Maxwell Davison settled in Oxford for six months, in order to see his
great book on Persian Literature through the press. His advent had been
looked forward to as promising a welcome variety, bringing a splash of
vivid color into a somewhat quiet-hued, monotonous world. But there was
doomed to be some disappointment. Mr. Davison went rather freely to
College dinners but seldom into general society. It came to be
understood that he disliked meeting women; Mrs. Stewart, however, he
appeared to except from his condemnation or rule. Ian was his cousin,
which made a pretext at first for going to the Stewarts' house; but he
went because he found the couple interesting in their respective ways.
Some Dons, unable to believe that a man without a University education
could teach them anything, would lecture him out of their little
pocketful of knowledge about Oriental life and literature. Ian, on the
contrary, was an admirable producer of all that was interesting in
others; and in Davison that all was much. At first he had tried to keep
Mrs. Stewart in what he conceived to be her proper place; but as time
went on he found himself dropping in at the old house with surprising
frequency, and often when he knew Ian to be in College or too busy to
attend to him.
He had brought horses with him and offered to give Mildred a mount
whenever she liked. Milly had learned the rudiments of the art, but she
was too timid to care for riding. Mildred, on the other hand, delighted
in the swift motion through the air, the sensation of the strong
bounding life almost incorporated with her own, and if she had moments
of terror she had more of ecstatic daring. She and Davison ended by
riding together once or twice a week.
Interesting as Mildred found Maxwell Davison's companionship, it did not
altogether conduce to her happiness. She who had been so content to be
merely alive, began now to chafe at the narrow limits of her existence.
He opened the wide horizons of the world before her, and her soul seemed
native to them. One April afternoon they rode to Wytham together. The
woods of Wytham clothe a long ridge of hill around which the young
Thames sweeps in a strong curve and through them a grass ride runs
unbroken for a mile and a half. Now side by side, now passing and
repassing each other, they had "kept the great pace" along the track,
the horses slackening their speed somewhat as they went down the dip,
only to spring forward with fresh impetus, lifting their hind-quarters
gallantly to the rise; then given their heads for the last burst along
the straight bit to the drop of the hill, away they went in passionate
competition, foam-flecked and sending the clods flying from their
hurrying hoofs.
A mile and a half of galloping only serves to whet the appetite of a
well-girt horse, and the foaming rivals hardly allowed themselves to be
pulled up at the edge of a steep grassy slope, where already here and
there a yellow cowslip bud was beginning to break its pale silken
sheath. At length their impatient dancing was over, and they stood
quiet, resigned to the will of the incomprehensible beings who
controlled them. But Mildred's blood was dancing still and she abandoned
herself to the pleasure of it, undistracted by speech. Beyond the
shining Thames, wide-curving through its broad green meadows, and the
gray bridge and tower of Eynsham, that great landscape, undulating,
clothed in the mystery of moving cloud-shadows, gave her an agreeable
impression of being a view into a strange country, hundreds of miles
away from Oxford and the beaten track. But Maxwell's eyes were fixed
upon her.
The wood about them was just breaking into the various beauty of spring
foliage, emerald and gold and red; a few trees still holding up naked
gray branches among it; here and there a white cloud of cherry blossom,
shining in a clearing or floating mistily amid bursting tree-tops below
them. They turned to the right, down a narrow ride, mossy and winding,
where perforce they trod on flowers as they went; for the path and the
wood about it were carpeted with blue dog-violets and the pale soft
blossoms of primroses, opening in clusters amid their thick fresh
foliage and the brown of last year's fallen leaves. The sky above wore
the intense blue in which dark clouds are seen floating, and as the
gleams of travelling sunshine passed over the wooded hill, its colors
also glowed with a peculiar intensity. The horses, no longer excited by
a vista of turf, were walking side by side. But the beauty of earth and
sky were nothing to Maxwell, whose whole being was intent on the beauty
of the woman in the saddle beside him; the rose and the gold of cheek
and hair, the lithe grace of the body, lightly moving to the motion of
her horse.
She turned to him with a sudden bright smile.
"How perfectly delightful riding is! I owe all the pleasure of it to
you."
"Do you?" he asked, smiling too, but slightly and gravely, narrowing on
her his inscrutable eyes. "Well, then, will you do what I want?"
"I thought you were a fatalist and never wanted anything. But if you
condescend to want me to do something, your slave obeys. You see I'm
learning the proper way for a woman to talk."
"I want you to remove the preposterous black pot with which you've
covered up your hair. I'll carry it for you."
"Oh, Max! What would people think if they met me riding without my hat?
Fancy Miss Cayley! What she'd say! And the Warden of Canterbury! What
he'd feel!"
She laughed delightedly.
"They never ride this way. It's the 'primrose path,' you see, and
they're afraid of the 'everlasting bonfire.' I'm not; you're not. You're
not afraid of anything."
"I am. I'm afraid of old maids and--most butlers."
Maxwell laughed, but his laugh was a harsh one.
"Humbug! If you really wanted to do anything you'd do it. I know you
better than you know yourself. If you won't take your hat off it's
because you don't really want to do what I want; and when you say pretty
things to me about your gratitude for the pleasure I'm giving you,
you're only telling the same old lies women tell all the world over."
"There! Catch my reins!" cried Mildred, leaning over and holding them
out to him. "How do you suppose I can take my hat off if you don't?"
He obeyed and drew up to her, stooping near, a hand on the mane of her
horse. The horses nosed together and fidgeted, while she balanced
herself in the saddle with lifted arms, busy with hat-pins. The task
accomplished, she handed the hat to him and they cantered on. Presently
she turned towards him, brightening.
"You were quite right about the hat, Max. It's ever so much nicer
without it; one feels freer, and what I love about riding is the free
feeling. It's as though one had got out of a cage; as though one could
jump over all the barriers of life; as though there were nobody and
nothing to hinder one from galloping right out into the sky if one
chose. But I can't explain what I mean."
"Of course you don't mean the sky," he answered. "What you really mean
is the desert. There's space, there's color, glorious, infinite, with an
air purer than earthly. Such a life, Mildred! The utter freedom of it!
None of this weary, dreary slavery you call civilization. That would be
the life for you."
It was true that Mildred's was an essentially nomadic and adventurous
soul. Whether the desert was precisely the most suitable sphere for her
wanderings was open to doubt, but for the moment as typifying freedom,
travel, and motion--all that really was as the breath of life to her--it
fascinated her imagination. Maxwell, closely watching that
sunshine-gilded head, saw her eyes widen, her whole expression at once
excited and meditative, as though she beheld a vision. But in a moment
she had turned to him with a challenging smile.
"I thought slavery was the only proper thing for women."
"So it is--for ordinary women. It makes them happier and less
mischievous. But I don't fall into the mistake--which causes such a deal
of unnecessary misery and waste in the world--the mistake of supposing
that you can ever make a rule which it's good for every one to obey.
You've got to make your rule for the average person. Therefore it's
bound not to fit the man or woman who is not average, and it's folly to
wish them to distort themselves to fit it."
"And I'm not average? I needn't be a slave? Oh, thank you, Max! I am so
glad."
"Confound it, Mildred, I'm not joking. You are a born queen and you
oughtn't to be a slave; but you are one, all the same. You're a slave to
the 'daily round, the common task,' which were never meant for such as
you; you're a slave to the conventional idiocy of your neighbors. You
daren't even take your hat off till I make you; and now you see how nice
it is to ride with your hat off."
They had been slowly descending the steep, stony road which leads to
Wytham Village, but as he spoke they were turning off into a large field
to the right, across which a turfy track led gradually up to the woods
from which they had come. The track lay smooth before them, and the
horses began to sidle and dance directly their hoofs touched it. Mildred
did not answer his remarks, except by a reference to the hat.
"Don't lose it, that's all!" she shouted, looking back and laughing, as
she shot up the track ahead of him. He fancied she was trying to show
him that she could run away from him if she chose; and with a quiet
smile on his lips and a firm hand on his tugging horse, he kept behind
her until she was a good way up the field. Then he gave his horse its
head and it sprang forward. She heard the eager thud of the heavy hoofs
drawing up behind, and in a few seconds he was level with her. For a
minute they galloped neck and neck, though at a little distance from
each other. Then she saw him ahead, riding with a seat looser than most
Englishmen's, yet with an assurance, a grace of its own, the
hind-quarters of his big horse lifting powerfully under him, as it sped
with great bounds over the flying turf. Her own mare saw it, too, and
vented her annoyance in a series of kicks, which, it must be confessed,
seriously disturbed Mildred's equilibrium. Then settling to business,
she sprang after her companion. Maxwell heard her following him up the
long grass slope towards the gate which opens into the main ride by
which they had started. He fancied he had the improvised race well in
hand, but suddenly the hoofs behind him hurried their beat; Mildred flew
past him at top speed and flung her mare back on its haunches at the
gate.
"I've won! Hurrah! I've won!" she shouted, breathlessly, and waved her
whip at him.
Maxwell was swearing beneath his breath, in a spasm of anger and
anxiety.
"Don't play the fool!" he cried, savagely, as he drew rein close to her.
"You might have thrown the mare down or mixed her in with the gate,
pulling her up short like that. It's a wonder you didn't come off
yourself, for though you're a devil to go, you know as well as I do
you're a poor horse-woman."
He was violently angry, partly at Mildred's ignorant rashness, partly
because, after all, she had beaten him. She, taking her hat from his
hand and fastening it on again, uttered apologies, but from the lips
only; for she had never seen a man furious before, and she was keenly
interested in the spectacle. Maxwell's eyes were not inscrutable now;
they glittered with manifest rage. His harsh voice was still harsher,
his hard jaw clinched, the muscles of his lean face, which was as pale
as its brownness allowed it to be, stood out like cords, and the hand
that grasped her reins shook. Mildred felt somewhat as she imagined a
lion-tamer might feel; just the least bit alarmed, but mistress of the
brute, on the whole, and enjoying the contact with anything so natural
and fierce and primitive. The feeling had not had time to pall on her,
when going through the gate, they were joined by two other members of
the little clan of Wytham riders, and all rode back to Oxford together,
through flying scuds of rain.