The Missourian Part 82

Blood awoke, and coursed, sluggishly at first, through her being, until her heart tripped and throbbed and pounded against his own. Her head lay on his breast, the hat hanging by its ribbons over her back, and with the pulsing life the head and her whole body nestled closer. The soft arms grew warm against his neck, and tightened fiercely, to hold and keep him. Gently he forced up her chin, and her eyes, wet with hottest tears, opened under his. He bent and kissed the long lashes. But a small moist hand flattened against his brow and pushed back his head, and she raised on tiptoe. He understood, and--their lips met.

"Tu sais," she murmured deliriously--nothing but her own dear French would answer now--"tu sais, que--oh, mon coeur, que je--que je _t'aime_!"

The oddest contrasts fall over life's most sacred moments. The tone of her words thrilled him, set every fibre tingling, yet he thought of dry conjugations and declensions, conned over and over again in school, and he was conscious of vague wonderment that those things really, actually, had a meaning. Meaning? He believed now that no words in English could tell so much. He did not have to understand them. They bore the flesh and blood, the pa.s.sion and the soul, of a woman who told him that she loved him.

With a hesitant gentleness which bespoke the deep and reverent awe in his yearning, he pressed her head back against its resting place. A man can do without words of any kind. She grew very quiet there. The tense quivering ceased, and she crept closer, and at last she sighed, purringly, contentedly.

But of course there was more which she simply had to say. And this time, when she raised her eyes, they were calm and earnest, and her beautiful forehead was white and very grave. "Do you know, dear," she said, "I should not care to live, I would not have lived, if what he said were--were--" But the eyes filled with tears, and angry with herself, she planted her fists against him to be free, and as impulsively crying, "Oh, my--my own dear lad!" she flung her arms about his neck again. "Oh, oh," she moaned, "he said that you were dead!"

For the first time it dawned on Driscoll that all this must have had a cause, and for the first time since entering the room he remembered Boone.

"_He_ told you--He----"

But Driscoll did not finish. Putting her from him he sprang to the door and flung it open. There he waited. Boone was outside, and Boone walked expectantly in. Without a word Driscoll raised his fist, drew it back, his cruel arm muscled to kill. Jacqueline saw his anger for her, terrible in murder. She threw herself upon him, got hold of the knotted fist, got it to her lips. Another woman, too, had darted between him and the other man, and she faced him. The gentle Berthe was become a little tigress.

"Not that, not that!" It was Jacqueline's voice. "Listen, mon cheri, I--I thank him. Au contraire, I do! And--and you must, too!"

Driscoll stared at all three, first at one, then at another. He floundered, stupefied. Here was this loving girl, clinging to him as though he might vanish, and he had left her that morning a disdainful beauty. Then here was this Meagre Shanks with his mysterious ten minutes, and here was this dumfounding product of those ten minutes.

Driscoll put forth an open hand.

"Dan," he muttered incoherently, "you're a--a wonder, too!"

Boone clenched the proffered hand in his own. "I never once thought, Jack," he said earnestly, contritely, "never once, that she cared so ever-_lastingly_ much."

"Well," said Driscoll, "don't do it again."

"Not unless," ventured Boone, "not unless she should ever want a little antidote for ennui. By the way, mademoiselle, do you thank me for the quaver of emotion, for the frisson?"

"Frisson?" she repeated scornfully, with loathing. For once she had been unaware of the prized knife-like tremor. In the fear of losing one dear she had lost consciousness of self. She had _lived_ the tremor, the agony, and it was too dreadful, "No, monsieur," she said, "I want no more of art. I--I want to _live_!"

"You needed something, though," said Berthe, "to make you find it out."

Driscoll looked curiously at the two girls.

"Yes, J-Jack'leen"--how quaintly awkward he was, trying her old tomboy nickname without the "Miss!"--"Yes, what was the matter with you, anyhow?"

"Parbleu, I forgot!" cried Jacqueline in dismay. "I was not to have monsieur, no!" And Jacqueline's chin, tilting back with elaborate hauteur, was meant to indicate that she was in her first mind about it.

Berthe laughed outright, and softly clapped her hands.

"Sho'," declared Mr. Boone, "the matter was nothing, nothing _at_ all!"

But before feminine caprices and scruples it is wiser to bow low into the dust. Jacqueline turned on the editorial personage with vast indignation. "You leave the room, Seigneur Troubadour," she commanded, "and Berthe, you march with him. Haste, both of you!"

They went, meekly. Their attempt to hide content over the dismissal together was extreme, but transparent.

"What was it?" Driscoll insisted, when he and Jacqueline were alone once more.

"You mean," she exclaimed, "that you are going to quarrel--now?"

"Jack'leen, what was it?"

"I reck-on," she observed demurely, "that the animal disputans was--was right, after all. It was nothing, I--reck-on."

He noted mockery, defiance. There was much too much independence after her late surrender. He went up to her and deliberately rea.s.sumed the mastery. He held her, by force. "Mon chevalier," she murmured softly. So she confessed his strength.

"Tell me," he said.

"And you did not guess? You--Oh, how I hated you! How I never wanted to see you, never again! Not after, not after--Mon Dieu, you were two exasperating idiots, you and poor Prince Max! He virtually _threw_ me into your arms. But I, monsieur, am not a person to be thrown. That is, unless--unless I do it myself, which--I did, helas!"

The trooper's grip tightened on her arms. "Then you," he said earnestly, "would have let me lose you?"

She laughed merrily at him.

"And would not you have followed after me?"

"W'y, little girl, I reckon I certainly would of."

"Don't," she gasped. "Let me come--closer. Oh dear, how can the bon Dieu let people be so happy--s-o happy!"