‘I like to be out at night myself,’ Robie admitted. ‘There’s a lot of good company in the stars. Did she have a blanket, anything to keep warm?’
Ruth said quietly: ‘She packed a heavy sweater in her slicker roll. She’ll be all right, I’m sure.’
Mrs. Berent snorted. ‘She’s a fool — and so am I, to go gallivanting over mountains on a horse at my age. Ruth, I’ve one of my coryzas coming on!’ Harland reflected that she treated Ruth more like a paid companion than a daughter.
‘I’ll fix you up, Mother,’ the girl promised, a twinkle in her eyes.
When dinner was done, Mrs. Berent had begun to sneeze; and she and Ruth said good night at once. Harland, his emotions deeply stirred by that scene he and the children had witnessed, was alert for Ellen’s return, wishing he might be with her in this hour of her lonely grief, and he waited a while on the veranda, listening for the hoofbeats of her horse. Mrs. Robie presently joined him, and he confessed that he and the children had chanced upon the scene on the heights that afternoon. ‘It was a moving thing to watch,’ he said.
‘Tess told me,’ she assented. ‘And Glen saw you, but the others didn’t know you were there.’
His own hunger to see her made him resent Ellen’s long delay, and he said: ‘Ellen ought to come back. She must know it will worry you. You’ve enough of a job, keeping us comfortable here, without riding herd on us too.’
‘Oh, I enjoy this,’ she assured him. ‘I mean, making things nice here for Glen and our friends. But Ellen really is difficult, sometimes. It’s not so much selfishness as a sort of — is egoism the word? When she wants to do a thing, she doesn’t take into account the wants of others at all. It isn’t that she overrides them. She simply goes her own way — and they can only submit.’ There was no resentment in her tones, merely a half-amused appraisal. ‘I’ve never seen anyone so wholly sure of herself,’ she confessed.
Harland nodded, feeling himself aggrieved. ‘I know. When we went after turkeys, she told me exactly what to do. It never occurred to me to argue with her.’
‘Of course not.’ She added after a moment: ‘Her father couldn’t call his soul his own. I used to feel like — slapping her, sometimes. I loved that old man. I’m glad he wanted to come back here.’
Someone stirred in the shadows, coming quietly toward them, and Harland till she spoke hoped this might be Ellen; but it was Ruth.
‘I saw your cigarettes,’ she said. ‘Don’t feel you must wait for Ellen, Mrs. Robie. She’s all right.’
‘We weren’t sleepy,’ the older woman assured her, and Harland asked:
‘Where do you think she is?’
‘I think she’ll stay up there till dawn,’ Ruth told them. Her voice was warm and heartening in the night. ‘She probably hid to let us pass, and then went back there after we were surely gone.’ She added in faint amusement: ‘Ellen dramatizes things, you, know.’
Lightning flickered far away, sending a faint wave of radiance across the cloudless sky; but it was so distant they heard no thunder rumble. ‘There’s rain north of us,’ Mrs. Robie doubtfully remarked.
As she spoke, Robie joined them. ‘Ellen knows her way home, if she wants to come,’ he reminded her.
Ruth added: ‘Yes. Don’t worry, please.’ She bade them good night and turned away, and Harland. noticed how pleasantly she moved. He was surprised to find that in the darkness she wore a beauty of which in the light of day he had never been conscious.
After a moment Mis. Robie likewise said good night, and the lightning flashed again, and Harland said: ‘That must be an old roncher of a thunderstorm.’
‘We get some terrors,’ Robie agreed. ‘Real cloudbursts. I’ve seen the brook rise three feet in an hour, even here where it has room to spread all over the canyon.’ He turned away. ‘Good night, old man.’
Harland at last abandoned his vigil, telling himself he was a fool to be concerned; but he wondered whether he would hear Ellen’s horse if she returned during the night. He woke before sunrise and at once thought of her and dressed and went out. No one was stirring in the bunkhouse; but one of the men must already have gone to find and bring in the horses for the day’s use, and Harland walked up to the corral — a lonely milch cow, secured to one of the posts, was its sole occupant — and stayed there till he heard the clatter of hooves up the canyon. The horses came at a gallop, with tossing heads and flanks wet from the night’s fall of dew. Penned in the corral they circled excitedly, the cow shrinking and making herself small as they milled past her; and then Charlie Yates, who had brought them in, stopped to roll a cigarette and to exchange a word with Harland.
‘She hasn’t come home yet,’ he said looking up the canyon trail; and after a moment he added: ‘She’s a hot one, always doing the damnedest things. You’d think she’d know Mrs. Robie would be upset.’
Harland surprisingly resented this echo of his own criticism. ‘Can I have a horse?’ he asked stiffly. ‘I think I’ll ride to meet her.’
‘Sure thing,’ Charlie agreed. ‘I’ll go along if you say so.’
‘No need,’ Harland told him. ‘She’s all. right.’
‘Sure,’ Charlie drawled. ‘She knows all the answers.’ Harland realized that even Charlie must be uneasy, to speak thus of a guest.
When his horse was ready, Harland set out, at first at a foot pace to conceal his own eagerness; but once out of the other’s sight, he lifted his horse to a trot and then to a lope. The sun struck the ridges high above him; but here in the canyon the air lay damp and cool, and he rode in shadows while in the sky the level rays swept away some shredded skeins of golden cloud. When in due time he passed the bars and left the main trail and began to climb, he ascended into sunlight that came pouring over the heights behind him in a shining flood; and on the crest of the ridge he met Ellen face to face.
The sun was in her eyes and the sun was all upon her, so that she seemed for an instant to wear a sort of incandescence. Hear-land imagined the stains of tears upon her cheeks, and the ravages of solitary grief in her countenance. Phrases formed themselves in his writer’s mind and he thought of a white-hot ingot coming from the fire, of molten gold in a bone-white crucible. Sorrow, the night long, had brayed her in a mortar, and her soul was swept and burnished.
‘All right?’ he asked, hoarse and husky.
She nodded, smiling radiantly. ‘Come,’ she said, and touched his hand, inviting him to share with her some pleasant prospect. ‘I’m ready now to return to the world again.’
They rode back to the lodge, and till they left their horses — Charlie was there to take the reins — she did not speak, nor did he; but then she said gravely: ‘Thank you, Mr. Harland.’
So they parted and Harland was alive with a mysterious excitement. He heard her mother’s querulous greeting, heard the sound of a sneeze, as Ellen went into the cabin where they lodged.
– VII –
Harland after breakfast waited for Ellen to reappear, and he stayed at the lodge all day, refusing Robie’s suggestion that they try the brooks; but she remained invisible till dinner time. Even then he had no chance to claim her, for when they rose from the table, she joined Tess and Lin at one end of the wide veranda, and they chattered together like children, flying into gales of laughter at their own words or at nothing. Harland, sitting with Glen and Mrs. Robie twenty feet away, wished he might join them, but would not without an invitation. The moon was waxing, and the canyon was paved with magic shadows that were broken by silver light patterns, and presently the two young people and Ellen strolled away down the trail together, and their voices came back softly through the night, blurred by the steady chuckle of the brook. After a time, at some distance, he heard them singing the nonsense songs of which children — young or old — never tire. He was so abstracted that Robie noticed it and suggested they join the singers; but Harland, feeling that Robie had read his mind, reddened in the darkness; and he said he was sleepy and would go to bed, and did so.
At breakfas
t Robie proposed a day of fishing, and Harland agreed and hoped Ellen might go with them; but when Robie invited her to do so, she declined. ‘Lin says he and Charlie Yates and one of the cowboys want to try to locate a trail out of the box canyon up in the horse parks,’ she explained. ‘I’m going with them.’
So to Harland the fishing was dull and profitless. Back at the lodge they found she had not returned, and they sat on the veranda for a while, and the sun sank lower in the west, till at last Glen said:
‘Look yonder!’
Ellen and Lin had appeared on the crest of the ridge above camp, and now they brought their horses plunging down the steep descent, refusing the trail, starting a small avalanche of tumbling loose stones, the horses as often as not sliding on their rumps, plunging through the pines and aspens which clad the slope, the riders with shrill cries urging them on. When they reached the level, Lin was one jump ahead; but as they raced toward the lodge, splashing through the brook, his hand lay too heavy on the reins, so that he twitched his horse off stride. Ellen passed him and came first to the goal triumphantly.
Lin had lost his hat, and from a deep scratch on Ellen’s cheek fresh blood trickled, bright crimson against her warm dark skin. They were panting and laughing, and Lin explained to his father, while he gasped for breath:
‘We raced the last mile, Dad; took a straight line, up and down, over everything. I’d have beat her, too, but I swung too far south on the first pitch. I thought she was headed wrong.’
Glen laughed. ‘Ellen always knows exactly where she is, and where she’s going,’ he said drily.
‘She’ll never beat me again,’ Lin declared, and Ellen laughed and told him she could beat him whenever he chose. She was in dungarees, hot and soiled from her long day in the saddle, that scratch on her cheek a red flame, her face as smudged and sweat-stained as the boy’s; but she appeared for dinner in something light and soft and completely feminine, and the contrast beween her delicate and pulsing beauty now and the disordered hoyden she had been an hour before seemed to Harland so intoxicating that he became suddenly wary. When Robie next morning proposed an inspection trip to the upper pastures, he accepted, determined to put her out of his mind.
He and Robie rode all day, scouring every covert, starting the scattered bunches of cattle and inspecting them. Robie and Charlie decided it was time to brand and earmark the young stock, and settled on Tuesday for this task. When they returned to the lodge they found Ellen and Lin together on the veranda, and Robie asked: ‘What have you two been up to?’
‘Not a thing,’ Ellen smilingly assured him. ‘We didn’t feel like doing anything strenuous, so we’ve just been sitting here talking all day.’
Harland wondered whether he could spend a long day alone with any fourteen-year-old boy — unless of course it were Danny. Clearly Ellen liked boys, and understood them too. The youngster’s eyes were shining as he watched her now.
That evening the moon was brighter, and the sky a cloudless bowl of paling stars. Lin went early to bed, and Ellen after a little rose and stood by the veranda rail. ‘I’ve sat still too long,’ she said. ‘Mr. Harland, will you walk with me?’
Mrs. Berent — this was her first appearance at dinner for days — made a derisive sound. ‘Quoth the spider to the fly!’ she said sharply; and everyone laughed in dutiful fashion, and Harland as he joined Ellen felt hot and angry; but when he was alone with her his anger passed. They followed the brook trail half a mile down the canyon to the lower bridge — the moon was bright enough to show them every pebble in the way — and they went at first in silence, till Harland said at last, remembering Danny:
‘You and Lin get along.’
‘I enjoy being with him,’ she agreed.
‘I like him, too, but I can’t imagine sitting and talking to him all day.’
Her tone was lightly quizzical. ‘ You’re ever so dignified, aren’t you? I think you’re one of those men who wear a sort of mental beard. You try to seem more reserved and mature than you really are. Except the day you shot the turkey, I’ve never seen you really let go and throw back your head and laugh!’
“‘I’ see ourselves as ithers see us,’” he quoted, amused. ‘I suppose I don’t laugh much. Laughter is the luxury of the indolent, isn’t it? Busy people don’t have time to laugh.’
‘You’re on vacation here, not busy at all!’
‘An author never has a vacation. He’s a walking sponge, sopping up impressions till he’s saturated, then going to his desk and squeezing them out on paper.’
‘I’d forgotten you’re an author,’ she confessed. ‘Probably that’s why you like to make phrases. Of course I know you must have worked hard, to be so successful so young.’ She laughed at him in a teasing way. ‘I suppose you think you must live up to your position, pretend a — gravity you do not always feel. And then of course you’re terribly shy!’
Harland chuckled. ‘I wonder why men always feel a little flattered at being told they’re shy.’
‘They like to feel they’re — heroes,’ she suggested smilingly. ‘Keeping a stiff upper lip against heavy odds.’ They came to the bridge and stopped, leaning on the handrail, looking down into the clear water; and she cried: ‘Look! You can see the trout, even in the moonlight.’
The night air was damp and cool and fragrant. ‘And you can smell flowers,’ he agreed. ‘All your senses seem so much keener here.’
‘I know,’ she murmured. Her shoulder almost touched his, and he caught a dizzying hint of some faint scent she wore. She looked up at him and an overhanging bough between her and the moon laid a dark shadow across her nose and mouth and chin; and he thought again, as on that first day he saw her, of those mysterious beauties of the harem, who wear a veil which hides all but their eyes as the shadow hid all but her eyes now; and he smiled and spoke of this, said the shadow on her face was like one of those veils.
‘Yashmaks? Is that what they call them?’ he suggested. ‘Or it’s like one of the handkerchiefs train robbers used to wear as masks, when this country out here was young.’
‘I suppose we all wear masks,’ she assented, and turned, and he moved at her side; and as they walked slowly back toward the lodge she asked questions about Danny; asked where he was, and how long he had been ill, and how he progressed; and Harland answered her, and to speak of Danny woke tenderness in him, and it was in his tones, so that she said at last:
‘You love him almost too much, don’t you?’ Her words faintly disturbed him, seemed to be in some way he could not define a threat to Danny. She said: ‘I wish I knew him. I get along well with boys his age — and Lin’s.’
That sense of danger to Danny, groundless though it was, made his tone dry. ‘I’m sure you do,’ he assented. She looked at him in surprise and let her hand rest lightly on his arm, as though in reassurance; but he did not speak again and they came back to the lodge.
– VIII –
On the day set for the branding, they all except Ruth and Mrs. Berent went to watch the proceedings. Cowboys rode into the mass of milling cattle, dropped their ropes over the necks of the calves they selected, and dragged the bucking victims toward where little fires were burning and the irons were hot. Sometimes a cow followed her offspring, excited by its bawling, making alarmed or threatening movements till she was driven away. Lin helped to throw the calves, but he was not big enough to handle them easily, and his ambition sometimes outran his powers. When he tackled a lusty antagonist there might follow a protracted struggle, the calf bucking and bawling, Lin’s feet as often in the air as on the ground, till he was spattered with blood and smeared with dirt and grime — and completely happy. Harland, laughing with the others at the boy’s activities, had an itching impulse to dismount and try his hand; but he could picture too clearly the ridiculous figure he would cut if he proved inept. He thought no one guessed his wish, but when they all rode homeward, descending from sunlit heights into the cool and shadowed canyons again, Ellen brought her horse beside his and said with
a twinkling amusement in her tones:
‘You were just aching to try to throw a calf, weren’t you? I could see it in your eyes.’
He grinned. ‘Yes, I wanted to; but I had sense enough not to try.’
‘I did it, last year,’ she assured him. ‘It’s a knack, that’s all. Not hard. If there hadn’t been an audience, you’d have chanced it.’
‘Another week here and I’d feel young enough to tackle the job, even with an audience.’
‘Another week, yes,’ she echoed in a lower tone. ‘But we’ve only another day.’ He looked at her in sharpened attention, but then the trail narrowed so that she moved ahead, and they went single file and spoke no more. Yet at dinner that evening — Harland found himself between Ellen and Tess — she referred again to their approaching departure.
‘It doesn’t seem possible that we’ve been here almost two weeks,’ she said. ‘And yet it seems too as though we’d always been here!’
‘It’s been very pleasant,’ he agreed.
She nodded and, her eyes downcast, she said softly: ‘I’ll never forget these days.’
As she spoke she moved her hand in such a way that the movement caught his eye, and he looked at her hand on the table here beside him and felt a shock of surprise. For the ring — Quinton’s ring, whom she would never marry — was not now on her finger! He stared at her hand so long that she looked at him inquiringly.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Have you lost your ring?’
She shook her head, her eyes holding his. ‘No. I took it off, forever, an hour ago.’
The moment was simple, yet there was an electric message in it. Meeting her glance, he read that message plain; and his eyes were the first to fall. He looked at the fork beside his plate and absently turned it over and turned it back again. She began to talk to Lin, across the table, and he tried to put his thoughts in order. He felt himself entangled, held in light yet tenacious bonds; and a stubborn anger that was half alarm took hold of him. When they rose from the table he excused himself. There was a letter he must write, he said; and he sought the sanctuary of his own quarters, admitting not even to himself that this was flight.
Leave Her to Heaven Page 6
