THE Road ran spitefully up a steep, hot, rocky, utterly shadeless hill,
and then at the top turned suddenly in a flirty little green loop, and
looked back, and called "Follow me!"
Wouldn't you have considered that a dare?
The Girl and the White Pony certainly took it as such, and proceeded at
once to "follow," though the White Pony stumbled clatteringly on the
rolling stones, and the Girl had to cling for dear life to the rocking
pommels of her saddle.
It was a cruel climb, puff--pant--scramble--dust--glare--every step of
the way, but when the two adventurers really reached the summit at last,
a great dark chestnut-tree loomed up for shade, every sweet-smelling
breeze in the world was there to welcome them, and the whole green
valley below stretched out before them in the shining, woodsy wonder of
high noon and high June.
You know, yourself, just how the world looks and feels and smells at
high noon of a high June!
Even a pony stands majestically on the summit of a high hill--neck
arched, eyes rolling, mane blowing, nostrils quivering. Even a girl
feels a tug of power at her heart.
And still the Road cried "Follow me!" though it never turned its head
again in doubt or coquetry. It was a kind-looking Road now, all gracious
and sweet and tender, with rustly green overhead, and soft green
underfoot, and the pleasant, buzzing drone of bees along its clovered
edges.
"We might just as well follow it and see," argued the Girl, and the
White Pony took the suggestion with a wild leap and cantered eagerly
along the desired way.
It was such an extraordinarily lonesome Road that you could scarcely
blame it for picking up companionship as best it might. There was
stretch after stretch of pasture, and stretch after stretch of woodland,
and stretch after stretch of black-stumped clearing--with never a house
to cheer it, or a human echo to break its ghostly stillness. Yet with
all its isolation and remoteness the landscape had that certain vibrant,
vivid air of self-consciousness that thrills you with an uncanny sense
of an invisible presence--somewhere. It's just a trick of June!
Tramps, pirates, even cannibals, seemed deliciously imminent. The Girl
remembered reading once of a lonely woman bicyclist who met a runaway
circus elephant at the turn of a country road. Twelve miles from home is
a long way off to have anything happen.
Her heart began to quicken with the joyous sort of fear that is one of
the prime sweets of youth. It's only when fear reaches your head that it
hurts. The loneliness, the mystery, the uncertainty, were tonic to her.
The color spotted in her cheeks. Her eyes narrowed defensively to every
startling detail of woods or turf. Her ears rang with the sudden, new
acuteness of her hearing. She felt as though she and the White Pony were
stalking right across the heartstrings of the earth. Once the White Pony
caught his foot and sent a scared sob into her throat.
Oh, everything was magic! A little brown rabbit reared up in the Road as
big as a kangaroo, and beckoned her with his ears. A red-winged
blackbird bulky as an eagle trumpeted a swamp-secret to her as he
passed. A tiny chipmunk in the wall loomed like a lion in his lair, and
sent a huge rock crashing like an avalanche into the field. The whole
green and blue world seemed tingling with toy noises, made suddenly big.
The White Pony's mouth was frothing with the curb. The White Pony's
coat was reeking wet with noon and nervousness, but the Girl sat tense
and smiling and important in her saddle, as though just once for all
time she was the only italicized word in the Book of Life.
"It's just the kind of a road that I like to travel alone," she gasped,
a little breathlessly, "but if I were engaged and my man let me do it, I
should consider him--careless."
That was exactly the sort of Road it was!
Yet after three or four miles the White Pony shook all the skittishness
out of his feet, and settled down to a zigzag, browsing-clover gait, and
the Girl relaxed at last, and sat loosely to ease her own muscles, and
slid the bridle trustingly across the White Pony's neck.
Then she began to sing. Never in all her life had she sung outside the
restricting cage of house or church. A green and blue loneliness on a
June day is really the only place in the world that is big enough for
singing! In dainty ballad, in impassioned hymn, in opera, in anthem, the
Girl's voice, high and sweet and wild as a boy's, rang out in fluttering
tremolo. Over and over again, as though half unconscious of the words,
but enraptured with the melody, she dwelt at last on that dream-song of
every ecstatic young soul who tarries for a moment on the edge of an
unfocused exultation:
The King of Love my Shepherd is
Whose Goodness faileth never,
I nothing lack if I am _his_
And he is _mine f-o-r-e-v-e-r_!
Forever!----Is _mine f-o-r-e-v-e-r_!
Her pulsing, passionate crescendo came echoing back to her from a gray
granite hillside, and sent a reverent thrill of power across her senses.
Then--suddenly--into her rhapsody broke the astonishing, harsh clash and
clatter of a hay-rake. The White Pony lurched, stood stock-still, gave a
hideous snort of terror, grabbed the bit in his teeth, and bolted like
mad on and on and on and on till a quick curve in the Road dashed him
into the very lap of a tiny old gray farmhouse that completely blocked
the way.
In another second he would have stumbled across the threshold and hurled
his rider precipitously into the front hall if she had not at that very
second recovered her "yank-hold" on his churning mouth and wrenched him
back so hard that any animal but a horse would have sat down.
Then the girl straightened up very tremblingly in her saddle and said
"O--h!"
Some one had to say something, for there in the dooryard close beside
her were an Artist, a Bossy, and a White Bulldog, who all
instantaneously, without the slightest cordiality or greeting, stopped
whatever they were doing and began to stare at her.
Now it's all very well to go dashing like mad into a person's front yard
on a runaway horse. Anybody could see that you didn't do it on purpose;
but when at last you have stopped dashing, what are you going to do
next, particularly when the Road doesn't go any farther? Shall you say,
"Isn't this a pleasant summer?" or "What did you really like best at the
theater last winter?" If you gallop out it looks as though you were
frightened. If you amble out, you might hear some one laugh behind your
back, which is infinitely worse than being grabbed on the stairs.
The situation was excessively awkward. And the Artist evidently was not
clever in conversational emergencies.
The Girl straightened her gray slouch hat. Then she ran the cool metal
butt of her riding-whip back and forth under the White Pony's sweltering
mane. Then she swallowed very hard once or twice and remarked inanely:
"Did the Road go right into the house?"
"Yes," said the Artist, with a nervous blue dab at his canvas.
The Girl's ire rose at his churlishness. "If that is so," she announced,
"if the Road really went right into the house, I'll just wait here a
minute till it comes out again."
But the Artist never smiled an atom to make things easier, though the
Bossy began to tug most joyously at his chain, and the White Bulldog
rolled over and over with delight.
The Girl would have given anything now to escape at full speed down the
Road along which she had come, but escape of that sort had suddenly
assumed the qualities of a panicky, ignominious retreat, so she parried
for time by riding right up behind the Artist and watching him change a
perfectly blue canvas sky into a regular tornado.
"Oh, do you think it's going to rain as hard as that?" she teased.
"Perhaps I'd better settle down here until the storm is over."
But the Artist never smiled or spoke. He just painted and sniffed as
though he worked by steam, and when his ears had finally grown so
crimson that apoplexy seemed impending, she took pity on his miserable
embarrassment and backed even the shadow of her pony out of his sight.
Then with a desperate effort at perfect ease she remarked:
"Well--I guess I'll ride round to your back door. Perhaps the Road came
out that way and went on without me."
But though she and the White Pony hunted in every direction through
white birch and swaying alders, they found no possible path by which the
Road could have escaped, and were obliged at last to return with some
hauteur, and make as dignified an exit as possible from the scene.
The Artist bowed with stiff relief at their departure, but the White
Bulldog preceded them with friendly romps and yells, and the Bossy
pulled up his iron hitching stake and chain and came clanking after them
with furious bounds and jingles.
No one but the White Pony would have stood the racket for a moment, and
even the White Pony began to feel a bit staccato in his feet. The Girl
kept her saddle like a circus rider, but the amusement on her face was
just a trifle studied. It was a fine procession, clamor and all, with
the Bulldog scouting ahead, the White Pony following skittishly, and the
Bossy see-sawing behind, clanking a dungeon chain that left a cloud of
dust as far as you could see.
It must have startled the Youngish Man who loomed up suddenly at a bend
of the Road and caught the wriggling Bulldog in his arms.
"Who comes here?" he cried with a regular war-whoop of a challenge. "Who
comes here?"
"Just a lady and a bossy," said the Girl, as she reined in the Pony
abruptly, and sent the Bossy caroming off into the bushes.
"But it's my brother's Bossy," protested the Youngish Man.
"Oh, no, it isn't," the Girl explained a little wearily. "It's mine now.
It chose between us."
The Youngish Man eyed her with some amusement.
"Did you really see my brother at the house?" he probed.
The Girl nodded, flushing. It was very hot, and she was beginning to
feel just a wee bit faint and hungry and irritable.
"Yes, I saw your brother," she reiterated, "but I didn't seem to care
for him. I rode by mistake right into the picture he was painting.
There's probably paint all over me. It was very awkward, and he didn't
do a thing to make it easier. I abominate that kind of person. If a man
can't do anything else he can always ask you if you wouldn't like a
drink of water!" She scowled indignantly. "It was the Road's fault
anyway! I was just exploring, and the Road cried 'Follow me,' and I
followed--a little faster than I meant to--and the Road ran right into
your house and shut the door. Oh, _slammed_ the door right in my face!"
"Would you like a drink of water, _now_?" suggested the Youngish Man.
"No, I thank you," said the Girl, with stubborn dignity, and then
weakened to the alluring offer with "But my White Pony is very cruelly
thirsty."
Both adventurers looked pretty jaded with heat and dust.
The Youngish Man led the way into a tiny, pungent wood-path that ended
in a gurgling spring-hole, where the White Pony nuzzled his nose with
deep-breathed, dripping satisfaction, while the Girl kept to her saddle
and looked down on the Youngish Man with frank interest.
He looked very picturesque and brown and clever in his khaki suit with a
game bag slung across his shoulder.
"You're not a hunter," she exclaimed impulsively. "You're not a
hunter--because you haven't any gun."
"No," said the Man, "I'm a collector."
The Girl cried out with pleasure and clapped her hands. "A
collector?--oh, goody! So am I! What do you collect? Minerals? Oh--dear!
_Mine_ is lots more interesting. I collect adventures."
"Adventures?" The Man made no slightest effort to conceal his amused
curiosity. "Adventures? Now I call that a jolly thing to collect. Is it
a good country to work in? And what have you found?"
The Girl smiled at him appreciatively--a little flitting, whimsical
sort of smile, and commenced to rummage in the blouse of her white
shirt-waist, from which she finally produced a small, red-covered
notebook. She fluttered its diminutive pages for a second, and then
began to laugh:
"You'd better sit down if you really want to hear what I've found."
The Man dropped comfortably into place beside the spring and watched
her. She was very watchable. Some people have to be beautiful to rivet
your attention. Some people _don't_ have to be. It's all a matter of
temperament. Her hair was very, very brown, though, and her eyes were
deep and wide and hazel, and the red in her cheeks came and went with
every throb of her heart.
"Of course," she explained apologetically, "of course I haven't found a
lot of things yet--I've only been working at it a little while. But I've
collected a 'Runaway Accident with the Rural Free-Delivery Man.' It was
awfully scary and interesting. And I've collected a 'Den of Little Foxes
Down in the Woods Back of My House,' and 'Two Sunrises with a Crazy
Woman who Thinks that the Sun Can't Get Up Until She Does,' and I've
collected a 'Country Camp-Meeting all Hallelujahs and By Goshes,' and a
'Circus Where I Spent All Day with the Snake-Charmer,' and a 'Midnight
Ride Alone through the Rosedale Woods in a Thunder-Storm.' Of course,
as I say, I haven't found a lot of things yet, but then it's only the
middle of June and I have two more weeks' vacation yet."
The Man put back his head and laughed, but it was a pleasant sort of
laugh that flooded all the stern lines in his face.
"I'm sure I never thought of making a regular business of collecting
adventures," he admitted, "but it certainly is a splendid idea. But
aren't you ever afraid?" he asked. "Aren't you ever afraid, for
instance, riding round on a lonesome trip like this?"
The Girl laughed. "Yes," she acknowledged, "I'm often afraid
of--squirrels--and falling twigs--and black-looking stumps. I'm often
afraid of toy noises and toy fears--but I never saw a real fear in all
my life. Even when you jumped up in the Road I wasn't afraid of
you--because you are a gentleman--and--gentlemen are my friends."
"Have you many friends?" asked the Man. The question seemed amusingly
justifiable. "You look to me about eighteen. Girls of your age are
usually too busy collecting Love to collect anything else--even ideas.
Have you collected any Love?"
The Girl threw out her hands in joking protest. "Collected any Love?
Why, I don't even know what Love looks like! Maybe what I'd collect
would be--poison ivy." Her eyes narrowed a little. Her voice quivered
the merest trifle. "There's a Boy at Home--who talks--a little--about
it. But how can I tell that it's Love?"
Her sudden vehemency startled him. "Where _is_ 'Home'?" he asked.
For immediate answer the Girl slipped down from the White Pony's back,
and loosened the saddle creakingly before she helped herself to a long,
dripping draught from the birch cup that hung just over the spring.
"You're nice to talk to," she acknowledged, "and almost no one is nice
to talk to. It's a whole year since I've talked right out to any one!
Where do I live? Well, my headquarters are in New York, but my
heartquarters are over at Rosedale. There's quite a difference, you
know!"
"Yes," said the Man, "I remember--there used to--be--quite a difference.
But how did you ever happen to think of collecting adventures?"
The girl pulled at the White Pony's mane for a long, hesitating moment,
then she turned and looked searchingly into the Man's face. She very
evidently liked what she saw.
"I collect adventures because I am lonesome!" Her voice shook a little,
but her eyes were frankly untroubled. "I collect adventures because the
life that interests me doesn't happen to come to me, and I have to go
out and search for it!--I'm companion all the year to a woman who
doesn't know right from wrong in any dear, big sense, but who could
define propriety and impropriety to you till your ears split. And all
her friends are just like her. They haven't any mental muscle to them.
It's just dress and etiquette, dress and etiquette, dress and etiquette!
So I have to live all alone in my head, and think and think and think,
till my poor brain churns and overlaps like a surf without any shore. Do
you know what I mean? Then when my June vacation comes, I run right off
to Rosedale and collect all the adventures I possibly can to take back
with me for the long dreary year. Things to think about, you know, when
I have to sit up at night giving medicine, or when I have to mend heavy
black silk clothes, or when the dinners are so long that I could scream
over the extra delay of a salad course. So I make June a sort of pranky,
fancy-dress party for my soul. Do you know what I mean?"
"Yes, I know what you mean," said the Man. "I know just what you mean.
You mean you're eighteen. That's the whole of it. You mean that there's
no fence to your pasture, no bottom to your cup, no crust to your bread.
You mean that you can't sleep at night for the pounding of your heart.
You mean most of all that there's no limit to your vision. You're
inordinately keen after life. That's all. You'll get over it!"
"_I won't get over it!_" There was fire in the Girl's eyes and she drew
her breath sharply. "I say I _won't_ get over it! There's nothing on
earth that could stale me! If I live to be a hundred I sha'n't
wither!--why, how could I?"
Buoyant, blooming, aquiver with startled emotions, she threw out her
hands with a passionate gesture of protest.
The Man shook his shoulders and jumped up. "Perhaps you're right," he
muttered. "Perhaps you _are_ the kind that won't ever grow old. If you
are--Heaven help you! Youth's nothing but a wound, anyway. Do you want
to be a wound that never heals?" He laughed stridently.
Then the Girl began to fumble through sudden tears at the buckles of her
saddle. Her growing hunger and faintness and the heat of the day were
telling on her.
"You must think me a crazy fool," she confessed, "the way I have plunged
into personalities. Why, I could go a whole year with an alien
running-mate and never breathe a word or a sigh about myself, but with
some people--the second you see them you know they are part of your
chord. Chord is the only term in music that I understand, and I
understand that as though I had made the word myself." She tried to
laugh. "Now I'm going home! I've had a good time. You seem almost like a
friend. I've never had a talky friend."
And she was in her saddle and half-way down the wood-path before his
mind quickened to cry out "Stop! Wait a minute!"
A little out of breath he caught up with her, and stood for a moment
like an embarrassed schoolboy, though his face in the sunlight was as
old as young forty.
"I'm afraid you haven't had much of an adventure this morning," he
volunteered whimsically. "If you really want an adventure why don't you
come back to the house and have dinner with my brother and me? There's
no one else there. Think how it would tease my brother! You're twelve or
fifteen miles from home, and it's already two o'clock and very hot. My
brother has done some pictures that are going to be talked about next
winter, and I--I've got rather a conspicuous position ahead of me in
Washington. Wouldn't it amuse you a little bit afterward, if any one
spoke of us, to remember our little farmhouse dinner to-day?--Would you
be afraid to come?" His last question was very direct.
A look came into the Girl's eyes that was very good for a man to see.
"Why, of course I wouldn't be afraid to come," she said. "Gentlemen are
my friends."
But she was shy about going, just the same, with a certain frank, boyish
shyness that only served to emphasize the general artlessness of her
verve.
With a quick dive into the bushes the Man collared the Bossy and
transferred his clanking chain to the bit of the astonished White Pony.
"Now you've got to come," he laughed up at her, and the whole party
started back for the tiny old gray farmhouse where the Artist greeted
them with sad concern.
"I've brought Miss Girl back to have dinner with us," announced the
Pony-leader cheerfully, relying on his brother's serious nature to
overlook any strangeness of nomenclature. "You evidently didn't remember
meeting her at Mrs. Moyne's house-party last spring?"
The Girl fell readily into the game. She turned the White Pony loose in
the dooryard, and then went into the queer old kitchen, rolled up her
sleeves, wound herself round with a blue-checked apron, and commenced to
work. She had a deft touch at household matters, and the Man followed
her about as humbly as though he himself had not been adequately
providing meals for the past two months.
The color rose high in the Girl's cheeks, and her voice took on the
thrill and breathiness of amused excitement. Wherever she found a huddle
of best china or linen or silver she raided it for her use, and the
table flared forth at last with a dainty, inconsequent prettiness that
quite defied the Artist's prescribed rules for beauty.
It was a funny dinner, with an endless amount of significant bantering
going on right under the Artist's sunburned nose. Yet for all the mirth
of the situation, the Girl had quite a chance to study the face of her
special host, in all its full detail of worldliness, of spirituality, of
hardness, of sweetness. Her final impression, as her first one, was of a
wonderful affinity and congeniality. "His face is like a harbor for all
my stormy thoughts," was the way she described it to herself.
After dinner the three washed up the dishes as sedately as though they
had been working together day-in, day-out through the whole season, and
after that the Artist escaped as quickly as possible to catch a cloud
effect which he seemed to consider preposterously vital.
Then with a dreary little feeling of a prize-pleasure all spent and
gone, the Girl went over to the mirror in the sitting-room and pinned on
her gray slouch hat and patted her hair and straightened her belt.
But it was not her own reflection that interested her most. The mirror
made a fine frame for the whole quaint room, with its dingy landscape
wall-paper from which the scarlet petticoat of a shepherdess or the
vivid green of a garland stood out with cheerful crudity. The battered,
blackened fireplace was lurid here and there with gleams of copper
kettles, and a huge gray cat purred comfortably in the curving seat of a
sun-baked rocking-chair.
It was a good picture to take home in your mind for remembrance, when
walls should be brick and rooms ornate and life hackneyed, and the Girl
shut her eyes for a second, experimentally, to fix the vision in her
consciousness.
When she opened her eyes again the Man was struggling through the
doorway dragging a small, heavy trunk.
"Oh, don't go yet!" he exclaimed. "Here are a lot of your things in this
trunk. I brought them in to show you."
And he dragged the trunk to the middle of the room and knelt down on the
floor and commenced to unlock it.
"_My_ things?" cried the Girl in amazement, and ran across the room and
sat down on the floor beside him. "_My_ things?"
There was a funny little twist to the Man's mouth that never relaxed all
the time he was tinkering with the lock. "Yes--_your_ things," was all
he said till the catch yielded finally, and he raised the cover to
display the full contents to his companion's curious eyes.
[Illustration: Instinctively she clasped it to her]
"Oh--_books_!" she cried out, with a sudden, sweeping flush of
comprehension, and darted her hand into the dusty pile and pulled out a
well-worn copy of the Rubaiyat. Instinctively she clasped it to her.
"I thought so!" said the Youngish Man quizzically. "I thought that was
one of your books.
"When Time lets slip a little, perfect hour,
Oh, take it--for it will not come again."
His eyes narrowed, and his hands reached nervously to regain possession
of the volume. Then he laughed.
"_I_, also, used to think that Life was made for me," he scoffed
teasingly. "It's a glorious idea--as long as it lasts! You take every
harsh old happening and every flimsy friendship and line it with your
own silk, and then sit by and say, 'Oh, _isn't_ the World a rustly,
shimmery, luxurious place!' And all the time the happening _is_ harsh,
and the friendship _is_ flimsy, and it's just your own perishable silk
lining that does the rustle and the shimmer and the luxury act. Oh, I
suppose that's 'woman talk' about silk linings, but I know a thing or
two, even if I am a man."
But the radiancy of the Girl's face defied his cynicism utterly. Her
eyes were absolutely fathomless with Youth.
Then his mood changed suddenly. He reached out with a little brooding
gesture of protection. "These are my college books," he confided, "my
Dream Library. I've scarcely thought of them for a dozen years. I don't
meet many dreamers nowadays. You've probably got a lot of newer books
than these, but I'll wager you anything in the world that every book
here is a precious friend to you. I shouldn't wonder if your own copies
opened exactly to the same places. Here's young Keats with his shadowing
tragedy. How you have mooned over it. And here's Tennyson. What about
the starlit vision:
"And on her lover's arm she leant,
And round her waist she felt it fold,--"
The Girl took up the words softly in unison:
"And far across the hills they went
To that new world which is the old."
In rushing, eager tenderness she browsed through one book after another,
sometimes silently, sometimes with a little crooning quotation, where
corners were turned down. And when she had quite finished, her eyes
were like stars, and she looked up tremulously, and whispered:
"Why, we--like--just--the--same--things."
But the Youngish Man did not smile back at her. His face in that second
turned suddenly old-looking and haggard and gray. He threw the books
back into their places, and slammed the trunk-cover with a bang.
For just the infinitesimal fraction of a second the Man and the Girl
looked into each other's eyes. For just that infinitesimal fraction of a
second the Man's eyes were as unfathomable as the Girl's.
Then with a great sniff and scratching and whine, the White Bulldog
pushed his way into the room, and the Girl jumped up in alarm to note
that the sun was dropping very low in the west, and that the shadows of
late afternoon crept palpably over her companion's face.
For a moment the two stood awkwardly without a word, and then the Girl
with a conscious effort at lightness queried:
"But _where_ did the Runaway Road go to? I _must_ find out."
The Youngish Man turned as though something had startled him.
"Wouldn't you rather leave things just as they are?" he asked.
"NO!" The Girl stamped her foot vehemently. "NO! I want everything. I
want the whole adventure."
"The whole adventure?" The Youngish Man winced at the phrase, and then
laughed to cover his seriousness.
"All right," he acquiesced. "I'll show you just where the Runaway Road
goes to."
Without further explanation he stepped to the dooryard and scooped up
two heaping handfuls of gravel from the Road. As he came back into the
room he trailed a little line of earth across the floor to the foot of
the stairs, and threw the remaining handful up the steps just as a
heedless child might have done.
"Go follow your Runaway Road," he smiled, "and see where it leads to, if
you are so eager! I'm going down to the woods to see if my brother is
quite lost in his clouds."
Wasn't that _another_ dare? It seemed a craven thing to tease for a
climax and then shirk it. She had never shirked anything yet that was
right, no matter how unusual it was.
She started for the stairs. One step, two steps, three steps, four
steps--her riding-boots grated on the gravel. "Oh, you funny Runaway
Road," she trembled, "where _do_ you go to?"
At the top stairs a tiny waft of earth turned her definitely into the
first doorway.
She took one step across the threshold, and then stood stock-still and
stared. It was a _woman's room_. And from floor to ceiling and from wall
to wall flaunted an incongruous, moneyed effort to blot out all
temperament and pang and trenchant life-history from one spot at least
of the little old gray farmhouse. Bauble was there, and fashion and
novelty, but the whole gay decoration looked and felt like the sumptuous
dressing of a child whom one _hated_.
With a gasp of surprise the Girl went over and looked at herself in the
mirror.
"Wouldn't I look queer in a room like this?" she whispered to herself.
But she didn't look queer at all. She only felt queer, like a flatted
note.
Then she hurried right down the stairs again, and went out in the yard,
and caught the White Pony, and climbed up into her saddle.
The Youngish Man came running to say good-by.
"Well?" he said.
The Girl's eyes were steady as her hand. If her heart fluttered there
was no sign of it.
"Why, it was a _woman's_ room," she answered to his inflection.
"Yes," said the Youngish Man quite simply. "It is my wife's room. My
wife is in Europe getting her winter clothes. All people do not
happen--to--like--the--same--things."
The Girl put out her hand to him with bright-faced friendliness.
"In Europe?" she repeated. "Indeed, I shall not be so local when I think
of her. Wherever she is--all the time--I shall always think of your wife
as being--most of anything else--_in luck_."
She drew back her hand and chirruped to the White Pony, but the Youngish
Man detained her.
"Wait a second," he begged. "Here's a copy of Matthew Arnold for you to
take home as a token, though there's only one thing in it for us, and
you won't care for that until you are forty. You can play it's about the
mountains that you pass going home. Here it is:
"Unaffrighted by the silence round them,
Undistracted by the sights they see,
_THESE_ demand not that the things about them
Yield them love, amusement, sympathy."
"Rather cracked-ice comfort, isn't it?" the Girl laughed as she tucked
the little book into her blouse.
"Rather," said the Youngish Man, "but cracked ice is good for fevers,
and Youth is the most raging fever that I know about."
Then he stood back from the White Pony, and smiled quizzically, and the
Girl turned the White Pony's head, and started down the Road.
Just before the first curve in the alders, she whirled in her saddle and
looked back. The Youngish Man was still standing there watching her, and
she held up her hand as a final signal. Then the Road curved her out of
sight.
It was chilly now in the gloaming shade of the woods, and home seemed a
long way off. After a mile or two the White Pony dragged as though his
feet were sore, and when she tried to force him into a jarring canter
the sharp corners of the Matthew Arnold book goaded cruelly against her
breast.
"It isn't going to be a very pleasant ride," she said. "But it was quite
an adventure. I don't know whether to call it the 'Adventure of the
Runaway Road' or the 'Adventure of the Little Perfect Hour.'"
Then she shivered a little and tried to keep the White Pony in the
rapidly fading sun spots of the Road, but the shadows grew thicker and
cracklier and more lonesome every minute, and the only familiar sound of
life to be heard was 'way off in the distance, where some little lost
bossy was calling plaintively for its mother.
There were plenty of unfamiliar sounds, though. Things--nothing special,
but just Things--sighed mournfully from behind a looming boulder.
Something dark, with gleaming eyes, scudded madly through the woods. A
ghastly, mawkish chill like tomb-air blew dankly from the swamp. Myriads
of tiny insects droned venomously. The White Pony shied at a flash of
heat lightning, and stumbled bunglingly on a rolling stone. Worst of
all, far behind her, sounded the unmistakable tagging step of some
stealthy creature.
For the first time in her life the girl was frightened--hideously,
sickeningly frightened of Night!
Back in the open clearing round the tiny farmhouse, the light, of
course, still lingered in a lulling yellow-gray. It would be an hour
yet, she reasoned, before the great, black loneliness settled there. She
could picture the little, simple, homely, companionable activities of
early evening--the sputter of a candle, the good smell of a pipe, the
steamy murmur of a boiling kettle. O--h! But could one go back wildly
and say: "It is darker and cracklier than I supposed in the woods, and I
am a wilful Girl, and there are fifteen wilful miles between me and
home--and there is a cemetery on the way, and a new grave--and a
squalid camp of gypsies--and a broken bridge--_and I am afraid! What
shall I do?_"
She laughed aloud at the absurdity, and cut at the White Pony sharply
with her whip. It would be lighter, she thought, on the open village
road below the hill.
Love? Amusement? Sympathy? She shook her young fist defiantly at the
hulking contour of a stolid, bored old mountain that loomed up through a
gap in the trees. "_Drat_ Self-sufficiency," she cursed, with a vehement
little-girl curse. "I won't be a bored old Mountain. I _won't_! I
_won't_! I _won't_!"
All her short, eager life, it seemed, she had been floundering like a
stranger in a strange land--no father or mother, no chum, no friend, no
lover, no anything--and now just for a flash, just for one "little,
perfect hour" she had found a voice at last that _spoke her own
language_, and the voice belonged to a Man who belonged to another
woman!
She remembered her morning's singing with a bitter pang. "_Nothing_ is
mine forever. Nothing, _nothing_, NOTHING!" she sobbed.
A great, black, smothering isolation like a pall settled down over her,
and seemed to pin itself with a stab through her heart. Everybody, once
in his time, has tried to imagine his Dearest-one absolutely
nonexistent, unborn, and tortured himself with the possibility of such a
ghostly vacuum in his life. To the Girl suddenly it seemed as though
puzzled, lonely, unmated, all her short years, she had stumbled now
precipitously on the Great Cause Of It--a _vacuum_. It was not that she
had lost any one, or missed any one. _It was simply that some one had
never been born!_
The thought filled her with a whimsical new terror. She pounded the
White Pony into a gallop and covered the last half-mile of the Runaway
Road. At the crest of the hill the valley vista brightened palely and
the White Pony gave a whimper of awakened home instinct. Cautiously,
warily, with legs folding like a jack-knife he began the hazardous
descent.
Was he sleepy? Was he clumsy? Was he footsore? Just before the Runaway
Road smoothed out into the village highway his knees wilted suddenly
under him, and he pitched headlong with a hideous lurch that sent the
Girl hurtling over his neck into a pitiful, cluttered heap among the
dust and stones, where he came back after his first panicky run, and
blew over her with dilated nostrils, and whimpered a little before he
strayed off to a clover patch on the highway below.
Twilight deepened to darkness. Darkness quickened at last to stars. It
was Night, real Night, black alike in meadow, wood, and dooryard,
before the Girl opened her eyes again. Part of an orange moon, waning,
wasted, decadent, glowed dully in the sky.
For a long time, stark-still and numb, she lay staring up into space,
conscious of nothing except consciousness. It was a floaty sort of
feeling. Was she dead? That was the first thought that twittered in her
brain. Gradually, though, the reassuring edges of her cheeks loomed into
sight, and a beautiful, real pain racked along her spine and through her
side. It was the pain that whetted her curiosity. "If it's my neck
that's broken," she reasoned, "it's all over. If it's my heart it's only
just begun."
Then she wriggled one hand very cautiously, and a White Doggish
Something came over and licked her fingers. It felt very kind and
refreshing.
Now and then on the road below, a carriage rattled by, or one voice
called to another. She didn't exactly care that no one noticed her, or
rescued her--indeed, she was perfectly, sluggishly comfortable--but she
remembered with alarming distinctness that once, on a scorching city
pavement, she had gone right by a bruised purple pansy that lay wilting
underfoot. She could remember just how it looked. It had a funny little
face, purple and yellow, and all twisted with pain. And she had gone
right by. And she felt very sorry about it now.
She was still thinking about that purple pansy an hour later, when she
heard the screeching toot of an automobile, the snort of a horse, and
the terrified clatter of hoofs up the hill. Then the White Doggish
Something leaped up and barked a sharp, fluttery bark like a signal.
The next thing she knew, pleasant voices and a lantern were coming
toward her. "They will be frightened," she thought, "to find a body in
the Road." So, "Coo-o! Coo-o!" she cried in a faint little voice.
Then quickly a bright light poured into her face, and she swallowed very
hard with her eyes for a whole minute before she could see that two men
were bending over her. One of the men was just a man, but the other one
was the Boy From Home. As soon as she saw him she began to cry very
softly to herself, and the Boy From Home took her right up in his great,
strong arms and carried her down to the cushioned comfort of the
automobile.
"Where--did--you--come--from?" she whispered smotheringly into his
shoulder.
The harried, boyish face broke brightly into a smile.
"I came from Rosedale to-night, to find _you_!" he said. "But they sent
me up here on business to survey a new Road."
"To survey a new Road?" she gasped. "That's--good. All the Roads that I
know--go--to--Other People's Homes."
Her head began to droop limply to one side. She felt her senses reeling
away from her again. "If--I--loved--you," she hurried to ask,
"would--you--make--me--a--safe Road--_all my own_?"
The Boy From Home gave a scathing glance at the hill that reared like a
crag out of the darkness.
"If I couldn't make a safer Road than _that_--" he began, then stopped
abruptly, with a sudden flash of illumination, and brushed his trembling
lips across her hair.
"I'll make you the safest, smoothest Road that ever happened," he said,
"if I have to dig it with my fingers and gnaw it with my teeth."
A little, snuggling sigh of contentment slipped from the Girl's lips.
"Do--you--suppose," she whispered,
"do--you--suppose--that--after--all--_this_--was--the real--end--of--the
Runaway Road?"