The Romance of a Plain Man Part 21

She shook her head. "My feet are better than a lame horse. It's not more than two miles anyway."

"And you danced all night?"

I hung the reins over my arm and we turned together, facing the sunrise.

"Yes, but the way to rest is to run out-of-doors. Are you often up with the dawn, too?"

"No, but I couldn't sleep. The music got into my head."

"Into mine also. But I often take a canter at sunrise. It is my hour."

"And this is your road?"

"Not always. I go different ways. This one I call the road-to-what-might-have-been because it turns off just as it reaches a glorious view."

"Then don't let's travel it. I'd rather go with you on the road-to-what-is-to-be."

She looked at me steadily for a minute with arching brows. "I wonder why they say of you that you have no social amenities?" she observed mockingly.

"I haven't. That isn't an amenity, it is a fact. To save my life I couldn't find a blessed thing to say last night to the little lady in pink tarlatan whose dress I tore."

"Poor Bessy!" she laughed softly, "she vows she'll never waltz with you again."

"She's perfectly safe to vow it."

"Oh, yes, I remember, and I hope you won't dance any more. Do you know, I like you better out-of-doors."

"Out-of-doors?"

"Well, the broomsedge is becoming to you. It seems your natural background somehow. Now it makes George Bolingbroke look frivolous."

"His natural background is the ballroom, and I'm not sure he hasn't the best of it. I can't live always in the broomsedge."

"Oh, it isn't only the broomsedge, though that goes admirably with your hair--it's the bigness, the s.p.a.ce, the simplicity. You take up too much room among lamps and palms, you trip on a waxed floor, and down goes poor Bessy. But out here you are natural and at home. The sky sets off your head--and it's really very fine if you only knew it. Out here, with me, you are in your native element."

"Is that because you are my native element? Can you imagine poor Bessy fitting into the picture?"

"To tell the truth I can't imagine poor Bessy fitting you at all. Her native element is pink tarlatan."

"And yours?" I demanded.

"That you must find out for yourself." A smile played on her face like an edge of light.

"The sunrise," I answered.

"Like you, I am sorry that I can't be always in my proper setting," she replied.

"You are always. The sunrise never leaves you."

Her brows arched merrily, and I saw the tiny scar I had remembered from childhood catch up the corner of her mouth with its provoking and irresistible trick of expression.

"Do you mean to tell me that you learned these gallantries in Johnson's Dictionary?" she enquired, "or have you taken other lessons from the General besides those in speculations?"

I had got out of my starched s.h.i.+rt and my evening clothes, and the timidity of the ballroom had no part in me under the open sky.

"Johnson's Dictionary wasn't my only teacher," I retorted, "nor was the General. At ten years of age I could recite the prosiest speeches of Sir Charles Grandison."

"Ah, that explains it. Well, I'm glad anyway you didn't learn it from the General. He broke poor Aunt Matoaca's heart, you know."

"Then I hope he managed to break his own at the same time."

"He didn't. I don't believe he had a big enough one to break. Oh, yes, I've always detested your great man, the General. They were engaged to be married, you have heard, I suppose, and three weeks before the wedding she found out some dreadful things about his life--and she behaved then, as Dr. Theophilus used to say, 'like a gentleman of honour.' He--he ought to have married another woman, but even after Aunt Matoaca gave him up, he refused to do it--and this was what she never got over. If he had behaved as dishonourably as that in business, no man would have spoken to him, she said--and can you believe it?--she declined to speak to him for twenty years, though she was desperately in love with him all the time. She only began again when he got old and gouty and humbled himself to her. In my heart of hearts I can't help disliking him in spite of all his success, but I really believe that he has never in his life cared for any woman except Aunt Matoaca. It's because she's so perfectly honourable, I think--but, of course, it is her terrible experience that has made her so--so extreme in her views."

"What are her views?"

"She calls them principles--but Aunt Mitty says, and I suppose she's right, that it would have been more ladylike to have borne her wrongs in silence instead of shrieking them aloud. For my part I think that, however loud she shrieked, she couldn't shriek as loud as the General has acted."

"I hope she isn't still in love with him?"

Her clear rippling laugh--the laugh of a free spirit--fluted over the broomsedge. "Can you imagine it? One might quite as well be in love with one's Thanksgiving turkey. No, she isn't in love with him now, but she's in love with the idea that she used to be, and that's almost as bad. I know it's her own past that makes her think all the time about the wrongs of women. She wants to have them vote, and make the laws, and have a voice in the government. Do you?"

"I never thought about it, but I'm pretty sure I shouldn't like my wife to go to the polls," I answered.

Again she laughed. "It's funny, isn't it?--that when you ask a man anything about women, he always begins to talk about his wife, even when he hasn't got one?"

"That's because he's always hoping to have one, I suppose."

"Do you want one very badly?" she taunted.

"Dreadfully--the one I want."

"A real dream lady in pink tarlatan?"

"No, a living lady in a riding habit."

If I had thought to embarra.s.s her by this flight of gallantry, my hope was fruitless, for the arrow, splintered by her smile, fell harmlessly to the dust of the road.

"An Amazon seems hardly the appropriate mate to Sir Charles Grandison,"

she retorted.

"Just now it was the General that I resembled."

"Oh, you out-generaled the General a mile back. Even he didn't attempt to break the heart of Aunt Matoaca at their second meeting."

The candid merriment in her face had put me wholly at ease,--I who had stood tongue-tied and blus.h.i.+ng before the simpers of poor Bessy. Dare as I might, I could bring no shadow of self-consciousness, no armour of s.e.x, into her sparkling eyes.

"And have I tried to break yours?" I asked bluntly.

"Have you? You know best. I am not familiar with Grandisonian tactics."