"Where we were?" she repeated, and there was, I thought, a listless note in her voice.
"Doesn"t it make you happy?" I asked.
"Oh, I"m glad, glad the debt is gone, and now you"ll look young and splendid again, won"t you?"
"I"ll try hard if you want me to."
"I do want you to," she answered, looking up at me with a smile.
The window was open, and a flood of sunshine fell on her pale brown hair, as it rested against the high arm of a chintz-covered sofa. Her hand, small and childlike, though less round and soft than it had been two years ago, caressed my cheek when I bent over her. She was well again, she was blooming, but the bloom was paler and more delicate, and there was a fragility in her appearance which was a new and disturbing sign of diminished strength. Would she ever, even when cradled in luxuries, recover her buoyant health, her sparkling vitality, I wondered.
The old Bland house, with the two great sycamores growing beside it, was for sale; and thinking to please Sally, I bought it without her knowledge, filled, as it was, with the Bland and Fairfax furniture, which had surrounded Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca. On the day some eight or nine months later that we moved into it the sycamores were budding, and there were faint spring scents in the air.
"This is where you belong. This is home to you," I said as we stood on the wide porch at the back, and looked down on the garden. "You will be happy here, dearest."
"Oh, yes, I"ll be happy here."
"It won"t be so hard for you when I"m obliged to leave you alone. I"m sorry I"ve had to be away so much of late. Have you been lonely?"
"I"ve taken up riding again. George has found me a new horse, a beauty.
To-morrow I shall follow the hounds with Bonny."
"Oh, be careful, Sally, promise me that you will be careful."
She turned with a laugh that sounded a little reckless.
"There"s no pleasure in being careful, and I"m seeking pleasure," she answered.
The next morning I went to New York for a couple of days, and when I returned late one afternoon, I found Sally, in her riding habit, pouring tea for Bonny Marshall and George Bolingbroke in the drawing-room.
I was very tired, my mind was engrossed in business, as it had been engrossed since the day of the sale of the West Virginia and Wyanoke Railroad, and I was about to pa.s.s upstairs to my dressing-room, when George, catching sight of me, called to me to come in and exert my powers of persuasion.
"I"m begging Sally to sell that horse, Beauchamp," he said. "She tried to make him take a fence this afternoon and he balked and threw her. At first we were frightened out of our wits, but she got up laughing and insisted upon mounting him again on the spot."
"Of course you didn"t let her," I retorted, with anger.
"Let her? Great Scott! have you been married to a Bland for nearly eight years and are you still saying, "let her"?"
"I mounted and rode on with the hunt," said Sally, looking at me with shining eyes in which there was a defiant and reckless expression. "He got quite away with me, but I held on and came in at the death, though without a hat. Now my arms are so sore I shall hardly be able to do my hair."
"Of course you"re not to ride that horse again, Sally," I responded sternly, forgetting my dusty clothes, forgetting Bonny"s dancing black eyes that never left my face while I stood there.
"Of course I am, Ben," rejoined Sally, laughing, while a high colour rose to her forehead. "Of course I"m going to ride him to-morrow afternoon when I go out with Bonny."
"Ah, don"t, please," entreated Bonny, in evident distress; "he"s really an ugly brute, you know, dear, if he is so beautiful."
"I feel awfully mean about it, Ben," said George, "because, you see, I got him for her."
"And you got him," I retorted, indignantly, "without knowing evidently a thing about him."
"One can never know anything about a brute like that. He went like a lamb as long as I was on him, but the trouble is that Sally has too light a hand."
"He"d be all right with me," remarked Bonny, stretching out her arm, in which the muscle was hard as steel. "See what a grip I have."
"I"ll never give up, I"ll never give up," said Sally, and though she uttered the words with gaiety, the expression of defiance, of recklessness, was still in her eyes.
When George and Bonny had gone, I tried in vain to shake this resolve, which had in it something of the gentle, yet unconquerable, obstinacy of Miss Matoaca.
"Promise me, Sally, that you will not attempt to ride that horse again,"
I entreated.
Turning from me, she walked slowly to the end of the room and bent over the box of sweet alyssum, which still blossomed under a canary cage on the window-sill. A cedar log was burning on the andirons, and the red light of the flames fell on the tapestried furniture, on the quaint inlaid spinet in one corner, and on the portrait above it of Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca clasping hands under a garland of roses.
"Will you promise me, dearest?" I asked again, for she did not answer.
Lifting her head from the flowers, she stood with her hand on one of the delicate curtains, and her figure, in its straight black habit, drawn very erect.
"I"ll ride him," she responded quietly, "if--if he kills me."
"But why--why--what on earth is the use of taking so great a risk?" I demanded.
A humorous expression shot into her face, and I saw her full, red lips grow tremulous with laughter.
"That," she answered, after a moment, "is my ambition. All of us have an ambition, you know, women as well as men."
"An ambition?" I repeated, and looked in mystification at the portrait above the spinet.
"It sounds strange to you," she went on, "but why shouldn"t I have one?
I was a very promising horsewoman before my marriage, and my ambition now is to--to go after Bonny. Only Bonny says I can"t," she added regretfully, "because of my hands."
"They are too small?"
"Too small and too light. They can"t hold things."
"Well, they"ve managed to hold one at any rate," I responded gaily, though I added seriously the minute afterward, "If you"ll let me sell that horse, darling, I"ll give you anything on G.o.d"s earth that you want."
"But suppose I don"t want anything on G.o.d"s earth except that horse?"
"There"s no sense in that," I blurted out, in bewilderment. "What in thunder is there about the brute that has so taken your fancy?"
Her hand fell from the curtain, and plucking a single blossom of sweet alyssum, she came back to the hearth holding it to her lips.
"He has taken my fancy," she replied, "because he is exciting--and I am craving excitement."
"But you never used to want excitement."
"People change, all the poets and philosophers tell us. I"ve wanted it very badly indeed for the last six or eight months."
"Just since we"ve recovered our money?"