“Dear,” she said, passing one arm around the younger girl, “I didn’t quite dare to object too strongly. You looked so — so interested, so deliciously defiant — so like your real self — —”
“I feel like it to-day, Kathleen; let me turn back in my own footsteps — if I can. I’ve been trying so very hard to — to get back to where there was no — no terror in the world.”
“I know. But, darling, you won’t run into any danger, will you?”
“Do you call a hard-hit beast a danger? I’ve wounded a more terrible one than any boar that ever bristled. I’m trying to kill something more terrifying. And I shall if I live.”
“You poor, brave little martyr!” whispered Kathleen, her violet eyes filled with sudden tears; “don’t you suppose I know what you are doing? Don’t you suppose I watch and pray — —”
“Did you know I was really trying?” asked the girl, astonished— “I mean before I told you?”
“Know it! Angels above! Of course I know it. Don’t you suppose I’ve been watching you slowly winning back to your old dear self — tired, weary-footed, desolate, almost hopeless, yet always surely finding your way back through the dreadful twilight to the dear, sweet, generous self that I know so well — the straightforward, innocent, brave little self that grew at my knee! — Geraldine — Geraldine, my own dear child!”
“Hush — I did not know you knew. I am trying. Once I failed. That was not very long ago, either. Oh, Kathleen, I am trying so hard, so hard! And to-day has been a dreadful day for me. That is why I went off by myself; I paddled until I was ready to drop into the lake; and the fright that the boar gave me almost ended me; but it could not end desire!... So I took a rifle — anything to interest me — keep me on my feet and moving somewhere — doing something — anything — anything, Kathleen — until I can crush it out of me — until there’s a chance that I can sleep — —”
“I know — I know! That is why I dared not remonstrate when I saw you drifting again toward your old affectionate relations with Scott. I’m afraid of animals — except what few Scott has persuaded me to tolerate — butterflies and frogs and things. But if anything on earth is going to interest you — take your mind off yourself — and bring you and Scott any nearer together, I shall not utter one word against it — even when it puts you in physical danger and frightens me. Do you understand?”
The girl nodded, turned and kissed her. They were following a path made by game; Scott was out of sight ahead somewhere; they could hear his boots crashing through the underbrush. After a while the sound died away in the forest.
“The main thing,” said Geraldine, “is to keep up my interest in the world. I want to do things. To sit idle is pure destruction to me. I write to Duane every morning, I read, I do a dozen things that require my attention — little duties that everybody has. But I can’t continue to write to Duane all day. I can’t read all day; duties are soon ended. And, Kathleen, it’s the idle intervals I dread so — the brooding, the memories, the waiting for events scheduled in domestic routine — like dinner — the — the terrible waiting for sleep! That is the worst. I tell you, physical fatigue must help to save me — must help my love for Duane, my love for you and Scott, my self-respect — what is left of it. This rifle” — she held it out— “would turn into a nuisance if I let it. But I won’t; I can’t; I’ve got to use everything to help me.”
“You ride every day, don’t you?” ventured the other woman timidly.
“Before breakfast. That helps. I wish I had a vicious horse to break. I wish there was rough water where canoes ought not to go!” she exclaimed fiercely. “I need something of that sort.”
“You drove Scott’s Blue Racer yesterday so fast that Felix came to me about it,” said Kathleen gently.
Geraldine laughed. “It couldn’t go fast enough, dear; that was the only trouble.” Then, serious and wistful: “If I could only have Duane.... Don’t be alarmed; I can’t — yet. But if I only could have him now! You see, his life is already very full; his work is absorbing him. It would absorb me. I don’t know anything about it technically, but it interests me. If I could only have him now; think about him every second of the day — to keep me from myself — —”
She checked herself; suddenly her eyes filled, her lip quivered:
“I want him now!” she said desperately. “He could save me; I know it! I want him now — his love, his arms to keep me safe at night! I want him to love me — love me! Oh, Kathleen! if I could only have him!”
A delicate colour tinted Kathleen’s face; her ears shrank from the girl’s low-voiced cry, with its glimmer of a passion scarcely understood.
Long, long, the memory of his embrace had tormented her — the feeling of happy safety she had in his arms — the contact that thrilled almost past endurance, yet filled her with a glorious and splendid strength — that set wild pulses beating, wild blood leaping in her veins — that aroused her very soul to meet his lips and heed his words and be what his behest would have her.
And the memory of it now possessed her so that she stood straight and slim and tall, trembling in the forest path, and her dark eyes looked into Kathleen’s with a strange, fiery glimmer of pride:
“I need him, but I love him too well to take him. Can I do more for him than that?”
“Oh, my darling, my darling,” said Kathleen brokenly, “if you believe that he can save you — if you really feel that he can — —”
“I am trying to save myself — I am trying.” She turned and looked off through the forest, a straight, slender shape in the moving shadows of the leaves.
“But if he could really help you — if you truly believe it, dear, I — I don’t know whether you might not venture — now — —”
“No, dear.” She slowly closed her eyes, remained motionless for a moment, drew a deep, long breath, and looked up through the sunlit branches overhead.
“I’ve got to be fair to him,” she said aloud to herself; “I must give myself to him as I ought to be, or not at all.... That is settled.”
She turned to Kathleen and took her hand:
“Come on, fellow-pilgrim,” she said with an effort to smile. “My cowardice is over for the present.”
A few steps forward they sighted Scott coming back. He was unusually red in the face and rather excited, and he flourished a stick.
“Of all the infernal impudence!” he said. “What do you think has happened to me? I saw a wild boar back there — not a very big one — and he came out into the trail ahead, and I kept straight on, thinking he’d hear me and run. And I’m blessed if the brute didn’t whirl around and roughen up, and clatter his tusks until I actually had to come to a halt!”
“I don’t want to walk in these woods any more,” said Kathleen with sudden conviction. “Please come home, all of us.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “I won’t stand for being hustled out of my own woods. Give me that rifle, Geraldine.”
“I certainly will not,” she said, smiling.
“What! Why not?”
“Because it rather looks as though I’m about to win my bet with you,” observed Geraldine. “Please show me your boar, Scott.” And she threw a cartridge into the magazine and started forward.
“Don’t let her!” pleaded Kathleen. “Scott, it’s ridiculous to let that child do such silly things — —”
“Then stop her if you can,” said Scott gloomily, following his sister. “I don’t know anything about wild boar, but I suppose straight shooting will take care of them, and Sis can do that if she keeps her nerve.”
Geraldine, hastening ahead, rifle poised, scanned the woods with the palpitating curiosity of an amateur. Eyes and ears alert, she kept mechanically reassuring herself that the thing to do was to shoot straight and keep cool, and to keep on shooting whichever way the boar might take it into his porcine head to run.
Scott hastened forward to her side:
“Here’s the place,” he said, looking about him. “He’s concl
uded to make off, you see. They usually go off; they only stand when wounded or when they think they can’t get away. He’s harmless, I suppose — only it made me very tired to have him act that way. I hate to be backed out of my own property.”
Geraldine, rather relieved, yet ashamed not to do all she could, began to walk toward a clump of low hemlocks. She had heard that wild boar take that sort of cover. She did not really expect to find anything there, so when a big black streak crashed out ahead of her she stood stock still in frozen astonishment, rifle clutched to her breast.
“Shoot!” shouted her brother.
“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” she said helplessly, “he’s gone out of sight! And I had such a splendid shot!” She stamped with vexation. “What a goose!” she repeated. “I had a perfectly splendid shot. And all I did was to jump like a scared cat and stare!”
“Anyway, you didn’t run, and that’s a point gained,” observed her brother. “I had to. And that’s one on me.”
A moment later he said: “I believe those impudent boar do need a little thinning out. When is Duane coming?”
“In November,” said Geraldine, still looking vaguely about for the departed pig.
“Early?”
“I think so, if his father is all right again. I’ve asked Naïda, too. Rosalie wants to come — —”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, don’t,” he protested. “All I wanted was a shooting party to do a little scientific thinning out of these boar. I’ll do some myself, too.”
Geraldine laughed. “Rosalie is a dead shot at a target, dear. She wrote asking us to invite her to shoot. I don’t see how I can very well refuse her. Do you?”
“That means her husband, too,” grumbled Scott, “and that entire bunch.”
“No; if it’s a shooting party, I don’t have to ask him.”
Her brother said ungraciously: “Well, I don’t care who you ask if they’ll thin out these cheeky brutes. Fancy that two-year-old pig clattering his tusks at me, planted there in the path with his mane on end! — You know it mortifies me, Kathleen — it certainly does. One of these fine days some facetious pig will send me shinning up a tree!” He grew madder at the speculative indignity. “By ginger! I’m going to have a shooting party before the snow flies,” he muttered, walking forward between Kathleen and his sister. “Keep your eyes out ahead; we may jump another at any time, as the wind is all right. And if we do, let him have it, Geraldine!”
It was a beautiful woodland through which they moved.
The late autumn foliage was unusually magnificent, lacking, this year, those garish and discordant hues which Americans think it necessary to admire. Oak brown and elm yellow, deep chrome bronze and sombre crimson the hard woods glowed against backgrounds of pine and hemlock. Larches were mossy cones of feathery gold; birches slim shafts of snowy gray, ochre-crowned; silver and green the balsams’ spires pierced the canopy of splendid tapestry upborne by ash and oak and towering pine under a sky of blue so deep and intense that the lakes reflecting it seemed no less vivid.
Already in the brooks they passed painted trout hung low over every bed of gravel and white sand; the male trout wore his best scarlet fins, and his sides glowed in alternate patterns, jewelled with ruby and sapphire spots. Already the ruffed grouse thundered up by coveys, though they had not yet packed, for the broods still retained their autonomy.
But somewhere beyond the royal azure of the northern sky, very, very far away, there was cold in the world, for even last week, through the violet and primrose dusk, out of the north, shadowy winged things came speeding, batlike phantoms against the dying light — flight-woodcock coming through hill-cleft and valley to the land where summer lingered still.
And there in mid-forest, right in the tall timber, Scott, advancing, flushed a woodcock, which darted up, filling the forest with twittering music — the truest music of our eastern autumn, clear, bewildering, charming in its evanescent sweetness which leaves in its wake a startling silence.
Ahead, lining both sides of a gully deep with last year’s leaves, was an oak grove in mid-forest. Here the brown earth was usually furrowed by the black snouts of wild boar, for mast lay thick here in autumn and tender roots invited investigation.
“Get down flat and crawl,” whispered Scott; “there may be a boar or two on the grounds.”
Kathleen, in her pretty white gown of lace and some sheer stuff, looked at him piteously; but when he and Geraldine dropped flat and wriggled forward into the wind, misgiving of what might prowl behind seized her, and she tucked up her skirts and gave herself to the brown earth with a tremor of indignation and despair.
Nearer and nearer they crept, making very little sound; but they made enough to rouse a young boar, who jerked his head into the air, where he stood among the acorns, big, furry ears high and wide, nose working nervously.
“He’s only a yearling,” breathed Scott in his sister’s ear. “There are traces of stripes, if you look hard. Wait for a better one.”
They lay silent, all three peering down at the yearling, who stood motionless, nosing for tainted air, listening, peering about with dull, near-sighted eyes.
And, after a long time, as they made no sound, the brute wheeled suddenly, made a complete circle at a nervous trout, uttered a series of short, staccato sounds that, when he became older, would become deeper, more of an ominous roar than a hoarse and irritated grunt.
Two deer, a doe and a fawn, came picking their way cautiously along the edge of the gully, sometimes flattening their ears, sometimes necks outstretched, ears forward, peering ahead at the young and bad-tempered pig.
The latter saw them, turned in fury and charged with swiftness incredible, and the deer stampeded headlong through the forest.
“What a fierce, little brute!” whispered Kathleen, appalled. “Scott, if he comes any nearer, I’m going to get into a tree.”
“If he sees us or winds us he’ll run. Don’t move; there may be a good boar in presently. I’ve thought two or three times that I heard something on that hemlock ridge.”
They listened, holding their breath. Crack! went a distant stick. Silence; nothing stirred except the yearling who had returned to the mast and was eagerly nosing among the acorns. They could hear him crunching the husks, see the gleam of long white teeth which one day would grow outside that furry muzzle and curve up and backward like ivory sabres.
Geraldine whispered: “There’s a huge black thing moving in the hemlock scrub. I can see its feet against the sky-line, and sometimes part of its bulk — —”
“Oh, heavens,” breathed Kathleen, “what is that?”
Out of the scrub trotted a huge, shaggy, black thing, all head and shoulders, with body slanting back abruptly to a pair of weak hindquarters. Down the slope it ran in quick, noiseless, jerky steps; the yearling turned his head, still munching, ears cocked forward. And suddenly the monster rushed at him with a squeal, and the yearling shrieked and fled, chased clear up the slope.
“It’s a sow; don’t shoot,” whispered Scott. “Look, Sis, you can’t see a sign of tusks. Good heavens, what a huge creature she is!”
Fierce, formidable, the great beast halted; three striped, partly grown pigs came rushing and frisking down the gully to join her, filling the forest with their clumsy clatter and baby squealing. From the ridge the two deer, who had sneaked back, regarded the scene with terrified fascination.
Presently the yearling rushed them out again, then sidled down, venturing to the edge of the feeding-ground, where he began to crunch acorns again with a cautious eye on the sow and her noisy brood.
Here and there a brilliant blue-jay floated down, seized an acorn, and winged hastily to some near tree where presently he filled the woods with the noise he made in hammering the acorn into some cleft in the bark.
Gradually the sunlight on the leaves reddened; long, luminous shadows lengthened eastward. Kathleen, lying at full length, her pretty face between her hands, suddenly sneezed.
The next moment the fe
eding-ground was deserted; only a distant crashing betrayed the line of flight where the great fierce sow and her young were rushing upward toward the rocks of the Gilded Dome.
“I’m so sorry,” faltered Kathleen, very pink and embarrassed.
Geraldine sat up and laughed, laying the uncocked rifle across her knees.
“Some of these days I’m going to win my wager,” she said to her brother. “And it won’t be with a striped yearling, either; it will be with the biggest, shaggiest, fiercest, tuskiest boar that ranges the Gilded Dome. And that,” she added, looking at Kathleen, “will give me something to think of and keep me rather busy, I believe.”
“Rather,” observed her brother, getting up and helping Kathleen to her feet. He added, to torment her: “Probably you’ll get Duane to win your bet for you, Sis.”
“No,” said the girl gravely; “whatever is to die I must slay all by myself, Scott — all alone, with no man’s help.”
He nodded: “Sure thing; it’s the only sporting way. There’s no stunt to it; only keep cool and keep shooting, and drop him before he comes to close quarters.”
“Yes,” she said, looking up at Kathleen.
Her brother drew her to her feet. She gave him a little hug.
“Believe in me, dear,” she said. “I’ll do it easier if you do.”
“Of course I do. You’re a better sport than I. You always were. And that’s no idle jest; witness my nose and Duane’s in days gone by.”
The girl smiled. As they turned homeward she slung her rifle, passed her right arm through Kathleen’s, and dropped her left on her brother’s shoulder. She was very tired, and hopeful that she might sleep.
And tired, hopeful, thinking of her lover, she passed through the woods, leaning on those who were nearest and most dear.
Somehow — and just why was not clear to her — it seemed at that moment as though she had passed the danger mark — as though the very worst lay behind her — close, scarcely clear of her skirts yet, but all the same it lay behind her, not ahead.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 452