"But what do you want with the Norwegians? I thought you were tired of dancing."
"So I am, with some people. But I want to see a Norwegian dance, and I intend to. Come, Wyllis, you know how seldom it is that one really wants to do anything nowadays. I wonder when I have really wanted to go to a party before. It will be something to remember next month at Newport, when we have to and don"t want to. Remember your own theory that contrast is about the only thing that makes life endurable. This is my party and Mr. Lockhart"s; your whole duty tomorrow night will consist in being nice to the Norwegian girls. I"ll warrant you were adept enough at it once. And you"d better be very nice indeed, for if there are many such young Valkyries as Eric"s sister among them, they would simply tie you up in a knot if they suspected you were guying them."
Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his fate, while his sister went on.
"And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?"
Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the sole of his plowshoe.
"Well, I guess we"ll have a couple dozen. You see it"s pretty hard to get a crowd together here any more. Most of "em have gone over to the Free Gospellers, and they"d rather put their feet in the fire than shake "em to a fiddle."
Margaret made a gesture of impatience. "Those Free Gospellers have just cast an evil spell over this country, haven"t they?"
"Well," said Lockhart, cautiously, "I don"t just like to pa.s.s judgment on any Christian sect, but if you"re to know the chosen by their works, the Gospellers can"t make a very proud showin", an" that"s a fact.
They"re responsible for a few suicides, and they"ve sent a good-sized delegation to the state insane asylum, an" I don"t see as they"ve made the rest of us much better than we were before. I had a little herdboy last spring, as square a little Dane as I want to work for me, but after the Gospellers got hold of him and sanctified him, the little beggar used to get down on his knees out on the prairie and pray by the hour and let the cattle get into the corn, an" I had to fire him. That"s about the way it goes. Now there"s Eric; that chap used to be a hustler and the spryest dancer in all this section-called all the dances. Now he"s got no ambition and he"s glum as a preacher. I don"t suppose we can even get him to come in tomorrow night."
"Eric? Why, he must dance, we can"t let him off," said Margaret, quickly. "Why, I intend to dance with him myself."
"I"m afraid he won"t dance. I asked him this morning if he"d help us out and he said, "I don"t dance now, any more,"" said Lockhart, imitating the laboured English of the Norwegian.
""The Miller of Hofbau, the Miller of Hofbau, O my Princess!"" chirped Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.
The red on his sister"s cheek deepened a little, and she laughed mischievously. "We"ll see about that, sir. I"ll not admit that I am beaten until I have asked him myself."
Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in the heart of the French settlement, for the mail. As the road lay through the most attractive part of the Divide country, on several occasions Margaret Elliot and her brother had accompanied him. Tonight Wyllis had business with Lockhart, and Margaret rode with Eric, mounted on a frisky little mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had broken to the sidesaddle. Margaret regarded her escort very much as she did the servant who always accompanied her on long rides at home, and the ride to the village was a silent one. She was occupied with thoughts of another world, and Eric was wrestling with more thoughts than had ever been crowded into his head before.
He rode with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as though he wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it in his brain forever. He understood the situation perfectly. His brain worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him, but he knew where to place her. The prophets of old, when an angel first appeared unto them, never doubted its high origin.
Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but he was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost its self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were not afraid of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had prospects before him when his father went down off the North Cape in the long Arctic night, and his mother, seized by a violent horror of seafaring life, had followed her brother to America. Eric was eighteen then, handsome as young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with a skin singularly pure and delicate, like a Swede"s; hair as yellow as the locks of Tennyson"s amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce, burning blue, whose flash was most dangerous to women.
He had in those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of approach, that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was even said of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined to levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide. But the sad history of those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an arid soil and under a scorching sun, had repeated itself in his case. Toil and isolation had sobered him, and he grew more and more like the clods among which he laboured. It was as though some red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those delicate fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away.
It is a painful thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those Nors.e.m.e.n, leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite pa.s.sive, quite hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change comes almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness, with others it comes more slowly, according to the time it takes each man"s heart to die.
Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a year before they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the windy hill where exiles of all nations grow akin.
The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of his people sooner or later succ.u.mb had not developed in Eric until that night at the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his violin across his knee. After that, the gloom of his people settled down upon him, and the gospel of maceration began its work.
_"If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,"_ et cetera. The pagan smile that once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was one with sorrow.
Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it embitters, but when it destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and where the agony of the cross has been, joy will not come again. This man understood things literally: one must live without pleasure to die without fear; to save the soul, it was necessary to starve the soul.
The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her cavalier left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch of road that runs for some three miles through the French settlement, where the prairie is as level as the surface of a lake. There the fields of flax and wheat and rye are bordered by precise rows of slender, tapering Lombard poplars. It was a yellow world that Margaret Elliot saw under the wide light of the setting sun.
The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, "It will be safe to run the horses here, won"t it?"
"Yes, I think so, now," he answered, touching his spur to his pony"s flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old saying in the West that newcomers always ride a horse or two to death before they get broken in to the country. They are tempted by the great open s.p.a.ces and try to outride the horizon, to get to the end of something. Margaret galloped over the level road, and Eric, from behind, saw her long veil fluttering in the wind. It had fluttered just so in his dreams last night and the night before. With a sudden inspiration of courage he overtook her and rode beside her, looking intently at her half-averted face. Before, he had only stolen occasional glances at it, seen it in blinding flashes, always with more or less embarra.s.sment, but now he determined to let every line of it sink into his memory. Men of the world would have said that it was an unusual face, nervous, finely cut, with clear, elegant lines that betokened ancestry. Men of letters would have called it a historic face, and would have conjectured at what old pa.s.sions, long asleep, what old sorrows forgotten time out of mind, doing battle together in ages gone, had curved those delicate nostrils, left their unconscious memory in those eyes. But Eric read no meaning in these details. To him this beauty was something more than colour and line; it was a flash of white light, in which one cannot distinguish colour because all colours are there. To him it was a complete revelation, an embodiment of those dreams of impossible loveliness that linger by a young man"s pillow on midsummer nights; yet, because it held something more than the attraction of health and youth and shapeliness, it troubled him, and in its presence he felt as the Goths before the white marbles in the Roman Capitol, not knowing whether they were men or G.o.ds.
At times he felt like uncovering his head before it, again the fury seized him to break and despoil, to find the clay in this spirit-thing and stamp upon it. Away from her, he longed to strike out with his arms, and take and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break in his hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he admitted the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him.
Tonight, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched her, he knew that he might as well reach out his hand to take a star.
Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly in her saddle.
"This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride fast," she said.
Eric turned his eyes away.
"I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe hear music like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand to work," he asked, timidly.
Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied the outline of his face, pityingly.
"Well, you might--but you"d lose a good deal else. I shouldn"t like you to go to New York--and be poor, you"d be out of atmosphere, some way," she said, slowly. Inwardly she was thinking: _There he would be altogether sordid, impossible--a machine who would carry one"s trunks upstairs, perhaps. Here he is every inch a man, rather picturesque; why is it?_ "No," she added aloud, "I shouldn"t like that."
"Then I not go," said Eric, decidedly.
Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle amused and a trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.
"But I"ll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want you to dance with us tomorrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian dances; they say you know them all. Won"t you?"
Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed as they had done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke his violin across his knee.
"Yes, I will," he said, quietly, and he believed that he delivered his soul to h.e.l.l as he said it.
They had reached the rougher country now, where the road wound through a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along the creek, when a beat of hoofs ahead and the sharp neighing of horses made the ponies start and Eric rose in his stirrups. Then down the gulch in front of them and over the steep clay banks thundered a herd of wild ponies, nimble as monkeys and wild as rabbits, such as horse-traders drive east from the plains of Montana to sell in the farming country. Margaret"s pony made a shrill sound, a neigh that was almost a scream, and started up the clay bank to meet them, all the wild blood of the range breaking out in an instant.
Margaret called to Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and caught her pony"s bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and was kicking and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the range were all about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and striking her with their forefeet and snapping at her flanks. It was the old liberty of the range that the little beast fought for.
"Drop the reins and hold tight, tight!" Eric called, throwing all his weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic forefeet that now beat at his breast, and now kicked at the wild mustangs that surged and tossed about him. He succeeded in wrenching the pony"s head toward him and crowding her withers against the clay bank, so that she could not roll.
"Hold tight, tight!" he shouted again, launching a kick at a snorting animal that reared back against Margaret"s saddle. If she should lose her courage and fall now, under those hoofs--He struck out again and again, kicking right and left with all his might. Already the negligent drivers had galloped into the cut, and their long quirts were whistling over the heads of the herd. As suddenly as it had come, the struggling, frantic wave of wild life swept up out of the gulch and on across the open prairie, and with a long despairing whinny of farewell the pony dropped her head and stood trembling in her sweat, shaking the foam and blood from her bit.
Eric stepped close to Margaret"s side and laid his hand on her saddle.
"You are not hurt?" he asked, hoa.r.s.ely. As he raised his face in the soft starlight she saw that it was white and drawn and that his lips were working nervously.
"No, no, not at all. But you, you are suffering; they struck you!" she cried in sharp alarm.
He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.
"No, it is not that," he spoke rapidly now, with his hands clenched at his side. "But if they had hurt you, I would beat their brains out with my hands. I would kill them all. I was never afraid before. You are the only beautiful thing that has ever come close to me. You came like an angel out of the sky. You are like the music you sing, you are like the stars and the snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little boy. You are like all that I wanted once and never had, you are all that they have killed in me. I die for you tonight, tomorrow, for all eternity. I am not a coward; I was afraid because I love you more than Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of h.e.l.l, or hope for heaven. I was never afraid before. If you had fallen--oh, my G.o.d!" He threw his arms out blindly and dropped his head upon the pony"s mane, leaning limply against the animal like a man struck by some sickness.
His shoulders rose and fell perceptibly with his laboured breathing. The horse stood cowed with exhaustion and fear. Presently Margaret laid her hand on Eric"s head and said gently:
"You are better now, shall we go on? Can you get your horse?"
"No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not safe.
I will not frighten you again." His voice was still husky, but it was steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped home in silence.
When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the pony"s head until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.
"The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis. I think I was pretty thoroughly scared myself," she said as she took her brother"s arm and went slowly up the hill toward the house. "No, I"m not hurt, thanks to Eric. You must thank him for taking such good care of me. He"s a mighty fine fellow. I"ll tell you all about it in the morning, dear. I was pretty well shaken up and I"m going right to bed now. Good night."
When she reached the low room in which she slept, she sank upon the bed in her riding dress, face downward.