's self is the first
principle of independence. Bennington de Laney looked back on his old
New York self as on a being infinitely remote.
She awoke and opened her eyes slowly, and looked at him without
blinking. The sun had gone nearly to the ridge top, and a Wilson's
thrush was celebrating with his hollow notes the artificial twilight
of its shadow.
She smiled at him a little vaguely, the mists of sleep clouding her
eyes. It is the unguarded moment, the instant of awakening. At such an
instant the mask falls from before the features of the soul. I do not
know what Bennington saw.
"Mary, Mary!" he cried uncontrolledly, "I love you! I love you, girl."
He had never before seen any one so vexed. She sat up at once.
"Oh, _why_ did you have to say that!" she cried angrily. "Why did you
have to spoil things! Why couldn't you have let it go along as it was
without bringing _that_ into it!"
She arose and began to walk angrily up and down, kicking aside the
sticks and stones as she encountered them.
"I was just beginning to like you, and now you do this. _Oh_, I am so
angry!" She stamped her little foot. "I thought I had found a man for
once who could be a good friend to me, whom I could meet unguardedly,
and behold! the third day he tells me this!"
"I am sorry," stammered Bennington, his new tenderness fleeing,
frightened, into the inner recesses of his being. "I beg your pardon, I
didn't know--_Don't_! I won't say it again. Please!"
The declaration had been manly. This was ridiculously boyish. The girl
frowned at him in two minds as to what to do.
"Really, truly," he assured her.
She laughed a little, scornfully. "Very well, I'll give you one more
chance. I like you too well to drop you entirely." (What an air of
autocracy she took, to be sure!) "You mustn't speak of that again. And
you must forget it entirely." She lowered at him, a delicious picture
of wrath.
They saddled the horses and took their way homeward in silence. The
tenderness put out its flower head from the inner sanctuary. Apparently
the coast was clear. It ventured a little further. The evening was very
shadowy and sweet and musical with birds. The tenderness boldly invaded
Bennington's eyes, and spoke, oh, so timidly, from his lips.
"I will do just as you say," it hesitated, "and I'll be very, very
good indeed. But am I to have no hope at all?"
"Why can't you keep off that standpoint entirely?"
"Just that one question; then I will."
"Well," grudgingly, "I suppose nothing on earth could keep the average
mortal from hoping; but I can't answer that there is any ground for
it."
"When can I speak of it again?"
"I don't know--after the Pioneer's Picnic."
"That is when you cease to be a mystery, isn't it?"
She sighed. "That is when I become a greater mystery--even to myself, I
fear," she added in a murmur too low for him to catch.
They rode on in silence for a little space more. The night shadows were
flowing down between the trees like vapour. The girl of her own accord
returned to the subject.
"You are greatly to be envied," she said a little sadly, "for you are
really young. I am old, oh, very, very old! You have trust and
confidence. I have not. I can sympathize; I can understand. But that
is all. There is something within me that binds all my emotions so fast
that I can not give way to them. I want to. I wish I could. But it is
getting harder and harder for me to think of absolutely trusting, in
the sense of giving out the self that is my own. Ah, but you are to be
envied! You have saved up and accumulated the beautiful in your nature.
I have wasted mine, and now I sit by the roadside and cry for it. My
only hope and prayer is that a higher and better something will be
given me in place of the wasted, and yet I have no right to expect it.
Silly, isn't it?" she concluded bitterly.
Bennington made no reply.
They drew near the gulch, and could hear the mellow sound of bells as
the town herd defiled slowly down it toward town.
"We part here," the young man broke the long silence. "When do I see
you again?"
"I do not know."
"To-morrow?"
"No."
"Day after?"
The girl shook herself from a reverie. "If you want me to believe you,
come every afternoon to the Rock, and wait. Some day I will meet you
there."
She was gone.