IF HE WAS A GENTLEMAN
"Don't you think we'd better drop it now, Frances, and be good?"
Major King reined his horse near hers as he spoke, and laid his hand
on the pommel of her saddle as if he expected to meet other fingers
there.
"You puzzle me, Major King," she returned, not willing to understand.
They were bringing up the rear of the tired procession which was
returning to the post from the ball. Already the east was quickening.
The stars near the horizon were growing pale; the morning wind was
moving, with a warmth in it from the low places, like a tide toward
the mountains.
"Oh, I mean this play acting of estrangement," said he, impatiently.
"Let's forget it--it doesn't carry naturally with either you or me."
"Why, Major King!" Her voice was lively with mild surprise; she was
looking at him as if for verification of his words. Then, slowly: "I
hadn't thought of any estrangement, I hadn't intended to bring you to
task for one flirtatious night. Be sure, sir, if it has given you
pleasure, it has brought me no pain."
"You began it," said he, petulantly. It is almost unbelievable how
boyishly silly a full-grown man can be.
"I began it, Major King? It's too early in the morning for a joke!"
"You were wilful and contrary; you would speak to the fellow that
day."
"Oh!" deprecatingly.
"Never mind it, though. Wilfulness doesn't become either of us,
Frances. I've tried my turn at it tonight, and it has left me cold."
"Poor man!" said she, in low voice, like a sigh. Perhaps it was not
all for Major King; perhaps not all assumed.
"Let's not quarrel, Frances."
"Not now, I'm too tired for a real good one. Leave it for tomorrow."
He rode on in silence, not sure, maybe, how much of it she meant.
Covertly she looked at him now and then, thinking better of him for
his ingenuous confession of failure to warm himself at little Nola
Chadron's heart-flame. She extended her hand.
"Forgive me, Major King," she said, very softly, not far removed,
indeed, from tenderness.
For a little while Major King left his horse to keep the road its own
way, his cavalry hands quite regardless of manuals, regulations, and
military airs. Both of them were enfolding her one. He might have held
it until they reached the post, but that she drew it away.
There were some qualms of uneasiness in her breast that hour, some
upbraidings of conscience for treason to Major King, of whom she had
been girlishly fond, girlishly proud, womanly selfish. That quick,
wild scene in the garden was not to be put away for all those
arraignments of her honest heart, although it seemed impossible,
recalled there in the thin hours of that long and eventful night, like
something remembered of another, not of herself.
Her cheeks grew hot, her heart leaped again, at the recollection of
that strong man's wild, bold words, his defiant kiss upon her lips.
She had yielded them in the recklessness of that moment, in the force
of his all-carrying demand, when she might have denied them, or sped
away from him, as innocence is believed to know from instinct when to
fly from a destructive lure.
Closing her eyes against the gray-creeping morning, she saw him again,
standing that moment with her glove to his lips; saw him bend and
speed away, the cunning of his hunted ancestors in his swift feet and
self-eliminating form. A wild fear struck her, a cold dread fell like
ashes into her heart, as she wondered how well he had ridden that
night, and how far.
Perhaps he was lying in his blood that hour, never to come back to her
again. Yet, why should it matter so much to her? Only that it was a
gallant life gone out, whatever its faults had been; only the interest
that she might have in any man who had danced with her, and told her
his story, and spoken of his designs. So she said, confessing with the
same breath that it was a poor, self-deluding lie.
Back again in her home at the post, the day awake around her, reveille
sounding in the barracks, she turned the key in her door as if to shut
the secret in with her, and bent beneath the strain of her long
suspense. She no longer tried to conceal, or to deny to her own heart,
the love she bore that man, which had come so suddenly, and so
fiercely sweet.
No longer past than the evening before her heart had ached with
jealous pain over the little triumph that Nola Chadron had thought she
was making of Major King. Now Nola might have Major King, and all the
world beside that her little head might covet. There was no
reservation in the surrender that she made of him in her conscience,
no regret.
She reproached herself for it in one breath, and glowed with a strange
new gladness the next, clasping the great secret fearfully in her
breast, in the world-old delusion that she had come into possession of
a treasure uniquely and singularly her own. One thing she understood
plainly now; she never had loved Major King. What a revolution it was
to overturn a life's plans thus in a single night! thought she.
How easily we are astounded by the eruptions in our own affairs, and
how disciplined in the end to find that the foundations of the world
have withstood the shock!
Chadron himself had not gone out after Macdonald. He had been merry
among his guests long after the shots had sounded up the river.
Frances believed that the old man had put the matter into the hands of
his cowboys and ranch foreman, having no sons, no near male relatives
of his own in that place. She did not know how many had gone in
pursuit of Macdonald, but several horses were in the party which rode
out of the gate. None had returned, she was certain, at the time the
party dispersed. The chase must have led them far.
There was no way of knowing what the result of that race had been. If
he had escaped, Frances believed that he would let her know in some
way; if he had fallen, she knew that the news of his death, important
as it would be to Chadron, would fly as if it had wings. There was
nothing to do but wait, and in any event hide away that warm sweet
thing that had unfolded in beautiful florescence in her soul.
She told herself that he must have escaped, or the pursuers would have
returned long before the party from the post left the Chadron house.
He had led them a long ride in his daring way, and doubtless was
laughing at them now in his own house, among his friends. She wondered
what his surroundings were, and what his life was like on that ranch
for which he risked it. In the midst of this speculation she fell
asleep, and lay wearily in dreamless repose for many hours.
Sleep is a marvelous clarifier of the mind. It is like the saleratus
which the pioneers used to cast into their barrels of Missouri River
water, to precipitate the silt and make it clear. Frances rose out of
her sleep with readjusted reasoning; in fear, and in doubt.
She was shocked by the surrender that she had made to that unknown
man. Perhaps he was nothing more than a thief, as charged, and this
story fixing his identification had been only a fabrication. An honest
man would have had no necessity for such haste, such wild insistence
of his right to love her. It seemed, in the light of due reflection,
the rude way of an outlawed hand.
Then there came the soft pleading of something deeper to answer for
Alan Macdonald, and to justify his rash deed. He had risked life to
see her and set himself right in her eyes, and he had doubled the risk
in standing there in the garden, defiantly proud, unbent, and
unrepentant, refusing to leave her without some favor to carry away.
There was only a sigh to answer it, after all; only a hope that time
would bring her neither shame nor regret for that romantic passage in
the dusky garden path. That she had neither shame nor regret in that
hour was her sweetest consolation. More, she was comfortable in the
security that the secret of that swift interlude was her own. Honest
man or thief, Alan Macdonald was not the man to speak of that.
Frances was surprised to find that she had slept into the middle of
the afternoon. Major King had called an hour ago, with inquiries, the
maid reported. There! that must be the major's ring again--she hoped
she might know it by this time, indeed. In case it was the major,
would miss--
Yes; miss would see him. Ask him to wait. The maid's ear was true; it
was the major's ring. She came bounding upstairs to report on it, her
breath short, her eyes big.
"Oh, miss! I think something must 'a' happened to him, he looks all
shook!" she said.
"Nonsense!" said Frances, a little flutter of apprehension,
indefinable, cold, passing through her nerves in spite of her bearing
and calm face.
Major King had remained standing, waiting her. He was handsome and
trim in his uniform, dark-eyed, healthy-skinned, full of the vigor of
his young manhood. The major's face was pale, his carriage stiff and
severe. He appeared as if something might have happened to him,
indeed, or to somebody in whom he was deeply concerned.
Frances knew that her face was a picture of the worriment and
straining of her past night, for it was a treacherous mirror of her
soul. She smiled as she made a little pause in the reception-room
door. Major King bowed, with formal, almost official, dignity. His
hand was in the bosom of his coat, and he drew it forth with something
white in it as she approached.
"I'm dreadfully indolent to belong to a soldiering family, Major
King," she said, offering her hand in greeting.
"Permit me," said he, placing the folded white thing in her
outstretched fingers.
"What is it? Not--it isn't--" she stammered, something deeper than
surprise, than foreboding, in her eyes and colorless cheeks.
"Unmistakably yours," he said; "your name is stamped in it."
"It must be," she owned, her spirits sinking low, her breath weak
between her lips. "Thank you, Major King."
The glove was soiled with earth-marks; it was wrinkled and drawn, as
if it had come back to her through conflict and tragedy. She rolled it
deliberately, in a compact little wad, her fingers as cold as her hope
for the life of the man who had borne it away. She knew that Major
King was waiting for a word; she was conscious of his stern eyes upon
her face. But she did not speak. As far as Major King's part in it
went, the matter was at an end.
"Miss Landcraft, I am waiting."
Major King spoke with imperious suggestion. She started, and looked
toward him quickly, a question in her eyes.
"I sha'n't keep you then," she returned, her words little more than a
whisper.
"Don't try to read a misunderstanding into my words," said he, his
voice shaking. Then he seemed to break his stiff, controlled pose as
if it had been a coating of ice, and expand into a trembling,
white-hot man in a moment. "God's name, girl! Say something, say
something! You know where that glove was found?"
"No; and I shall not ask you, Major King."
"But I demand of you to know how it came in that man's possession!
Tell me that--tell me!"
He stood before her, very near to her. His hands were shaking, his
eyes gleaming with fury.
"I might ask you with as much reason how it came in yours," she told
him, resentful of his angry demand.
"A messenger arrived with it an hour ago."
"For you, Major King?"
"For me, certainly."
She had no need to ask him whence the messenger came. She could see
the horsemen returning to the ranchhouse by the river in the gray
morning light, in the triumph of their successful hunt. Alan Macdonald
had fallen. It had been Nola's hand that had dispatched this evidence
of what she could but guess to be the disloyalty of Frances to her
betrothed. If Nola had hoped to make a case with the major, Frances
felt she had succeeded better than she knew.
"Then there is nothing more to be said, Major King," said she, after a
little wait.
"There is much more," he insisted. "Tell me that he snatched the glove
from you, tell me that you lost it--tell me anything, and I'll believe
you--but tell me something!"
"There is nothing to tell you," said she, resentful of the meddling of
Nola Chadron, which his own light conduct with her had in a manner
justified.
"Then I can only imagine the truth," he told her, bitterly. "But
surely you didn't give him the glove, surely you cannot love that wolf
of the range, that cattle thief, that murderer!"
"You have no right to ask me that," she said, flashing with
resentment.
"I have a right to ask you that, to ask you more; not only to ask, but
to demand. And you must answer. You forget that you are my affianced
wife."
"But you are not my confessor, for all that."
"God's name!" groaned King, his teeth set, his eyes staring as if he
had gone mad. "Will you shame us both? Do you forget you are _my
affianced wife?_"
"That is ended--you are free!"
"Frances!" he cried, sharply, as in despair of one sinking, whom he
was powerless to save.
"It is at an end between us, Major King. My 'necessity' of explaining
everything, or anything, to you is wiped away, your responsibility for
my acts relieved. Lift your head, sir. You need not blush before the
world for me!"
Sweat was springing on the major's forehead; he drew his breath
through open lips.
"I refuse to humor your caprice--you are irresponsible, you don't know
what you are doing," he declared. "You are forcing the issue to this
point, Frances, I haven't demanded this."
"You have demanded too much. You may go now, Major King."
"It's only the infatuation of a moment. You can't care for a man like
that, Frances," he argued, shaken out of his passion by her determined
stand.
"This is not a matter for discussion between you and me, sir."
Major King bowed his head as if the rebuke had crushed him. She stood
aside to let him pass. When he reached the door she turned to him. He
paused, expectantly, hopefully, as if he felt that a reconciliation
was dawning.
"If it hadn't been for you they wouldn't have discovered him last
night," she charged. "You betrayed him to his enemies. Can you tell
me, then--will you tell me--is Alan Macdonald--dead?"
Major King stood, his stern eyes on the glove, unrolled again, now
dangling in her hand.
"If he was a gentleman, as you said of him once, then he is dead,"
said he.
He turned and left her. She did not look after him, but stood with the
soiled glove spread in her hands, gazing upon it in sad tenderness.