The Silver Poppy Part 28

"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, rus.h.i.+ng 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 das.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion 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 gra.s.s, 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 a.s.sistance. Ten minutes later a mounted policeman rode up with the recaptured mare. A pa.s.sing 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?

CHAPTER XXV

TARNISHED GOLD

She yielded then where she had frowned, And fell her tears like leaves; She sank before him on the ground And clasped his iron greaves.

JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight."

After all, Rabelais' religion and women are one and the same thing--a great Perhaps.--"The Silver Poppy."

The lights of Cordelia's little yellow-trimmed study were carefully shaded and softened. Cordelia herself, with bright but restless eyes, with a slightly flushed face, and a little quickness of speech and movement betokening, perhaps, nerves too tensely strung, was already waiting for Hartley, when, an hour later, he stepped up to her door.

He had long since grown used to that freedom of action, to that unthought-of abandon of the Bohemian which Cordelia laid claim to as her natural right, and which the world about her had the habit of laughing away as the mere unrestrained eccentricity of guileless genius. He had noticed that this careless freedom seemed to suit her best. He liked her least when she was least ingenuous.

"It's so stupid and lonesome downstairs in that big sepulchral dining-room!" she said. "Let's have dinner up here."

A momentary and careless feeling that some too boldly effacing sponge was wiping out the last blurred line of formality pa.s.sed through him.

"Oh, I have nearly all my meals served up here, now that I'm alone!" she explained. "It's much quieter and more cozy. Here we can have dinner in peace, and be undisturbed. You don't mind, do you?"

After his stiff ride the blood was still running through his veins vigorously. He could feel life pulsing dominatingly through him, and some mysterious back-wash of that wave of joyous intoxication which earlier had taken possession of Cordelia now seemed sweeping in turn through him.

"The queen can do no wrong!" he cried, looking down into the unnatural brightness of her face that gleamed like a flower in the half-light.

Then something transient, fugitive, inscrutable, something that crept up into her eyes, drove the careless smile from his lips, and they looked at each other, man and woman.

"Stevens," she said, turning to the servant who had answered her ring, "I am at home to no one this evening! Remember, Stevens, to no one!"

She had replaced her dark-green riding-habit by a loose, heavily pleated robe of bebe blue, lined with the palest of yellow satin. Its sleeves hung loosely about her white arms, which they left partly unconcealed, as though by accident. Her even whiter throat, too, was left bare. She seemed suddenly converted from a child of alertness to a woman of languor. Hartley did not go out of his way to a.n.a.lyze the mystery of that sudden alteration by means of a mere change of raiment. But it seemed as if some magical breath of enchantment had blown away the fragile petals from the blossom of youth and left in its place the mellowed and rounded fruit of womanhood.

As he gazed across the table at her during that strangest of dinners she seemed to take on a warm maturity and a vitality quite new to her. The heavier shadows, caused, no doubt, he thought, by mere weariness of body, that seemed to dwell under the arch of her eyebrow, again and again suggested to him the picture of her as a young mother, saddened with the burden of her first maternity.

"Do you know," she said to him suddenly--they had been talking but little that night--"I have never yet once called you by your Christian name! John! How that sounds like you: substantial, solid, dignified! No; I have never dared. I believe I am still afraid of you--John!"

He made her say it over a dozen times. She repeated the name until it seemed to fall to pieces on her tongue, and lose all meaning. Then she sighed heavily.