CHAPTER XV.
IT was fine “growing weather” for the cotton, and in these hot days the Midas-touch of the sun had turned the wheat-fields to gold. From their midst the verdure-crowned earthworks rose like some gigantic basso-rilievo in green enamel. A fierce thunder-shower one afternoon had laid the dust and beaten the soft dirt-road, that swept in serpentine curves through the peaceful battle-field, into the ideal road for equestrians. Marcia, with one of her brothers, found a wonderful exhilaration in a smooth, swift dash through the freshness and perfume of the red sunset. They drew rein only when they had reached the boundary of their father’s land and were about to turn their horses’ heads homeward. She made some haste to do this, for where the plantation road struck into the turnpike she saw Estwicke riding along in the direction of the barracks. He had evidently not intended to call at General Vayne’s on the way--but now his hand hesitated on the rein, and she indignantly deprecated that a chance meeting should force him into an attention which he had not contemplated. He had been there only once since the fishing excursion, making a short and formal call. She had not understood his stiff manner, and it induced a responsive constraint.
“Oh, no, Dick,” she said urgently to her urchin escort, who at this moment expressed an inopportune desire to ride down to the river to see whether a boy who was fishing on the bank had caught anything, “I can’t wait, and you must take me home.”
Estwicke had put the whip to his horse and galloped up in time to hear Dick’s protest. “Let me take your place,” he said agreeably. Then to Marcia--“I suppose you will grant me the right of way through these fields with you.”
She assented with an effort at smiling ease. But she was so habitually sincere that the slightest duplicity was deeply marked by contrast on her face and loudly advertised itself a fraud. This evident artificiality furnished Estwicke with a subject of meditation, and for a few moments both were silent as they rode on together, leaving Dick far behind on the bank of the river.
Estwicke was summarily roused from his preoccupation.
“Isn’t that a dangerous horse for you to ride?” he asked, with the vicarious fright of a lover, as Hotspur shied suddenly.
Now, if any other lady had been mounted upon this animal, Estwicke would doubtless have considered him sufficiently gentle, for although young and a trifle freakish, he was evidently of a mild and tractable disposition, and well enough trained. Horse and rider each embellished the other. Estwicke had a vivid realization that in her black habit and hat she was handsomer than ever, and he was forced to admit that she rode with consummate grace and skill. Nevertheless he fully expected to see her thrown; his heart was in his mouth; a cold chill shot through every fibre; his hand was ready to catch the rein. He was irritated to observe that she was flattered by what he had said, and he divined that she thought it augured special virtues of horsewomanship to hold in subjection so insurgent and dangerous a spirit.
“Oh, yes,” she exclaimed, with her wonted tone and manner, “Hotspur is w-i-i-ld as he can be! You ought just to see him in one of his tantrums! He threw me last week, but it isn’t often that he can get me out of the saddle.”
Estwicke was aghast at this “often.” He could not altogether restrain his feeling.
“It surprises me,” he said, with more truth than tact, “that General Vayne should allow his only daughter to risk herself on a vicious brute like that.”
She flushed with some anger. She was half disposed to retort that General Vayne was popularly supposed to be able to manage his family affairs without assistance--only by an effort she withheld this thrust.
“His only daughter,” she quoted, laughing. “If he had five or six I suppose you would think him justifiable in letting some of them break their necks. It never occurred to me before that the reason papa thinks so much of me is because there are so few of me.”
“I wish he wouldn’t let you ride that horse,” persisted Estwicke gravely.
“Oh, if you think Hotspur is wild now, I don’t know what you would have said about him last summer. He had been out to pasture--he hadn’t _seen_ a saddle for months. Papa wouldn’t let me mount him then. He was so frisky I didn’t see how I should ever get him quiet. The men wouldn’t plough with him, for he was so fretful; papa was away most of the time, and therefore couldn’t ride him. So Mr. Percy took him home and rode him every day for two weeks.”
This turn to the conversation touched other feelings. Their sensitiveness was manifested in the rejoinder. “Obliging Mr. Percy!” uttered with unmistakable sarcasm.
Again her flush deepened to an angry glow. “He is always obliging,” she said--“and--amiable.”
Estwicke was minded to turn his horse and gallop away, leaving Hotspur to kill her if he would. Somehow he could not go; he remained, but he remained to retort.
“No doubt!” he exclaimed bitterly. “And in recognition of his grace of character, I suppose, you named your horse--‘Hotspur.’”
He was a soldier and a brave man. But he was flinching with abject terror the moment after he spoke. She wheeled her horse, and as she faced him suddenly, her beautiful eyes full of surprise, she demanded aggressively--
“Now what was that?”
“Nothing--nothing. Don’t ask me to repeat it,” Estwicke pleaded.
“I must know,” she rejoined. “I think I understood you, but I am not certain. May I ask you to do me the favor of repeating and explaining.”
This was said with an elaborate show of politeness, but it savored rather of the punctilio of the duello than of kindly Christian courtesy.
He hesitated and quailed before his formidable adversary. Now that he was called upon to put into words the theory over which he had brooded through the dark hours of sleepless nights, he began to realize how fantastic it was. Somehow he could find no words foolish enough to fit it. But he must answer.
“Miss Vayne,” he said helplessly, laying his hand upon Hotspur’s forelock, “let me off. Let me off--just this time.”
“I want to know what you said,” she replied sternly.
Estwicke felt that it was futile to temporize.
“Well,” he began in great abasement, “the horse is named Hotspur, you know.”
A pause ensued. Her eyes widened. “Yes, I know,” she interpolated by way of giving his confession a much needed impetus.
“And Percy’s name is Percy,” continued Estwicke, painfully aware of seeming to drivel. The astonishment in her face nerved him to try to brace this impalpable fabric of the imagination with an historical back-bone.
“And you know there’s that fellow from Northumberland--Percy--don’t you know?--Harry Percy--Hotspur.”
Her softly scornful laughter cut him as cruelly as a knife might have done. The color in her cheeks mounted to the roots of her hair. “I do homage to your ingenuity,” she exclaimed with a sarcasm intended to be withering. “It is equally creditable to your heart and head! I have the pleasure of hoping that your speculations about me, and my horse, and my motives have served to amuse you for an idle half hour or so.”
She looked him full in the eyes as she spoke, with her head erect, and a proud resentment eloquently expressed in her face. Then she shook the reins, and her horse sprang away like an unleashed hound.
She evidently wished to be rid of Estwicke. But he could not let her go now. He kept his horse side by side with hers, and as they came with a rush past Fort Despair he laid his hand upon Hotspur’s rein, and checked the impetuous gallop. She turned her head with an angry impatience. There were hot tears in her eyes. They should not fall--they would never fall. But there they were--and he had seen them.
“I must speak to you,” he said beseechingly. “If you are angry it will break my heart. Tell me you are not. Forgive me if you were.”
A moment ago she was vowing that he should never hear her speak another word. Now she determined to throw off the whole affair lightly; she would not allow him and Percy, and her horse’s name as connected with them, to seem matters of such importance. But she could not tell him she was not angry; she would not say she forgave him.
“You certainly stand in wholesome awe of my displeasure,” she returned, with a forced laugh. “It is a fearful thing, I know, but it has killed no one as yet.”
“It will kill me,” Estwicke protested, with inopportune fervor; “for no one loves you--no one can ever love you--as I do.”
Her eyes flashed. “Captain Estwicke,” she exclaimed hotly, “let my horse go.”
“One moment--just hear me for one moment. You will do me a cruel injustice if you refuse to listen now. Since Percy came, even long before he came, that fancy about the horse’s name has tortured me night and day. I have loved you all my life, it seems to me, for I never lived until I loved you. I have given you all my heart. It’s nothing to give, since you don’t care for it; but it’s all I have. And I want, in return, one word of forgiveness--one word.”
Her face was turned away; he could only see the downward sweep of her eyelashes and the delicate curve of her crimson cheek. He leaned forward wistfully, with his hand still on her horse’s rein, and all his fiery heart in his eyes. She slowly turned her head yet further, and still he saw only those gentle suggestions of the beauty of that averted face.
“It is hard on me!” he broke out despairingly, after a moment. “I have so sedulously repressed my feelings. I have stood guard over every word I uttered--so afraid of speaking too soon or at an inopportune moment. I have eaten out my heart by slow degrees; and now--now--I have angered you beyond endurance, and you cannot forgive me.”
Still not a word.
“I’ve got what I deserve, though,” he continued bitterly, after another pause, in which there were quick changes of expression on his face. “It is a sort of stern justice that I should find you unrelenting--_you_, on whom I have no claim; for I have been hard, and cruel, and unresponsive when there was the strongest claim upon me.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said suddenly.
“Oh, God bless you for that,” he exclaimed, clasping one of the little gauntleted hands.
She had not intended to speak; she had not intended to forgive him at all. She drew her hand from his grasp, but slowly and gently.
“Don’t you forgive me now?” he persisted. “You couldn’t have said that, if you didn’t forgive me.”
Her face was still averted. “Well--perhaps.”
“Then look at me--just once.”
She did not turn her head; she still sat motionless.
“Tell me,” he said, retaining his grasp upon her horse’s rein, “is there some one whom you like better than me? Does he keep us apart?”
“I don’t want to stand here any longer,” she exclaimed suddenly, turning her flushed and embarrassed face toward the great, grim house in the midst of the plain, the reflected sunset gorgeously emblazoned on its shattered windows.
He still held the horse. “Is it Percy?” She made a gesture of impatience.
“Then don’t you care for me a little--just a little, you know?”
“That’s just what I don’t know.” She laughed, but the next moment she was flushing, and trembling, and ready to cry.
“Then, some day--some day, soon, may I tell you again that I love you, and hear what you have to say to me then?”
“I can’t stay here any longer,” she declared evasively.
As they rode slowly along, Estwicke looked at her and sighed. “That day,” he said, “you know the day I mean, I must tell you something more--the great trouble and haunting sorrow of my life. Something painful and cruel to tell.”
“Then don’t tell it to me,” she replied gently.
“I was in fault throughout,” he continued. “I was hard, and cowardly, and ungenerous, and petty-minded. Oh, I don’t know anybody who would have done as I did.”
She said nothing, but there was a stony incredulity expressed in her face.
“I am afraid to tell you--to jeopardize every hope. Yet I cannot endure that you should think me different from what I am. Sometimes, when fellows are friendly and make much of me, I feel like a fraud. I wonder what they would have done in my place, and I wonder what they would think of me if they knew all. But I don’t care for them. With you it’s different. I can’t deceive you. You ought to know how I might come out if anything should happen to try me hard. I will tell you, and let you judge.”
“You need tell me nothing!” she cried impetuously. “I can trust you without it.”
“If I only deserved this!” he exclaimed. “But if you can believe in me against my own word, can’t you care for me--even a little?”
She rode on silently.
He leaned forward and once more clasped her hand.
“Or rather, dearest, let me take it for granted.”
“For the sake of argument,” she assented doubtfully.
And the sun went down over Fort Despair, and in all the east there was no moon. The long-waning brightness had fled from the battle-field; it lay now dim, and drear, and colorless, beneath the vast, vague sky. The fort was beleaguered by a multitude of shadows. The wind brought strange voices from out the haunted thickets. A shiver ran through the flowers and grasses that hung above the yawning, empty graves. A bugle’s resonance was thrilling along the air. The still evening palpitated with the throb of the drum. The tread of martial feet shook the ground. And all unheeding--here where the battle was fought--youth, and love, and life rode bravely through the spectred twilight.