Lady Good-for-Nothing Part 39

At the last pinch she had broken away. Was it possible, then, that after all she did not love him? She had crossed her arms once and called herself his slave. . . .

Not for one moment did he understand that other scepticism which, forced out of faith, clasps and clings to reverence; which, though it count the rite inefficient, yet sees the meaning, and counts the moment so holy that to contaminate the rite is to poison all.

Not as yet did he understand one whit of this. But he vehemently desired her, and his desire was straight. Because it was straight, while he rode some inkling of the truth pierced him.

For, as he rode, he recalled how she had cast up an arm and turned to flee. His eyes had rested confusedly on the breast-knot of scarlet leaves, and it seemed to him, as he rode, that he had seen her heart beating there through her ribs.

Chapter VI.

"YET HE WILL COME--".

The cabin stood close above the fall. It was built of oak logs split in two, with the barked and rounded sides turned outward. Pete Vanders would have found pine logs more tractable and handier to come by, and they would have outlasted his time; but, being a Dutchman, he had built solidly by instinct.

Also, he had chosen his ledge cunningly or else with amazing luck.

A stairway shaped in the solid rock--eight treads and no more--led down to the very brink of the first cascade; yet through all these years, with their freshets and floods, the cabin had clung to its perch.

Within doors the ears never lost the drone of the waters. There were top-notes that lifted or sank as the wind blew, but below them the deep ba.s.s thundered on.

Ruth had doffed her riding-dress for a bodice and short skirt of russet, and moved about the cabin tidying where she had tidied a score of times already. Through the window-opening drifted wisps of smoke, aromatic and pungent, from the fire she had built in an angle of the crags a few yards from the house. (It had been the Dutchman's hearth. She had found it and cleared the creepers away, and below them the rock-face was yet black with the smoke of old fires.) Some way up the gorge, where, at the foot of a smaller waterfall, the river divided and swirled about an island covered with sweet gra.s.s--a miniature meadow--her mare grazed at will. About a fortnight ago, having set aside three days for the search, on the second Ruth had found a circuitous way through the woods.

A part of it she had cleared with a billhook, and since then Madcap had trodden a rough pathway with her frequent goings and comings.

It had immensely lightened the labour of furnis.h.i.+ng, but she feared that the pasturage would last but a day or two. Her lover, when he came, must devise means of sending the mare back.

She never doubted his coming. He would probably miss the bridle-path, the opening of which she had carefully hidden, and be forced to make the ascent on foot. But he would come. See, she was laying out his clothes for him! He had sent to Sweet.w.a.ter, at her request, two valises full, packed by Mana.s.seh; and she had conveyed them hither with the rest of the furniture. Carefully now she made her selection from the store: coat, breeches of homespun and leather, stout boots, moccasined leggings such as the Indians wore, woollen s.h.i.+rts--but other s.h.i.+rts also of finest cambric--with underclothes of silk, and delicate nights.h.i.+rts, and silken stockings that could be drawn like soft ribbons between the fingers. She thrilled as she handled them garment by garment.

Along the wall hung his two guns, with shot-bag and powder-flask.

Here was his home. Here were his clothes. . . . She had forgiven him, hours ago, without necessity for his pleading. So would he forgive her.

After all, what store did he set by church ceremony. He had vowed to her a dozen times that he set none. He loved her; that was enough, and a.s.surance of his following. He would confess that she had been right.

. . . As she moved about, touching, smoothing this garment and that, there crossed her memory the Virgilian refrain--

"_Nihil ille deos, nil carmina curat.

Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnin._"

She murmured it, smiling to herself as she recalled also the dour figure of Mr. Hichens in the library at Sabines, seated stiffly, listening while she construed. If only tutors guessed what they taught!

She hummed the lines: "_Nihil ille deos_"--he cared nothing for church rites; "_nil carmina_"--she needed no incantations.

She never doubted that he would arrive; but, as the day wore on, she told herself that very likely he had missed his road. He would arrive hungered, in any event. . . . She stepped out to the cooking-pot, and, on her way, paused for a long look down the glen. The sun, streaming its rays over the high pines behind her, made rainbows in the spray of the fall and cast her shadow far over the hollow at her feet.

The water, plunging past her, shot down the valley in three separate cascades, lined with slippery rock, in the crevices of which many ferns had lodged and grew, waving in the incessantly shaken air. From the pool into which the last cascade tumbled--a stone dislodged by her foot dropped to it almost plumb--the stream hurtled down the glen, following the curve of its sides until they overlapped; naked cliffs above, touched with sunlight, their feet set in peat, up which the forest trees clambered as if in a race for the top--pines leading, with heather and scrubby junipers, oaks and hemlocks some way behind; alders, mostly by the waterside, with maples in swampy patches, and here and there a birch waving silver against the shadow. The pines kept their funereal plumes, like undertakers who had made a truce with death by making a business of it. But these deciduous trees, that had rioted in green through spring and summer, wrapped themselves in robes to die, the thinner the more royal; the maples in scarlet, the swamp-oak in purple--b.l.o.o.d.y purple where the sun smote on its upper boughs. Already the robes had worn thin, and their ribs showed. Leaves strewed the flat rock where Ruth stood, looking down.

She was not thinking of the leaves, nor of the fall of the year.

She was thinking that her lord would be hungered. She went back to her cooking-pot under the cliff overhung with heath and juniper.

Herself fearless--or less fearful than other women--she did not for some time let her mind run on possible accidents to him. He was a man, and would arrive, though tired and hungered. Not until the sun sank behind the upper pines did any sense of her own loneliness a.s.sail her.

Then she bethought her that with night, if he delayed, the forest would wrap her around, formless, haunted by wild beasts. The singing of birds, never in daylight utterly drowned by the roar of the fall, had ceased about her; the call of the hidden chickadees, the cheep-cheep of a friendly robin, hopping in near range of the cooking-pot, the sawing of busy chipmunks.

These sounds had ceased; but she did not feel the silence until, far up the valley behind her, a loon sent forth its sole unhappy cry.

It rang a moment between the cliffs. As it died away she felt how friendly had been these casual voices, and wondered what beasts the forest might hold.

She went back to the cabin, lit a lamp, and lifted one of the guns off its rack. She charged it--well she had learnt how to charge a gun.

Twilight was falling. The fire burned beneath the cooking-pot; but, seated on the flat stone with the gun laid across her knees and the fall sounding beneath her, she had another thought--that the fire, set in an angle of the rock, and moreover hidden around the house's corner, was but a poor signal. It shed no ray down the glen.

She would light another fire on the flat stone. In the dusk she collected dry twigs, piled stouter sticks above them, covered the whole with leaves, and lit it, fetching a live brand from under the cooking-pot. The flame leapt up, danced over the leaves, died down and again revived. When a.s.sured that it was caught, she sat beside it, staring across the flame over the valley now swallowed in darkness, still with the gun laid across her knees.

"Ruth! O Ruth!"

His voice came up over the roar of the fall--which, while he stumbled among the boulders below, had drowned his footsteps.

"Dear! Ah--have a care!"

"Yes; hold a light. . . . It must be dangerous here."

She s.n.a.t.c.hed a brand from the fire. She had collected a fresh heap of twigs and leaves in the lap of her gown, groping in the dusk for them; and his first sight of her had been as she stood high emptying them in a red stream to feed the flames. A witch she seemed, pouring sacrifice on that wild altar, while the light of it danced upon her face and figure.

Having gained the ledge of the second cascade, he anch.o.r.ed himself on good foothold and stared up, catching breath before he hailed.

Her first glimpse of him, as she held the blazing stick over the edge of the fall, was of a face damp with sweat or with spray, and of his hands reaching up the slimed rock, feeling for a grip.

"Ah, be careful! Shall I come down to you?" For the first time she realised his peril.

"_Over rocks that are steepest_," he quoted gaily, between grunts of hard breathing. He had handhold now. "Hero on her tower--and faith, Leander came near to swimming for it--once or twice" (grunt) "_Over the mountains, And over the waves_--hullo! that rock of yours overhangs.

What's to the left?" (grunt) "Gra.s.s? I mistrust gra.s.s on these ledges.

. . . Reach down your hand, dear Ruth, to steady me only. . . ."

She flung herself p.r.o.ne on the flat rock beside the fire, and gave a hand to him. He caught it, heaved himself over the ledge with a final grunt of triumph, and dropped beside her, panting and laughing.

"You might have killed yourself!" she s.h.i.+vered.

"And whom, then, would you have reproached?"

"You might have killed yourself--and then--and then I think I should have died too."

"Ruth!"

"My lord will be hungry. He shall rest here and eat."

He flung a glance towards the cabin; or rather--for the dusk hid its outlines--towards the light that shone cosily through the window-hatch.

"Not yet!" she murmured. "My lord shall rest here for a while."

She was kneeling now to draw off his shoes. He drew away his foot, protesting.

"Child, I am not so tired, but out of breath, and--yes--hungry as a hunter."

"My lord will remember. It was the first service I ever did for him."

It may have been an innocent wile to anchor him fast there and helpless.

. . . At any rate she knelt, and drew off his shoes and carried them to a little distance. "Next, my lord shall eat," she said; and having rinsed her hands in the stream and spread them a moment to the flame to dry, sped off to the cabin.