BREAKING IN THE BLACK HORSE.
Cora Lander curbed in her black horse and called out, with radiant good
humor:
“What, out walking? What a glorious day it is! But what has become of
you, cousin? I missed you at dinner yesterday and at breakfast this
morning. Do be a little more sociable—I so long to hear you sing again.
So, so, Blackbird!”
The horse was purposely rendered restive by a tight curb, and was
tossing his lovely head impatiently, while the gravel flew from under
his hoofs.
“Which way have you been?” she inquired, slackening the curb.
“Into the woods,” answered Virginia, gravely.
“Into the woods—why that is a long walk.”
“We did not think it so when we were children together.”
Cora curbed her horse sharply again. He reared to his hind feet, shaking
his head and arching his neck till the jet black mane streamed on the
wind; then, seizing the bit in his teeth, he dashed away, plunging
forward like a prairie horse in the lasso.
“There, he will hurl her from the saddle! Great Heavens, how he
plunges!” exclaimed Virginia.
“No, he won’t—she wasn’t born to be killed by a critter like that, I
answer for it,” broke in Joshua Hurd, coming upon them from behind a
thicket of almost leafless rose bushes. “Never you fear about her; she’s
got grit enough for that animal. Look at her now. Golly, ain’t she a
clipper?”
Cora had turned her horse off the road and was riding him furiously over
the lawn, lashing out with her whip and beating his side with her heel
till the foam flew over his chest like massed snow flakes.
“She’s a darned sight more likely to kill the hoss than he is to throw
her. Consarn the critter! don’t she know the natur of a dumb beast
better than that! Why, you should see this identical animal in the
stable, he’s playful as a kitten. Snowball herself ain’t playfuller.”
That instant Cora flashed by them like a comet; her hat had been blown
from her head; her face flushed with wild excitement. She took a swift
circuit on the lawn and reined up the quivering beast upon the carriage
road again, drooping and panic-stricken.
“Joshua Hurd, come take this brute,” she cried, leaping from the saddle.
“I think by this time he begins to know who his mistress is—I’ll teach
him!”
“He’s teached a ready, marm,” answered Joshua, catching the bridle she
flung to him. “But we hain’t got a feller in the stables as could find
it in his heart to treat a critter so, if he was ever so contrary.”
“You are not pleased, Joshua Hurd?” she cried, turning sharply upon him.
“No, I ain’t!”
“Then you can call up at the house and get your wages; I keep neither
refractory men nor beasts in my employ.”
“Yes you do. ’Cause I’m ’fractory as all possessed. Ask Eunice, if you
don’t believe it.”
She flashed a fierce, baffled look upon the man, and biting her lips
till they turned white under her teeth, she struck the skirt of her
riding-habit five or six times fiercely with her whip, as if that
allayed her fiery resentment.
“Go back to your lair in the stables, I will attend to you,” she said,
trembling with passion or dread, for it galled her that Virginia should
hear this. “While I am mistress of this establishment, those who receive
my money must be obedient and respectful.”
Joshua drew close to her, grasping his oilskin cap in one hand fiercely
as she held the whip. He trod upon her skirt, thus holding her prisoner
with his feet, and placed his mouth close to her ear. What he said no
one but herself could tell, but she turned ghostly white and attempted
to step back, but his heavy shoes were planted so firmly on her skirt
that she was held face to face with him till the twinkle in his small
eyes drove her frantic.
“Stand off my dress, sir, and begone, or I shall forget myself.”
The whip quivered in her hand, specks of foam flew from, her white lips.
She seemed absolutely about to strike him.
Joshua kept his position just long enough to provoke her beyond bearing,
then moved away, muttering as he went, and leading the horse loosely by
its bridle. Cora watched him with flashing eyes until he disappeared
behind the stables—then she turned upon Virginia.
“I suppose you envy me this pleasant position,” she said, with a sneer
in her voice. “Give me joy of the happiness; it brings! There is not a
servant about the house your mother has not spoiled.”
The quiet contempt with which Virginia heard this was just visible in
her face; but she said nothing, merely passing her cousin in silence.
Cora followed her, still fiercely grasping the whip and dragging her
long skirt over the crisp grass, stirring up a little winrow of red
leaves as she moved.
“You have put him up to this,” she said; “your underhand cunning is
demoralizing my servants.”
“Have the goodness to take your hand from my shoulder,” answered
Virginia, in her clear, low voice. “If you will usurp a lady’s place, at
least attempt something of her good manners.”
Cora’s hand dropped as if an arrow had pierced it. The calm dignity of
this rebuke struck her dumb. Long before her usual audacity came back,
Virginia and Ellen had entered the house.
Cora was standing mute and angry as her cousin had left her, when a
servant, coming up from the post-office, gave her a letter. It was from
Seymour; she knew the writing at once, but held it in her hand a full
minute unopened. In the days of her eager courtship, she would have torn
the envelope into shreds in order to seize upon the precious words it
covered. But now she pulled it open at the ends bit by bit, hesitating
as if the act were a task she had rather not perform.
One of the gardeners came loitering that way as she was slowly opening
her letter. So she thrust it into the corsage of her habit, and
gathering up the heavy folds of cloth falling about her feet, hurried to
the house and into her own room. Here she cast off her riding-dress,
flung it in a heap on the carpet, and locked the door with great
caution. Even then she did not read her letter, but pushed back her hair
before the glass and put on a fanciful loose-dress of white alpaca,
brightened with bows of lilac ribbon—for Mrs. Lander was right, she had
begun to soften the rigor of her first mourning to a considerable
extent.
“It is a lovely tint,” she decided as the ribbons fluttered around her;
“I will venture on it to-morrow!”
At last she sat down on a lounge, drew her feet up under the snowy
dress, arranged a cushion back of her head and took the letter from her
bosom, where it had been lying close to her heart without stirring a
pulse there. This was the letter she read:
“MY DARLING:—Oh, that some dearer and sweeter word might be found which
could leap from my heart to yours, carrying with it some faint idea of
the love that fills my being. I long for a new language of the heart
which can at once thank you for the happiness I have known and the hopes
which live in my heart continually as fire once kindled on a vestal
altar never goes out. Do believe it, my wife, you are the first woman I
ever loved, the only woman on this earth that I ever can love. The
happiness you have given me makes me so restless in my absence that I
sometimes grow desperate and resolve to come back at once. But I cannot,
I cannot. It is necessary that my original idea should be carried out.
My health is a little better, and the invigorating air of these vast
prairies brings spirit and life back to my frame. Unless you send for me
and command me to come back—unless you say that this separation makes
you wretched as I am, my reluctant face will be turned westward till I
reach the Rocky Mountains.
“Do I wish this, or do I dread it? Both, my beloved. The message which
says that my love is necessary to your happy existence would bring me to
your side though death itself lay in wait for me there. But it is
better—far better that I should go forward; therefore I dread the sweet
temptation which would lie in your recall. Do not be unhappy, love—yet I
would not like to think of you as content, or really capable of
enjoyment, now that I am away from you. This is egotism, and I know it;
but such egotism springs out of a soul that would sacrifice itself a
thousand times over rather than give you an hour’s pain.
“Do you love me after this fashion, my wife? Sometimes I ask this
question aloud in the depths of the night, with nothing but a thin
canvas between me and the arch of Heaven; for then a yearning desire
seizes me to read your soul and know, of a certainty, that it answers
mine in all the sweetness and depths of its requirements. But nothing
answers me, not even my own intelligence. I would give the world, if it
were mine, to have this question put at rest in my heart. Cora, I would
live for you in any stage of poverty and never feel it a sacrifice to be
poor or lowly for your sake. I would die for you, my wife, if that were
needful to your comfort or your happiness. To die _with_ you, my
beloved, would make death sweet to me. Can anything ever part us, my
wife? My wife! that is the holiest and sweetest word that I know of in
any language. I think this over sometimes and wonder that I am so
blessed, that you could have chosen me, given yourself to me with such
generous inconsideration. I was not worthy of you; I had neither
position, wealth nor any of the great advantages which make you the
ornament and glory of social life. But if love is a merit—if capacities
of affection can make a man worthy, then am I fairly matched, even with
my peerless wife. No other man living—or that will ever live—could have
loved her more devotedly. Believe that, oh! do believe it; let what will
come in the hereafter, there is not a pulse of my heart that is not
yours. What I am, good or bad, this great love has made me. Have I no
other object in life? you will ask. I answer, none. From the first hour
that I saw you in that beautiful Italian sunset, like a lost angel
searching for its fellows, my life had no hope or thought stronger than
that one keen wish to see you again. I left study and ambition to those
unhappy men who had not seen a woman like you capable of absorbing a
whole life and making these things as nothing. I took you into my
thoughts and brightened them with your goodness, your genius and your
beauty—for you are beautiful, my wife, so beautiful that I close any
eyes at night, and, folding your image in my heart, wonder if the angels
are more lovely.
“Yesterday I took the tress of hair that you gave me from my bosom for
the first time. I had not the courage to look at it before. Did you know
that it was tangled in with a ring of gold, a plain hoop like the
marriage ring I gave you, with the date of our wedding day? Was it
really that ring? or another, by which you thought to remind me of an
event I could no more forget than a happy spirit can forget when the
gates of Paradise opened for him?
“But the ring troubled me a little. It had become so tangled in the hair
that I was compelled to use some force before it was extricated. It was
a singular idea, wasn’t it, darling? but it seemed to me as if even that
light force was hurting you. I had not injured the tress, which now lies
in a coil of dusky gold in the palm of my hand, bright and silky as when
it was shorn from your head—that head which rested on my bosom with all
its wealth of hair thrown abroad that I might cut the richest tress. Oh!
my beloved! my beloved! shall we ever meet again? Can any calamity tear
you from me? What if you were to die? What folly! Hebe herself never had
fresher roses or more perfect health. What if the very intensity of my
love should weary you?
“This is how I torture myself with questions. I know they are absurd,
that devotion like yours should meet with perfect trust. But there is
something in my bosom that will torment me forever and ever, I fear—a
sense of unworthiness—a dread that some time you will discover to how
many faults a most generous love has blinded you. I wish you had not
left that ring so knotted up with the lock of hair. If it was our
wedding ring, you should have kept it sacredly on the finger where I
placed it, swearing to be faithful, solemnly promising my God to strive
hard and lift my imperfect nature up to yours. It was in this way I
circled your finger with that gold, my beloved. Is it possible that you
have cast it back upon me?
“I met a company on the Plains, going forward to the new Territory of
Montana. They are full of hope and eager for enterprise. The mines there
are said to be wonderfully rich. How I wish the great wealth you possess
had fallen to your cousin, and that you were penniless as I first
thought you. Then we would go together into this new country and I would
work for you, think for you, gather up wealth which should be doubly
ours, because the energies of affection had won it from the earth.
“What scope and purpose there would be for our energies in this new
world. How completely we should live out our youth to ourselves and by
ourselves. Say, Cora, is not this possible? Sometimes I have thought
that the possession of so much property has cast shadows of care over
you which seem unnatural. Is it so, my angel? I would to Heaven you
could say yes, and cast the burden of all this money aside. It oppresses
me and shames my manhood to feel the overpowering weight of another
man’s money choking up all aspirations for well-earned success. Cora,
Cora, if we had never given undue value to riches how happy we might
have been—you and I in the mountains of Montana! I have been looking my
past life in the face, dearest, and wonder that the possession of money
should ever have been important to me. I think of our life in that
exquisite little house which your taste made so beautiful, and ask
myself if a log cabin in some western nook, with morning glories running
up to the eaves and wild roses in front, would not have witnessed a
happiness as sweet and pure as that we knew there. Love like ours needs
no luxurious accessories to make it perfect.
“My wife, if I possessed the whole world, and you wished me to give it
up that your happiness might be more complete, I would do it. Will you
give up this property, which somehow seems at times to weigh you down,
and go with me into a new existence beyond the mountains? I ask it in
all seriousness. What has this wealth done for us? Shadowed our first
union with secrecy—a delicious secrecy, it is true, which had something
of Heaven in it, but which is sure to detract from the dignity of a pure
love. Sooner or later, we shall wish that our marriage had been open as
the day.
“Why will my pen refuse to quit the paper? Because it is writing to you,
my wife, and finds the thoughts that turn to you inexhaustible. But you
will weary of me, and I force myself to say good-night.
“Are you thinking of me now, as I think of you, with a yearning
tenderness that fills the eyes with tears? Good-night, my
bride—good-night, my dear, dear wife!
“ALFRED N. SEYMOUR.”
She read this letter stretched luxuriously on that couch, with the lilac
ribbons fluttering around her, and her foot dropping in and out of the
kid slipper into which she had thrust it after taking off her
riding-boots. She was not much affected by the reading. The impassioned
language sometimes brought a gleam of gratification to her face, and she
more than once muttered, “Poor fellow—poor fellow! how he does love me!”
But when she reached the latter part of the epistle, her face utterly
changed—a cloud came upon her forehead which deepened and deepened as
she went on, till she laughed out in her scorn.
“That’s splendid! So he really tired of my pretty box, as I did. That
_is_ delicious! He would have preferred a log cabin with morning
glories. Well, I’m not sure about it. A grand passion might last three
or four weeks longer perhaps, in a breezy new country, with plenty of
wild game, and so on. I did rather overdo the thing, but no one can say
that it was not regally done. I wish somebody would buy up the whole
affair at half-price, I really am afraid it was a failure.”
She read on after this, and came to the proposal about Montana, which
brought a storm of scornful wrath to her face.
“What, I! I, Cora Lander, with money enough to purchase all Montana—with
this form and face, bury myself in the gold mountains, fling away what I
have and trust to chance and his energies for getting more! Why, the
idiot! He really has not the capacity I gave him credit for; I should
make a pretty figure in the gold regions. So that is the length and
breath of his ambition. I am glad he enlightened me in time. Secrecy,
indeed! That becomes more and more important to me every day. What fools
women do make of themselves while the first grand passion lasts! I
wonder if I ever shall be really in love.”
The woman started as this question sprang to her lips. It had been
coiling in her heart like a viper for many a day, but she was shocked at
herself when it crept forth and shaped itself so repulsively.
“Well, I must answer this letter,” she said, turning the key of her desk
upon it. “That will be a safe way of keeping his face westward. I wish
he would go on to that gold country; it would be spring before he could
come back. Yet after all, I should rather like to see him. It is
something in a woman’s life to be so completely adored. That Montana
business has put me out of sorts, I suppose, or I should not feel so
indifferent. Of course I am fond of him. There never was a creature so
blindly in love as I was. But one cannot hold to the exaltation of any
feeling forever; I suppose that accounts for it all.”
Having pacified an easy conscience in this way, Cora turned her thoughts
on the scene which she had just gone through in the grounds. She
remembered the unseemly passion into which the horse had thrown her,
with bitter humiliation.
“I am mad,” she thought, “to give way in that fashion. This temper of
mine will certainly betray me, while she is cool and crafty enough to
take advantage of it. But it really is hard to keep up such a reputation
as the creature, somehow or other, managed to get for munificence,
amiability and so on. Then they all were really kind to me, and I cannot
order her out of the house without betraying the contrast. She never
would have whipped that horse so. It was well they were my only
audience. Then that brute of a man—it is clear that both he and that
red-haired virago know more than I dreamed of. Can any intelligence they
have shake my mother’s evidence? There again what a fool I was to refuse
money for her eternal shopping! After all, conciliation is the only safe
course. But so many secrets irritate the best of tempers, and I am
afraid mine isn’t quite that. I will have a little talk with this
Eunice; as I cannot get rid of her, she must be appeased.”
Here Cora rang the bell and gave orders that Miss Hurd, the housekeeper,
should come to her.
Eunice was informed of the exact words in which this message was given,
and gave her head a proportionate lift in the air as she marched up to
obey the summons.
“What do you want of me, I’d like to know?” was her first curt
salutation.
“Nothing very particular, Miss Hurd; but you know I have been spending a
little money down in the city. You have been in the family a long time?”
“Ever since you was a year old, Miss.”
This was a point that Cora was anxious to avoid, so she said, hurriedly:
“Never mind about the exact time; you have been a faithful housekeeper,
and, under a false impression, I was about to act unjustly by you. In
proof that you have forgiven me, pray, accept this.”
Here Cora took a piece of heavy moire antique from a drawer and placed
it in the housekeeper’s hands.
Eunice turned the rich material over and let it fall in glossy folds
from her arm.
“Now if this isn’t worth while. I never had a right down new moire
antike afore in my life. Well, I don’t know how to thank you, never was
good at thanking people all my life.”
“Never mind that, Miss Hurd, I am glad it pleases you. Some time next
week I will pay your expenses down to the city, and a person that
occasionally makes up things for me shall fit it for you.”
“I hope she’ll make it long enough to sweep like anything. It does one
good to hear sich silk a rustling and sweeping along the floor. How many
yards may there be?”
“Oh, you will find plenty for a long skirt, and to spare. The dressmaker
may trim it prettily, as you like it best; I wish it to be complete.”
Eunice stood with her head on one side, feasting her eyes on the silk.
“Mercy on me! how do they contrive to catch the lightning so nateral? It
seems to be blazing away all along the breadths. Well, Miss, I’m much
obliged. Gracious! don’t it glisten!”
“That will secure her brother’s silence,” said Cora, as Eunice closed
the door, but the words were scarcely out of her mouth when the
housekeeper returned and flung the silk in her lap.
“Put it up; I’m not going to take it,” she said, bluntly. “If either I
or Josh hold our tongues, it’s for Eliza Lander’s sake. It’ll take a
stupendouser silk than that to buy us up, if it is skiltered over with
chain lightning. Treat her well and don’t bear too hard on Amos Lander’s
daughter, and I’ll stand by and grit my teeth while this inikety goes
on, but no silk can buy me up.” While Cora sat dumb with astonishment,
Eunice left the room.