ROSES AND THORNS
Not for knaves like us she wept--
Yet who served or loved as we?--
Since her heart this many a day
Went to one beyond the sea!
But, if in those lands afar,
She her lightest word should say,
Here are ten good knights and true
With ten lives to cast away!
JOHN HARTLEY, "The Young Queen."
We are--only what we have been!--"The Silver Poppy."
Hartley lost no more time than was necessary before responding to
Cordelia's message asking that he come to her at once.
There was a touch of imperativeness in the hurriedly written little note
that indefinitely appealed to him. It seemed to show him how much she
had grown to lean on him. He assumed, though, that the urgency at the
most implied nothing more than some impending problem in connection with
her new book, and consequently Cordelia waited three anxious and
impatient hours before he finally appeared before her. And greedily she
was counting the minutes of that last precious day.
The ordeal through which she had passed the afternoon before had left
its traces behind it. It still showed on her face in an unusual look of
pensive weariness about the heavy eyelids, and a deepened and almost
feverish glow to the eyes themselves. For once, too, her face was the
true color of old ivory, with one small touch of the tenderest,
shell-like pink burning on each of her cheeks. The languor of her voice,
the calm pathos of her glance, and the heavier shadow about her lashes,
suggested to Hartley, as it had done before, but never so vividly, the
quiet, half-sorrowful beauty of an autumn twilight.
She was dressed in her riding-habit, of dark-green cloth, showing every
line of the thin yet buoyant figure. It appeared to him as a figure with
something bird-like in the very lightness and nervous quickness of
movement beyond all its outward languor. The dark-green of her habit,
too, seemed to give to the pale face above it a strangely heightened
sense of isolation, like the gloom out of which the solitary figure of a
Rembrandt portrait looks down on the world.
"Cordelia, what is it?" he asked anxiously, startled at the change,
though unable to determine in just what it consisted.
She looked up quickly at the note of unusual tenderness in his voice.
"I am going away!" she said quietly.
A sudden sense of loss, of deprivation, swept over him, and both his
voice and the startled face he turned to her showed his feeling.
"Going away?" he echoed.
"Yes." She shook her head sorrowfully.
"But where, Cordelia?"
"I leave for Quebec to-morrow morning, to join Mrs. Spaulding. From
there I think I shall go back home--back to Kentucky!"
"But why are you going?"
"For your sake," she said, giving him her eyes unrestrainedly.
"For my sake, Cordelia?" he repeated, astonished, openly miserable.
"Yes, for you," she said in a lighter tone, smiling. "But that's all
you're going to be told at present."
She went to the window and looked out at the falling rain.
"I thought," she said, "that we might have one last little ride
together, for the sake of--of the old days!"
"But it couldn't--surely it couldn't be for long?" he asked, still
thinking of her departure, scarcely believing the news.
"I don't think I shall ever again come back to New York," she said
slowly, with something that was almost a sob.
"But can't you tell me why?"
"No, I can't--not now!"
"My poor child," he said suddenly, taking her pale face between his
hands and looking earnestly into her eyes--and what gloriously luminous
eyes they were that poignantly happy moment! "My poor child, is it any
trouble I could take on my own shoulders? Is it anything I could ever
help you with?"
It was his first voluntary caress, his first spontaneous and
unlooked-for touch of tenderness. Her heart was beating riotously.
She shook her head.
"But explain to me about Quebec."
"Mrs. Spaulding has written to me and asked me to join her there. Here
is the letter; read it."
She handed the letter to him; it had reached her that morning most
opportunely. Hartley took it, and read:
CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC, QUEBEC CITY.
"MY DARLING CHILD:
"I am dying of loneliness up here in this dreary old town. Alfred
has gone up in the woods to shoot moose or something, and Heaven
only knows when he'll be back. I have decided that you and Mr.
Hartley had better take a holiday and run up here and join me for
the rest of the week; and then we can all come down together. I
refuse to take 'no' for an answer."
"That's really all," Cordelia broke in; "the rest is simply orders about
the servants and messages to dressmakers and that sort of thing."
He handed the letter back to her, disheartened, depressed.
"Could you come?" she asked him hesitatingly.
He thought over it; he scarcely saw how he could, but a desire to be
near her seemed to be shouldering out all other feelings.
"I should like to go, but--well, to be candid, I really can't afford it
just now."
"That doesn't count!" she cried happily.
Then a sudden disturbing thought came to him.
"But, Cordelia, how about our book? What would be done with that in the
meantime? And what will become of it in the end, if you leave?" He had
often confessed to her that he was no business man, that even the
thought of approaching an editor or a publisher could take away his
appetite for a day.
"Let's not talk about that!" Her hands were on his shoulders now, and
she was reading his face hungrily.
"But what shall be done with it?"
"Well, everything _is_ done!" she said, reluctantly, he thought. Then,
slipping away from him for a minute or two, she fluttered back to the
room with a bit of paper in her hand.
"And as a sign and proof of the same, permit me to present you with
something which is entirely your own!"
It was Slater & Slater's check for one thousand dollars, already
indorsed and marked accepted. He held it out to her, determined.
"You know I can't accept this," he said. But she was equally determined.
"But you shall, and must!"
Again he refused it, absolutely, proudly, she thought; and again she
thrust it back on him. Then she saw that it was useless, and with that
discovery a new trouble came to her.
At last she made a suggestion that had fluttered to the ark of her
indecision, like a dove with an olive-branch.
"Let's take it and spend it--on our holiday! No, let's spend half of it;
we can decide about the other half later on!"
He stopped to consider her proposal, and as she saw him wavering she
declared that she, like Mrs. Spaulding, would never take "no" for an
answer.
And so it was decided; and drawing on her gloves she reminded him of
their ride.
While the horses were being brought round she told him of her interview
with her publisher--not all of it, but at least enough to show how she
had succeeded in securing the terms she had first asked for.
"What a wonderful little warrior you are!" he cried, taking her hand
laughingly, but gratefully. He looked down at the frail little white
fingers admiringly. "It ought to guide an empire!" he cried.
But, strangely enough, she could not find it in her heart to share in
his delight. Even the mention of the book, during all that day, in some
manner distressed and worried her.
"Those are far-off things and battles long ago," she said, as they
started out, shrugging her little shoulders, as though to lift from
them some burden of useless care.
"This is the beginning of our holiday. You remember what you said: the
fulness and color of life! So let's turn vagabond. Do you know," she
continued, taking a tighter rein on her little chestnut mare, who was
champing restively at her bit, "do you know, I don't believe you've
enough of the rogue in you ever to make a poet!"
"Try me!" he laughed, yet not altogether pleased.
"You haven't enough of the dare-devil in your make-up. You are always
too staid and English and respectable and self-contained. You ought to
have more of the vagabond, the swashbuckler, more of the Villon!"
"Is that," he asked, "your ideal of man?"
"By no means!"
"Then what is?"
"My ideal"--she looked at him as she spoke--"my ideal is a man who, for
a woman's sake, can stand up alone against the whole wide world!"
"Try me!" he said again. As they turned into the Park she brooded
joyously, hungrily, over that simple challenge, which might mean so
little or so much. Try him! She wondered if he guessed how soon and how
severely he might be tried. And she wondered, even more, just what would
be the outcome of that test.
The driving rain had ceased, but it was still a humid, gray afternoon
with a fine mist hanging in the air. The Park was practically deserted,
and the bridle-paths empty.
"What a day for a ride!" cried Cordelia, waving her whip toward the
tree-tops that billowed through the silvery fog, "and our last ride
together!" Then she repeated aloud as they rode:
What hand and brain went ever paired?
What heart alike conceived and dared?
What act proved all its thought had been?
What will but felt the fleshy screen?
"I feel that way now," she said. "I feel as though I should like to fly,
as though I could ride out everything that life holds, in one crazy,
delicious, rushing gallop!"
They let out their spirited animals as they turned up into the longer
stretch of the Eastern path. The air and movement had brought a deeper
pink to Cordelia's cheeks, and, as was usual in her moments of
excitement, her expanded pupils made her eyes look dark.
"Isn't it glorious!" she cried abandonedly. "I think I'm going to make
myself drunk, dead drunk, with this ride to-day!"
She put the whip recklessly to her distracted mare, and, shooting out
ahead of Hartley, raced exultantly down the level stretch before her.
A Park attendant caught sight of her careering wildly down the path. He
pushed his way through the bushes as she swept past and called after her
warningly to lessen her speed. The little chestnut mare swerved at the
sudden appearance and call of the man, and for a moment, as her mount
bounded forward, Cordelia lost the reins.
The mare's speed did not yield one stride to her frantic pull at the
bit. At a glance Hartley realized that it was a runaway.
He remembered, to his sudden horror, that Cordelia was not the best of
horsewomen. But still, he felt, with the open stretch that lay before
them there might be no immediate danger. The danger lay ahead, in the
winding roadway, the brushwood and trees, the all too many overhead
bridges.
Hartley did not hesitate when he realized what these might mean. A dozen
times before that day he had shown his powerful roan to be the fleeter
animal. As Cordelia's mare bolted through a hedge of bare lilac-bushes
at the first turn of the path, and went dashing across the open
greensward of the Park, he was racing down on her, not a hundred yards
behind.
As they raced he could see that he was slowly gaining. It awoke in him
his dormant passion for struggle, his delight in action, and he almost
gloried in that strange chase, with a barbaric, a rudimentary gladness
in his sense of mastery over the quivering beast beneath him.
He came bounding alongside when they were not more than twenty yards
from a row of green-painted benches lining one of the walks.
"Shake off your stirrup!" he called to her. He was almost near enough
to reach out his arm and touch her, but at first she did not understand
him. She had, indeed, lost all control of herself and her horse. Before
he could make her understand, the row of benches were under their noses.
They had to take them together. Cordelia's mare struck the top board of
a bench-back and splintered it as she went over.
Then Hartley, in desperation, rode straight down on her, for already
they were getting in among the thick of the trees. He caught her under
the shoulders with one arm, as he swung in on her, and as her mare was
shouldered over and went suddenly sprawling and tumbling to the grass,
he held tight with his knees and clung to the trailing figure in green.
He clung to her and carried her out at his side in that way until his
own frightened roan could be pulled up, panting and bewildered, with the
blood staining the foam from its bruised mouth. He slipped to the
ground, in some way, still holding her. Her face was colorless, but she
looked up at him with the old luminous and wonderful eyes. He was
breathing heavily, but he still held her.
"My darling!" she said, locking her arms about his neck, as a torrent of
happy tears came to her eyes. "My darling!"
He still held her there close to him, but in silence, until two
gardeners and a Park policeman came to their assistance. Ten minutes
later a mounted policeman rode up with the recaptured mare. A passing
hansom was stopped, and Cordelia was handed up into it. The mounted
policeman wrote down his notes, and rode away tucking Hartley's bill
into his pocket. It all seemed over and past with kaleidoscopic
rapidity.
"Will you be able to manage them?" Cordelia cried, concerned, as she saw
Hartley mounting again, with her mare held short by the bridle-rein.
"Quite easily. But you must get back at once!"
Nothing, at that moment, could have made her happier than that
commonplace half-command from his lips.
She waved her gauntleted hand back at him; her face still stood out pale
and wistful against the darkness of the hansom-box.
"And you?" she asked.
"I'll be right after you."
"Then I'll have dinner ready for you!" she cried, as the hansom turned
and disappeared down through the darkening mist, smiling to herself at
the incongruousness of what she had said. It was only in fiction, she
felt, that the opportune moment and the adequate word coincided.
But driving home through the gray evening air with the tears still wet
on her lashes, she pondered over a new and perturbing and yet not
altogether painful problem: Could it be that she had played her part
with him too, too earnestly? Must she lose him now, when he meant so
much to her?