“I thought there were no end of gorgeous flowers in the semi-tropics,” he said, “but there’s almost nothing here except green.”
She laughed. “The concentration of bloom in Northern hothouses deceives people. The semi-tropics and the tropics are almost monotonously green except where cultivated gardens exist. There are no masses of flowers anywhere; even the great brilliant blossoms make no show because they are widely scattered. You notice them when you happen to come across them in the woods, they are so brilliant and so rare.”
“Are there no fruits — those delectable fruits one reads about?”
“There are bitter wild oranges, sour guavas, eatable beach-grapes and papaws. If you’re fond of wild cassava and can prepare it so it won’t poison you, you can make an eatable paste. If you like oily cabbage, the top of any palmetto will furnish it. But, my poor friend, there’s little here to tempt one’s appetite or satisfy one’s aesthetic hunger for flowers. Our Northern meadows are far more gorgeous from June to October; and our wild fruits are far more delicious than what one finds growing wild in the tropics.”
“But bananas, cocoa-nuts, oranges—”
“All cultivated!”
“Persimmons, mulberries—”
“All cultivated when eatable. Everything palatable in this country is cultivated.”
He laughed dejectedly, then, again insistent: “But there are plenty of wild flowering trees! — magnolia, poinciana, china-berry—”
“All set out by mere man,” she smiled— “except the magnolias and dog-wood. No, Mr. Hamil, the riotous tropical bloom one reads about is confined to people’s gardens. When you come upon jasmine or an orchid in the woods you notice the colour at once in the green monotony. But think how many acres of blue and white and gold one passes in the North with scarcely a glance! The South is beautiful too, in its way; but it is not that way. Yet I care for it even more, perhaps, than I do for the North—”
The calm, even tenor of the speech between them was reassuring her, although it was solving no problems which, deep in her breast, she knew lay latent, ready to quicken at any instant.
All that awaited to be solved; all that threatened between her and her heart and conscience, now lay within her, quiescent for the moment. And it was from moment to moment now that she was living, blindly evading, resolutely putting off what must come after that relentless self-examination which was still before her.
The transport wagon was now in sight ahead; and Bulow, one of the guides, had released a brace of setters, casting them out among the open pines.
Away raced the belled dogs, jingling into the saw-scrub; and Shiela nodded to him to prepare for a shot as she drew her own gun from its boot and loaded, eyes still following the distant dogs.
To and fro raced the setters, tails low, noses up, wheeling, checking, quartering, cutting up acres and acres — a stirring sight! — and more stirring still when the blue-ticked dog, catching the body-scent, slowed down, flag whipping madly, and began to crawl into the wind.
“You and Shiela!” called out Cardross as they trotted up, guns resting on their thighs. “Gray and I’ll pick up the singles.”
The girl sprang to the ground, gun poised; Hamil followed her, and they walked across the sandy open where scarcely a tuft of dead grass bristled. It seemed impossible that any living creature bigger than an ant could conceal itself on that bare, arid sand stretch, but the ticked dog was standing rigid, nose pointing almost between his forefeet, and the red dog was backing him, tail like a ramrod, right forefoot doubled, jaws a-slaver.
The girl glanced sideways at Hamil mischievously.
“What are we shooting for, Mr. Hamil?”
“Anything you wish,” he said, “but it’s yours anyway — all I can give. I suppose I’m going to miss.”
“No; you mustn’t. If you’re out of practice remember to let them get well away. And I won’t shoot a match with you this time. Shall I flush?”
“I’ll put them up. Are you ready?”
“Quite, thank you.”
He stepped up beside the ticked dog, halted, took one more step beyond — whir-r-r! and the startled air was filled with wings; and crack! crack! crack-crack! spoke the smokeless powder.
Two quail stopped in mid-air and pitched downward.
“O Lord!” said Hamil, “they’re not my birds. Shiela, how could you do such a thing under my very nose and in sight of your relatives and three unfeeling guides!”
“You poor boy’” she said, watching the bevy as he picked up the curious, dark, little Florida quail and displayed them. Then, having marked, she quietly signalled the dogs forward.
“I’m not going,” he said; “I’ve performed sufficiently.”
She was not quite sure how much of disappointment lay under his pretence, and rather shyly she suggested that he redeem himself. Gray and his father were walking toward one dog who was now standing; two quail flushed and both fell.
“Come,” she said, laying her hand lightly on his arm; “Ticky is pointing and I will have you redeem yourself.”
So they went forward, shoulder to shoulder; and three birds jumped and two fell.
“Bravo!” she exclaimed radiantly; “I knew my cavalier after all!”
“You held your fire,” he said accusingly.
“Ye-s.”
“Why?”
“Because — if you—” She raised her eyes half serious, half mockingly: “Do you think I care for — anything — at your expense?”
A thrill passed through him. “Do you think I mind if you are the better of us, you generous girl?”
“I am not a better shot; I really am not.... Look at these birds — both cocks. Are they not funny — these quaint little black quail of the semi-tropics? We’ll need all we can get, too. But now that you are your resistless self again I shall cease to dread the alternative of starvation or a resort to alligator tail.”
So with a gay exchange of badinage they took their turns when the dogs rounded up singles; and sometimes he missed shamefully, and sometimes he performed with credit, but she never amended his misses nor did more than match his successes, and he thought that in all his life he had never witnessed more faultless field courtesy than this young girl instinctively displayed. Nothing in the world could have touched him more keenly or convinced him more thoroughly. For it is on the firing line that character shows; a person is what he is in the field — even though he sometimes neglects to live up to it in less vital moments.
Generous and quick in her applause, sensitive under his failures, cool in difficulties, yielding instantly the slightest advantage to him, holding her fire when singles rose or where there could be the slightest doubt — that was his shooting companion under the white noon sun that day. He noticed, too, her sweetness with the dogs, her quick encouragement when work was well done, her brief rebuke when the red dog, galloping recklessly down wind, jumped a ground-rattler and came within a hair’s breadth of being bitten.
“The little devil!” said Hamil, looking down at the twisting reptile which he had killed with a palmetto stem. “Why, Shiela, he has no rattles at all.”
“No, only a button. Dig a hole and bury the head. Fangs are always fangs whether their owner is dead or alive.”
So Hamil scooped out a trench with his hunting-knife and they buried the little ground-rattler while both dogs looked on, growling.
Cardross and Gray had remounted; Bulow cast out a brace of pointers for them, and they were already far away. Presently the distant crack of their guns announced that fresh bevies had been found beyond the branch.
The guide, Carter, rode out, bringing Shiela and Hamil their horses and relieving the latter’s pockets of a dozen birds; announcing a halt for luncheon at the same time in a voice softly neglectful of I’s and R’s, and musical with aspirates.
As they followed him slowly toward the wagon which stood half a mile away under a group of noble pines, Hamil began in a low voice:
“I’ve got to say t
his, Shiela: I never saw more perfect sportsmanship than yours; and, if only for that, I love you with all my heart.”
“What a boyish thing to say!” But she coloured deliciously.
“You don’t care whether I love you — that way, do you?” he asked hopefully.
“N-no.”
“Then — I can wait.”
She turned toward him, confused.
“Wait?” she repeated.
“Yes — wait; all my life, if it must be.”
“There is nothing to wait for. Don’t say such things to me. I — it’s difficult enough for me now — to think what to do — You will not speak to me again that way, will you? Because, if you do, I must send you away.... And that will be — hard.”
“Once,” he said, “you spoke about men — how they come crashing through the barriers of friendship. Am I like that?”
She hesitated, looked at him.
“There were no barriers.”
“No barriers!”
“None — to keep you out. I should have seen to it; I should have been prepared; but you came so naturally into my friendship — inside the barriers — that I opened my eyes and found you there — and remembered, too late, alas—”
“Too late?”
“Too late to shut you out. And you frightened me last night; I tried to tell you — for your own sake; I was terrified, and I told you what I have never before told a living soul — that dreadful, hopeless, nightmare thing — to drive you out of my — my regard — and me from yours.”
His face whitened a little under its tan, but the flat jaw muscles tightened doggedly.
“I don’t understand — yet,” he said. “And when you tell me — for you will tell me sooner or later — it will not change me.”
“It must!”
He shook his head.
She said in desperation: “You cannot care for me too much because you know that I am — not free.”
“Cannot?” He laughed mirthlessly. “I am caring for you — loving you — every second more and more.”
“That is dishonourable,” she faltered.
“Why?”
“You know!”
“Yes. But if it does not change me how can I help it?”
“You can help making me care for you!”
His heart was racing now; every vein ran fiery riot.
“Is there a chance of that, Shiela?”
She did not answer, but the tragedy in her slowly lifted eyes appalled him. Then a rushing confusion of happiness and pain almost stupefied him.
“You must not be afraid,” he managed to say while the pulse hammered in his throat, and the tumult of his senses deadened his voice to a whisper.
“I am afraid.”
They were near the wagon now; both dismounted under the pines while Bulow came forward to picket their horses. On their way together among the trees she looked up at him almost piteously: “You must go if you talk to me again like this. I could not endure very much of it.”
“I don’t know what I am going to do,” he said in the same curiously deadened voice. “You must tell me more.”
“I cannot. I am — uncertain of myself. I can’t think clearly when we — when you speak to me — this way. Couldn’t you go North before I — before my unhappiness becomes too real — too hard? — couldn’t you go before it is too late — and leave me my peace of mind, my common sense!”
He looked around at her. “Yes,” he said, “I will go if there is no decent chance for us; and if it is not too late.”
“I have my common senses still left. It is not too late.”
There was a silence. “I will go,” he said very quietly.
“W-when?”
“The day we return.”
“Can you leave your work?”
“Yes. Halloran knows.”
“And — you will go?”
“Yes, if you wish it.”
Another silence. Then she shook her head, not looking at him.
“There is no use in going — now.”
“Why?”
“Because — because I do not wish it.” Her eyes fell lower; she drew a long, unsteady breath. “And because it is too late,” she said. “You should have gone before I ever knew you — if I was to be spared my peace of mind.”
Gray came galloping back through the woods, followed by his father and Eudo Stent. They were rather excited, having found signs of turkey along the mud of a distant branch; and, as they all gathered around a cold luncheon spread beside the wagon, a lively discussion began concerning the relative chances of “roosting” and “yelping.”
Hamil talked as in a dream, scarcely conscious that he was speaking and laughing a great deal. A heavenly sort of intoxication possessed him; a paradise of divine unrealities seemed to surround him — Shiela, the clustering pines, the strange white sunlight, the depthless splendour of the unshadowed blue above.
He heard vaguely the voices of the others, Cardross, senior, rallying Gray on his shooting, Gray replying in kind, the soft Southern voices of the guides at their own repast by the picket line, the stir and whisk and crunch of horses nuzzling their feed.
Specks moved in the dome of heaven — buzzards. Below, through the woods, myriads of robins were flying about, migrants from the North.
Gray displayed his butterflies; nothing uncommon, except a black and green one seldom found north of Miami — but they all bent over the lovely fragile creatures, admiring the silver-spangled Dione butterflies, the great velvety black Turnus; and Shiela, with the point of a dry pine needle, traced for Hamil the grotesque dog’s head on the fore wings of those lemon-tinted butterflies which haunt the Florida flat-woods.
“He’d never win at a bench-show,” observed her father, lighting his pipe — an out-of-door luxury he clung to. “Shiela, you little minx, what makes you look so unusually pretty? Probably that wild-west rig of yours. Hamil, I hope you gave her a few points on grassing a bird. She’s altogether too conceited. Do you know, once, while we were picking up singles, a razor-back boar charged us — or more probably the dogs, which were standing, poor devils. And upon my word I was so rattled that I did the worst thing possible — I tried to kick the dogs loose. Of course they went all to pieces, and I don’t know how it might have fared with us if my little daughter had not calmly bowled over that boar at three paces from my shin-bones!”
“Dad exaggerates,” observed the girl with heightened colour, then ventured a glance at Hamil which set his heart galloping; and her own responded to the tender pride and admiration in his eyes.
There was more discussion concerning “roosting” versus “yelping” with dire designs upon the huge wild turkey-cock whose tracks Gray had discovered in the mud along the branch where their camp was to be pitched.
Seven hens and youthful gobblers accompanied this patriarch according to Eudo Stent’s calculations, and Bulow thought that the Seminole might know the location of the roost; probably deep in some uninviting swamp.
But there was plenty of time to decide what to do when they reached camp; and half an hour later they started, wagon and all, wheels bumping over the exposed tree roots which infinitely bored the well-behaved dogs, squatting forward, heads in a row, every nose twitching at the subtle forest odours that only a dog could detect.
Once they emitted short and quickly stifled yelps as a ‘possum climbed leisurely into a small tree and turned to inspect the strange procession which was invading his wilderness. And Shiela and Hamil, riding behind the wagon, laughed like children.
Once they passed under a heronry — a rather odoriferous patch of dead cypress and pines, where the enormous nests bulged in the stark tree-tops; and once, as they rode out into a particularly park-like and velvety glade, five deer looked up, and then deliberately started to trot across.
“We need that venison!” exclaimed Gray, motioning for his gun which was in the wagon. Shiela spurred forward, launching her mount into a gallop; Hamil’s horse followed on a dead run, he tuggin
g madly at the buck-shot shell in his web belt; and away they tore to head the deer. In vain! for the agile herd bounded past far out of shell-range and went crashing on through the jungle of the branch; and Shiela reined in and turned her flushed face to Hamil with a laugh of sheer delight.
“Glorious sight, wasn’t it?” said Hamil. “I’m rather glad they got clear of us.”
“So am I. There was no chance, but I always try.”
“So shall I,” he said— “whether there is a chance or not.”
She looked up quickly, reading his meaning. Then she bent over the gun that she was breaking, extracted the shells, looped them, and returned the weapon to its holster.
Behind them her father and brother jeered at them for their failure, Gray being particularly offensive in ascribing their fiasco to bad riding and buck-fever.
A little later Shiela’s horse almost unseated her, leaping aside and into the jungle as an enormous black snake coiled close in front.
“Don’t shoot!” she cried out to Hamil, mastering her horse and forcing him past the big, handsome, harmless reptile; “nobody shoots black snakes or buzzards here. Slip your gun back quickly or Gray will torment you.”
However, Gray had seen, and kept up a running fire of sarcastic comment which made Hamil laugh and Shiela indignant.
And so they rode along through the rich afternoon sunshine, now under the clustered pines, now across glades where wild doves sprang up into clattering flight displaying the four white feathers, or pretty little ground doves ran fearlessly between the horses’ legs.
Here and there a crimson cardinal, crest lifted, sat singing deliciously on some green bough; now and then a summer tanager dropped like a live coal into the deeper jungle. Great shiny blue, crestless jays flitted over the scrub; shy black and white and chestnut chewinks flirted into sight and out again among the heaps of dead brush; red-bellied woodpeckers, sticking to the tree trunks, turned their heads calmly; gray lizards, big, ugly red-headed lizards, swift slender lizards with blue tails raced across the dry leaves or up tree trunks, making even more fuss and clatter than the noisy cinnamon-tinted thrashers in the underbrush.
Every step into the unknown was a new happiness; there was no silence there for those who could hear, no solitude for those who could see. And he was riding into it with a young companion who saw and heard and loved and understood it all. Nothing escaped her; no frail air plant trailing from the high water oaks, no school of tiny bass in the shallows where their horses splashed through, no gopher burrow, no foot imprint of the little wild things which haunt the water’s edge in forests.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 379