“It’s been a great day--great.”
Orlando Guise leaned lazily on the neck of the broncho he was riding,
peering between its ears, over the lonely prairie, to the sunset which
was making beautiful the western sky. It was as though there was a
golden fire behind vast hills of mauve and pink, purple and saffron;
but the glow was so soft as to suggest a flame which did not burn; which
only shed radiance, colour and an ethereal mist. All the width of land
and life between was full of peace as far as eye could see. The plains
were bountiful with golden harvest, and the activities of men were lost
among the corn. Horses and cattle in the distance were as insects, and
in the great concave sky stars still wan from the intolerant light of
their master, the Sun, looked timidly out to see him burn his way down
to the under-world.
“Great--but it might have been greater!” added Orlando, gazing intently
at the sunset.
Yet, as he spoke, his eyes gazed at something infinitely farther away
than the sunset-even to the goal of his desire. He was thinking that,
great as the day had been, with all he had done and seen, it lacked a
glimpse of the face he had not seen for a whole month. The voice, he
had not heard it since it softly cried, “Oh, Orlando!” when the Chinaman
crashed down the staircase with the tray of cherished porcelain, and had
been maltreated by the owner of Tralee.
How many times since then had those words rung in his ears! Louise had
never called him by name save that once, and then it was the cry of a
soul surprised, the wail of one who felt a heart-break coming on, the
approach of merciless Fate. It was the companionship of trouble; it was
the bird, pursued by a hawk, calling across the lonely valley to its
mate. “Oh, Orlando!” He had waked in the morning with the words in his
ears to make him face the day with hope and cheerfulness. It had sounded
in his ears at night as he sat on the wide stoop watching the moon
and listening to the night-birds, or vaguely heard his mother babbling
things he did not hear.
It is a memorable moment for a man when he hears for the first time his
“little name,” as the French call it, spoken by the woman he loves. It
is as the sound of a bell in the distance, a familiar note with a new
meaning, revealing new things of life in the panorama of the mind. By
those two words Orlando knew what was in the mind of Louise. They were a
prayer for protection and a cry for comradeship.
When Louise first clasped hands with the Young Doctor on her arrival at
Askatoon, the soft appeal of her fingers had made him understand that
loneliness where she lived, and to bear which she sought help. But the
“Oh, Orlando!” which was wrung from her, almost unknowingly, was the cry
of one who, to loneliness, had added fear and tragedy. Yet behind the
fear, tragedy and loneliness there was the revelation of a heart.
A courtship is a long or a short ceremonial or convention, a
make-believe, by which people pretend that they slowly come to know and
love each other; but lovers know that each understands the other by one
note or inflection of the voice, by one little act of tenderness. These,
or one of these, tell the whole story, the everlasting truth by
which men and women learn how good at its worst life is, or speak the
lightning-lie by which the bones of a dead world are exposed to the
disillusioned soul.
This had been a great day, because, in it, physical being had joyously
celebrated itself in a wild business of the hills; in air so fresh and
sweet that it almost sparkled to the eye; in a sun that was hot, but did
not punish; at a sport by which the earliest men in the earliest age
of the world made life a rare sensation. The man who has not chased the
wild pony in the hills with the lasso on his arm, riding, as they say in
the West, “Hell for leather,” down the steep hillside, over the rock and
the rough land, balancing on his broncho with the dexterity of a bird or
a baboon, has failed to find one of life’s supreme pleasures.
In the foothills, many miles away from Slow Down Ranch and Tralee, there
lived a herd of wild ponies, and it had been the ambition of a dozen
ranchmen and broncho-busters thereabouts to capture one or many. More
than once Orlando had seen a little gray broncho, with legs like the
wrists of a lady, with a tail like a comet, frisking among the rocks
and the brushwood, or standing alert, moveless and alone upon some
promontory, and he had made up his mind that if, and when, there came
a day of broncho-busting, he would become a hunter of the little
gray mare. When the news came that the ranchmen for miles around were
preparing for the drive of the hills, he determined to take part in it,
against the commands of the Young Doctor, who said that he would run
risk in doing so, for, though his wound was healed, he should still
avoid strain and fatigue.
There is no fatigue like that of broncho-busting. It is not galloping on
the turf; it is being shaken and tossed in a saddle which the knees can
never grip, on the back of something gone mad--for the maddest, wisest,
carefullest thing on earth is a broncho, which itself was once a wild
pony of the hills, and has been hunted down, thrown by the lasso,
saddled, bridled and heart-broken all in an hour. When the broncho
which was once a wild pony sets out on the chase after its own, there is
nothing like it in the world; and so Orlando found.
The veteran broncho-busters and ranchmen gave him no vociferous welcome
as he appeared among them. Had it not been for the reputation which he
already gained for courage, such as he had shown in the recent affair
when he had driven off the men who were robbing Joel Mazarine, and also
for an idea, steadily spreading, that he was masquerading, and that
behind all, was a curly-headed, intrepid, out-door “white man,” he would
not have had what he called a great day.
He could not throw the lasso as well as many another, but he could ride
as well as any man that ever rode; and the broncho given him to ride
that day was one sufficiently unreliable in character and sure-footed in
travel to test him to the utmost. He had endured the test; he had even
got his little gray mare, lassoing her like a veteran. He had helped to
break her, and had sent her home from the improvised corral by one of
his men. He had then parted from the others, who had dispersed to their
various ranches with their prizes, and had ridden away on the broncho
with which he had done such a good day’s work. He had had the thrill of
the hunter, riding like any wild Indian through the hills; he had had
the throb of conquest in his veins; but while other men had shouted and
happily blasphemed as they rode and captured, he had only giggled in
excitement.
As he looked now into the sunset, he was thinking of the little gray
mare, with the legs like the wrists of a lady and the soft, bright,
wild eye, which had fought and fought to resist subjection; but which,
overpowered by the stronger will of man, had yielded like a lady, and
had been ridden away to Slow Down Ranch, its bucking over for ever,
captive and subdued.
Orlando was picturing the little gray mare with Louise on its back. He
had no right to think of Louise; yet there was never an hour in which he
did not think of her. And Louise had no right to think of Orlando; yet,
sleeping and waking, he was with her. Their homes were four miles apart,
although, in one sense, they were a million miles apart by law and the
convention which shuts a woman off from the love of men other than her
husband; and yet in thought they were as near together always as though
they had lain in the same cradle and grown up under the same rooftree.
There was something about the gray pony, with the look of a captive in
its eye, a wildness in subjection, like the girl at Tralee--the girl
suddenly come to be woman, with her free soul born into understanding,
yet who was as much a captive as though in prison, and guarded by a
warder with a long beard, a carnivorous head, and boots greased with
tallow.
Since they had parted, the day after Li Choo had averted a domestic
“scene” or tragedy, the search had gone on by the Mounted Police-“the
Riders of the Plains”--for the men who had attempted to rob Mazarine,
and to put Orlando out of action by a bullet. Suspicion had been
directed against the McMahons, but Joel Mazarine had declared that it
was not the McMahons who had attacked him, although they were masked.
There was nothing strange in that, because, as the Inspector of the
Riders said “That lot is too fly to do the job themselves; you bet they
paid others to do it.”
Orlando had no wish to see the criminals caught or punished. Somehow,
secretly, he looked upon the assault and his wound as a blessing. It had
brought him near to his other self, his mate in the scheme of things.
There was something almost pagan and primitive, something near to the
very beginning of things in what these two felt for each other. It was
as though they really belonged to a world of lovers that “lived before
the god of Love was born.”
As Orlando sat watching the sunset, Louise’s last words to him, “Oh,
Orlando!” kept ringing in his ears. He thought of what had happened that
very morning before he started for the hills. Soon after daybreak, Li
Choo the Chinaman had come slip-slopping to him at Slow Down Ranch, and
had said to him without any preliminaries, or any reason for his coming:
“I bling Mlissy Mazaline what you like. She cly. What you want me do, I
do. That Mazaline, gloddam! I gloddam Mazaline!”
Orlando had no desire for intrigue, but Li Choo stood there waiting, and
the devotion the Chinaman had shown made him tear a piece of paper from
his pocket-book and write on it the one word “Always.” He then folded
the paper up until it was no bigger than a waistcoat button, and gave it
to Li Choo. Also, he offered a five-dollar bill, which Li Choo refused
to take. When he persisted, the Chinaman opened his loose blue jacket
and showed a ten-dollar gold-piece on a string around his neck.
“Mlissy Mazaline glive me that; it all plenty me,” he said. “You want me
come, I come. What you say do, I do. I say gloddam Mazaline!”
That scene came to Orlando’s mind now, and it agitated him as the
incident itself had not stirred him when it happened. The broncho he was
riding, as though the disturbance in Orlando’s breast had passed into
its own wilful body, suddenly became restless to be off, and as Orlando
gave no encouragement, showed signs of bucking.
At that moment Orlando saw in the distance, far north of both Tralee and
Slow Down Ranch, a horse, ridden by a woman, galloping on the prairie.
Presently as he watched the headlong gallop, the horse came down and the
rider was thrown. He watched intently for a moment, and then he saw that
the woman did not move, but lay still beside the fallen horse.
He dug his heels into the broncho’s side, and although it had done
its day’s work, it reached out upon the trail as though fresh from the
corral. It bucked malevolently as it went, but it went.
It was apparent that no one else had seen the accident. Orlando had been
at a point of vantage on a lonely rise about eighty feet above the level
of the prairie. Where horse and rider lay was a good two miles, but
within seven minutes he had reached the spot.
Flinging the bridle over the broncho’s neck, he dismounted. As he did
so, a cry broke from him. It was, as it were, an answer to the “Oh,
Orlando!” which had been ringing in his ears. There, lying upon the
ground beside the horse, with its broken leg caught in a gopher’s hole,
was Louise.
Orlando’s ruddy face turned white; something seemed to blind him for an
instant, and then he was on his knees beside her, lifting up her head,
feeling her heart. Presently the colour came back to his face with a
rush. Her heart was beating; her pulse trembled under his fingers; she
was only unconscious. But was there other injury? Was arm or leg broken?
He called to her. Then with an exclamation of self-reproach, he laid her
down again on the ground, ran to his broncho; caught the water-bottle
from the saddle, lifted her head, and poured some water between the
white lips.
Presently her eyes opened, and she stared confusedly at Orlando, unable
to realize what had happened. Then memory came back, and with it her
very life-blood seemed to flow like water through the opening gates of a
flume, with all the weight of the river behind. As her face flooded, she
shivered with emotion. She was resting against his knee; her head was
upon his arm; his face was very near; and there was that in his eyes
which told a story that any woman, loving, would be thrilled at seeing.
What restrained him from clasping her to his breast? What kept her arms
by her side?
The sun was gone, leaving only a glimmer behind; the swift twilight of
the prairie was drawing down. Warm currents of air were passing like
waves of a sea of breath over the wide plains; the stars were softly
stinging the sky, and a bright moon was asserting itself in the growing
dusk. Here they were who, without words or acts, had been to each other
what Adam and Eve were in the Garden, without furtiveness, and guiltless
of secret acts which poison Love. What restrained them was native,
childlike camaraderie, intense, unusual and strange. The world would
call them romancists, if they believed that this restraint could be. But
there was something more. With all their frank childlikeness, there was
also a shyness, a reserve, which would not have been, if either had ever
eaten of the Fruit of Understanding until they met each other for the
first time.
“Are you--are you hurt?” he asked, his voice calmer than his spirit,
his heart beating terribly hard. “I’m all right,” she answered. “I fell
soft. You see, I’m very light.”
“No bones broken? Are you sure?” he asked solicitously.
She sat erect, drawing away from his arms and the support of his knee.
“Don’t you see my legs and arms are all right! Help me up, please,” she
added, and stretched out a hand.
Then, all at once, she saw the horse lying near. Again she shivered, and
her hand was thrown out in a gesture of pain.
“Oh, see-see!” she cried. “His leg is broken.” She loved animals far
more than human beings. There were good reasons for it. She had fared
hard in life at the hands of men and women, because the only ones with
whom, in her seclusion, she had had to do, had sacrificed her, all save
one-the man beside her. Animal life had something in it akin to her own
voiceless being. Her spirit had never been vocal until Orlando came.
“Oh, how wicked I’ve been!” she cried.... “I couldn’t bear it any
longer. He wouldn’t let me ride alone, go anywhere alone. I had to do
it. I’d never ridden this horse before. My own mare wasn’t fit.
“See-see. It’s my ankle that ought to be broken, not his.”
Orlando got to his feet. “Look the other way,” he said. “Turn round,
please. I’ll put him out of pain. He bolted with you, and he’d have
killed you, if he could; but that doesn’t matter. He can’t be saved.
Turn round, don’t look this way.”
She had been commanded to do things all her life, first by her mother,
tyrant-hearted and selfish, and then by her husband, an overlord, with a
savage soul; and she had obeyed always, because she always seemed to be
in the grasp of something against which no pressure could avail. She
was being commanded now, but there was that in the voice which, while
commanding her, made her long to do as she was bid. It was an obedience
filled with passion, resigning itself to the will of a force which was
all gentleness, but oh, so compelling!
She buried her face in her hands, and presently Orlando had opened a
vein in the chestnut’s neck, and its life-blood slowly ebbed away.
As he turned towards her again, Orlando was startled by a sudden action
on the part of his broncho. Whether it was the smell of blood which
frightened it, or death itself, which has its own terrors to animal
life, or whether it was as though a naked, shivering animal soul passed
by, the broncho started, shied and presently broke into a trot; then,
before Orlando could reach it, into a gallop, and was away down the
prairie in the direction of Slow Down Ranch.
“That’s queer,” he said, and he gave a nervous little laugh. “It’s
the worst of luck, and--and we’re twelve miles from Tralee,” he added
slowly.
“It’s terrible!” Louise said, her fingers twisting together in an effort
at self-control. “Don’t you see how terrible it is?” she asked, looking
into Orlando’s troubled face but cheerful eyes.
“You couldn’t walk that distance, of course,” he remarked.
She endeavoured to get to her feet, but seemed to give way. He reached
out his hands. She took them, and he helped her up. His face was
anxious. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?” he asked. “There’s nothing
broken,” she answered. “No bones, anyway. But I don’t feel--” She
swayed. He put an arm around her.
“I don’t feel as if I could walk even a mile,” she continued. “It’s
shaken me so.”
“Or else you’re hurt badly inside,” he said apprehensively.
“No, no, I’m sure not,” she answered. “It’s only the shock.”
“Can you walk a little?” he asked. “This poor horse--let’s get away from
it. There’s a good place over there--see!” He pointed to a little rise
in the ground where were a few stunted trees and some long grass and
shrubs. “Can you walk?”
“Oh, yes, I’m all right,” she answered nervously. “I don’t need your
arm. I can walk by myself.”
“I think not--well, not yet, anyhow,” he answered soothingly. “Please do
as you’re told. I’m keeping my arm around you for the present.”
Always in the past she had obeyed, when commanded by her mother or
husband, with an apathy which had smothered her youth. Now her youth
seemed to drink eagerly a cup of obedience--as though it were the wine
of life itself. She even longed to obey the voice whispering in her soul
from ever so far away: “Close--close to him! Home is in his arms.”
With all her unconscious revelation of herself, however, there was that
in her which was pure maidenliness. For, married as she was, she had
never in any real sense been a wife, or truly understood what wifedom
meant, or heard in her heart the call of the cradle. She had been the
victim of possession, which had meant no more to her than to be, as it
were, subjected daily to the milder tortures of the Inquisition.
Yet she knew and could realize to the full that a power which had her
in control, which possessed her by the rights of the law, prevented
her--and would prevent her by whatever torture was possible--from
friendship, alliance, or whatever it might be, with Orlando. She knew
the law: one wife to one husband; and the wife to look neither to the
right nor to the left, to the east nor to the west, to the north nor to
the south, but to remain, and be constant in remaining, the helpmeet,
the housewife, the sole property of her husband, no matter what that
husband might be--vinous, vicious, vagrant, vengeful or any other
things, good or bad.
“Why don’t you look glad when you see me come in?” Joel Mazarine
remarked to her suddenly the day before. “If you’d had some husbands,
you might have reason for bein’ the statue and the dummy you are. Am I a
drunkard? Am I a thief? Am I a nighthawk? Do I go off lookin’ for other
women? Don’t I keep the commandments? Ain’t you got a home here as good
as any in the land? Didn’t I take you out of poverty, and make you head
of all this, with people to wait on you and all the rest of it?”
That was the way he had talked, and somehow she had not seemed able to
bear it; and she had said to him, in unexpected revolt, that her tongue
was her own, and what was in her mind was her own, even if her body
wasn’t.
Then, in a fury, he had caught his riding-whip from the wall to lash her
with it, just when Li Choo the Chinaman appeared with a message which he
delivered at the appropriate moment, though he had had it to deliver
for some time. It was to the effect that the Clerk of the Court in
the neighbouring town of Waterway wished to see him at once on urgent
business. The message had been left by a rancher in passing.
As Li Choo delivered the word, he managed to put himself between
Mazarine and his wife in such a way as to enrage the old man, who struck
the Chinaman twice savagely across the shoulders with the whip, and then
stamped out of the house, invoking God to punish the rebellious and the
heathen, while Li Choo, shrinking still from the cruel blows, clucked in
his throat. There was something in the sound which belonged to the abyss
dividing the Eastern from the Western races.
That night Louise had refused to go to bed; but at last, fearing
physical force, had obeyed, and had lain with her face to the wall,
close up to it, letting the cold plaster cool her hot palms, for now she
burned with a fire which was consuming the debris of an old life--the
fire of knowledge, for which she had to pay so heavily.
“You couldn’t walk even a little of the way to Tralee, could you?” asked
Orlando, when they had reached a shrub-covered hillock.
“No, I couldn’t walk it, I’m so shaken. I’m terribly weak; I tremble all
over,” she added, as she sat down upon a stone. “But if I don’t--if I
don’t go back--oh, you know!”
“Yes, I know,” answered Orlando. “He’s the sort that would horsewhip a
woman.”
“He started to do it yesterday,” she answered, “but Li Choo came in
time, and he horsewhipped Li Choo instead.”
“I wouldn’t myself be horsewhipping Chinamen much,” said Orlando.
“They’re a queer lot.”
Suddenly she got to her feet. “I won’t stand it. I won’t stand it any
longer,” she cried. “That is why to-day, although he told me I mustn’t
ride, I took that new chestnut, and saddled it and rode--I didn’t care
where I rode. I didn’t care how fast the horse went. I didn’t care what
happened to me. And here I am, and--But oh, I do care what happens to
me!” she added, her voice breaking. “I’m--I’m frightened of him--I’m
frightened, in spite of myself.... He doesn’t treat me right,” she
added. “And I’m terribly frightened.”
She raised her eyes to Orlando’s face in the growing dusk--there is no
twilight in that prairie land--and there was that in it which made her
feel that she must not give way any further. In Orlando’s veins was
Southern sap, mixed with Northern blood; in Orlando’s eyes was a sudden
look belonging to that which defies the law.
“Don’t--don’t look like that,” she exclaimed. “Oh, Orlando!”
Once more he heard her speak his name, and it was like salve to a wound.
He put a hand upon himself. “I’ll go to Tralee,” he said, “if you don’t
mind waiting here alone.”
“I can’t. I will not wait alone. If you go, then I’ll go too somehow....
It’s twelve miles. You couldn’t get there till midnight, and you
couldn’t get back here with a wagon for another couple of hours
from that. It would be daylight then. I can’t stay here alone. I’m
frightened, and I’m cold.”
“Wait a minute,” said Orlando.
He ran back to the dead horse, unloosed the saddle from its back,
detached from it a rain-coat strapped to the pommel, and brought it to
her.
“This will keep you warm,” he said. “It isn’t cold to-night. You only
feel cold because you’re upset and nervous.”
“I’m frightened,” she answered; “frightened of everything. Listen! Don’t
you hear something stirring--there!” She peered fearfully into the dusk
behind them.
“Probably,” he answered. “There are lots of prairie dogs and things
about. The more you listen, the more you hear on the prairie, especially
at night.”
There was silence for a moment, and then he added: “My broncho’ll steer
straight for Slow Down Ranch, and that’ll bring my men. You can be
quite sure there’ll be a search-party out from Tralee, too, at the first
streak of dawn. You can’t make the journey, so the only thing to be done
is to wait here. That coat will keep you from getting cold, and I’ll cut
a lot of long grass and make you a bed here. Also, the grass is warm,
and I’ll cover you with it and with pine branches.”
“I can’t lie down,” she answered. “No, I can’t; I’m afraid. It’s all so
strange, and to-morrow, he--”
“There’s nothing to be frightened about,” he interrupted. “Nothing at
all, Louise.”
It was the first time he had ever addressed her by name, and it made her
shiver with a new feeling. It seemed to tell a long, long story without
words.
“You must do what I ask you to do--whatever I ask you to do,” he
repeated. “Will you?”
“Yes, anything you ask me I’ll do,” she answered, and then added
quickly, “For you won’t ask me to do anything I don’t want to do. That’s
the difference. You understand, Orlando.”
A few minutes later he had found a suitable place to make a kind of
bed of grass for her, and had prepared it, with his knife, cutting the
branches of small shrubs and grass and the scanty branches of the pine.
When it was finished, he came to her and said:
“It’s all ready. Come and lie down, and I’ll cover you up.”
She got to her feet slowly, for she was in pain greater than she knew,
so absorbed was her mind in this new life suddenly enveloping her, and
then she said in a low voice: “No, not yet; I can’t yet. I want to sit
here. I’ve never felt the night like this before. It’s wonderful, and
I’m not nearly so cold now. I know I oughtn’t to be cold at all, in
the middle of summer like this.” She paused, and seemed lost in
contemplation of the sky. After a moment she added: “I never knew I
could feel so far away from all the world as I do tonight. But the sky
seems so near, and the moon and the stars so friendly.”
“You haven’t slept out of doors as I have hundreds of times,” he
answered. “The night and I are brothers; the stars are my little
cousins; and the moon”--he giggled in his boyish way--“is my maiden
aunt. She’s so prudish and so kind and friendly, as you say. She’s like
an aunt I had--Aunt Samantha. She was my father’s sister. I used to love
her to visit my mother. She always brought me things, and she gave them
to me as if they were on silver dishes--like a ceremony. She was so
prim, I used to call her Aunt Primrose. She made me feel as if I could
do anything I liked and break any law I pleased. But all the time, like
a saint in a stained-glass window, she always seemed to be saying, ‘Yes,
you’d like to, but you mustn’t.’ She was just like the moon. I’m well
acquainted with the moon, and--”
“Hush!” Louise interrupted. “Don’t you hear something stirring--there,
behind us?”
He laughed. “Of course something’s always ‘stirring behind us’ on the
prairie, and things you can’t hear at all in the day are almost loud at
night. There are thousands of sounds that never get to your ears when
the sun is busy, but when Aunt Primrose Moon is saying, ‘Hush! Hush!’ to
the naughty children of this world, you can hear a whole new population
at work, cracking away like mad. Say, ain’t I letting myself go
to-night?” he added, giggling again and sitting down beside her. “I’m
going to give you just half an hour, and at the end of that half-hour
you’ve got to go to sleep.”
“I can’t--I can’t,” she said scarcely above a whisper. As though in
response to an unspoken thought, he said casually: “I’m going to walk
awhile when you’ve lain down, and then--” He pointed to a spot about
twenty yards away. “Do you see the two big stones there? Well, when I’ve
finished my walk and my talk with Aunty Primrose”--he laughed up at the
moon--“I’m going to sit down there and snooze till daylight.” He pointed
again: “Right over there beside those two rocks. That’s my bed. Do you
see?”
She did not reply at once, but a long sigh came from her lips. “You’ll
be cold,” she said.
“No, it’s a hot night,” he answered. “I’m too hot as it is.” And he
loosened his heavy red shirt at the throat.
“If I’ve got to go to bed in half an hour,” she said presently, “tell me
more about your Aunt Samantha, and about yourself, and your home before
you came out here, and what you did when you were a little boy--tell me
everything about yourself.”
She was forgetting Tralee for the moment, and the man who raised his
hand against her yesterday, and the life she had lived. Or was it only
that she had grown young during these last two months, and the young can
so easily forget!
“You want to hear? You really want to hear?” he asked. “Say, it won’t
be a very interesting story. Better let me tell you about the
broncho-busting today.”
“No, I want to hear about yourself.” She looked intently at him for an
instant, and then her eyes closed and the long lashes touched her cheek.
There was something very wilful in her beauty, and her body too
had delicate, melancholy lines strange in one so young. She was not
conscious that, in her dreamy abstraction, she was leaning towards him.
It was but an instant, though it seemed to him an interminable time, in
which he fought the fierce desire to clasp her in his arms, and kiss
the lips which, to his ears, said things more wonderful than he had ever
dreamed of in his friendship with the night and the primrose moon.
He knew, however, that if he did, she would not go back to Tralee
to-morrow; that tomorrow she would defy the leviathan; and that tomorrow
he would not have the courage to say the things he must say to the
evil-hearted master of Tralee, who, he knew, would challenge them with
ugly accusations. He must be able to look old Mazarine fearlessly in the
face; he would not be the slave of opportunity. He was going to fight
clean. She was here beside him in the warm loneliness of the northern
world, and he was full-grown in body and brain, with all the human
emotions alive in him; yet he would fight clean.
Not for a half-hour, but for nearly an hour he told her what she wished
to know, while she listened in a happy dream; and when at last she lay
down, she refused his coverlet of dry grass, saying that she was quite
warm. She declared that she did not even need the coat he had taken from
the saddle of the dead horse, but he wrapped it around her, and, saying
“Goodnight” almost brusquely, marched away in the light of the dying
moon.
The night wore on. At first Louise’s ears were sensitive to every sound,
and there were stirrings in the hillock by which she slept, but she
comforted herself with the thought that they were the stirrings of
lonely little waifs of nature like herself. Though she dared not let the
thought take form, yet she feared, too, the sound of human footsteps. By
and by, however, in the sweet quiet of the night and the somnolent light
of the moon, sleep captured her. When at last Orlando’s footsteps did
crush the dry grass, the sound failed to reach her ears, for it was then
not very far from daylight, and she had slept for several hours. Sleep
had not touched Orlando’s eyes when, sitting down by the stones which
were to mark his resting-place, he waited for Louise to wake.