The Quickening Part 7

"Oh, please! Don't you hurt my dog!" said a rather weak little voice out of the rearward void.

But, gray eyes human, holding brown canine in an unwinking gaze: "You come round here and call him off o' me."

"He is not wis.h.i.+ng to hurt you, or anybody," said the voice. "Down, Hector!"

The Great Dane pa.s.sed from suspicious rigidity and threatening lip twitchings to mighty and frivolous gambolings, and Thomas Jefferson got up to give him room. A girl--_the_ girl, as some inner sense instantly a.s.sured him--was trying to make the dog behave. So he had a chance to look her over before the battle for sovereignty should begin.

There was a little shock of disdainful surprise to go with the first glance. Somehow he had been expecting something very different; something on the order of the Queen of Sheba--done small, of course--as that personage was pictured in the family Bible; a girl, proud and scornful, and possibly wearing a silk dress and satin shoes.

Instead, she was only a pale, tired baby in a brier-torn frock; a girl whose bones showed brazenly at every angle, and whose only claim to a second glance lay in her thick mop of reddish-brown hair and in a pair of great, slate-blue eyes two sizes too large for the thin face. A double conclusion came and sat in Thomas Jefferson's mind: she was rather to be contemptuously pitied than feared; and as for looks--well, she was not to be thought of in the same day with black-eyed Nan Bryerson.

When the dog was reduced to quietude, the small one repaid Thomas Jefferson's stare with a level gaze out of the over-sized eyes.

"Was it that you were afraid of Hector?" she asked.

"Huh!" said Thomas Jefferson, and the scorn was partly for her queer way of speaking and partly for the foolishness of the question. "Huh! I reckon you don't know who I am. I'd have killed your dog if he'd jumped on me, maybe."

"Me? I do know who you are. You are Thomas Gordon. Your mother took care of me and prayed for me when I was sick. Hector is a--an extremely good dog. He would not jump at you."

"It's mighty lucky for him he didn't," bragged Thomas Jefferson, with a very creditable imitation of his father's grim frown. Then he sat down on the bank of the stream and busied himself with his fis.h.i.+ng-tackle as if he considered the incident closed.

"What is it that you are trying to do?" asked Ardea, when the silence had extended to the third worm impaled on the hook and promptly abstracted therefrom by a wily sucker lying at the bottom of the pool.

"I was fis.h.i.+n' some before you and your dog came along and scared all the perch away," he said sourly. Then, turning suddenly on her: "Why don't you go ahead and say it? Is it 'cause you're afeard to?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"I know what you're going to say; you are going to tell me this is your grandfather's land and run me off. But I ain't aimin' to go till I'm good and ready."

She looked down on him without malice.

"You are such a funny boy," she remarked, and there was something in her way of saying it that made Thomas Jefferson feel little and infantile and inferior, though he was sure there must be an immense age difference in his favor.

"Why?" he demanded.

"Oh, I don't know; just because you are. If you knew French I could explain it better that way."

"I don't know anybody by that name, and I don't care," said Thomas Jefferson doggedly; and went back to his fis.h.i.+ng.

Followed another interval of silence, in which two more worms were fed to the insatiable sucker at the bottom of the pool. Then came the volcanic outburst.

"I think you are mean, mean!" she sobbed, with an angry stamp of her foot. "I--I want to go ho-ome!"

"Well, I reckon there ain't anybody holdin' you," said Thomas Jefferson brutally. He was intent on fixing the sixth worm on the hook in such fas.h.i.+on as permanently to discourage the bait thief, and was coming to his own in the matter of self-possession with grateful facility. It was going to be notably easy to bully her--another point of difference between her and Nan Bryerson.

"I know there isn't anybody holding me, but--but I can't find the way."

That any one could be lost within an easy mile of the manor-house was ridiculously incredible to Thomas Jefferson. Yet there was no telling, in the case of a girl.

"You want me to show you the way?" he asked, putting all the ungraciousness he could muster into the query.

"You might tell me, I should think! I've walked and walked!"

"I reckon I'd better take you; you might get lost again," he said, with gloomy sarcasm. Then he consumed all the time he could for the methodical disposal of his fis.h.i.+ng-tackle. It would be good for her to learn that she must wait on his motions.

She waited patiently, sitting on the ground with one arm around the neck of the Great Dane; and when Thomas Jefferson stole a glance at her to see how she was taking it, she looked so tired and thin and woebegone that he almost let the better part of him get the upper hand. That made him surlier than ever when he finally recovered his string of fish from the stream and said: "Well, come on, if you're comin'."

He told himself, hypocritically, that it was only to show her what hards.h.i.+ps she would have to face if she should try to tag him, that he dragged her such a weary round over the hills and through the worst brier patches and across and across the creek, doubling and circling until the easy mile was spun out into three uncommonly difficult ones.

But at bottom the motive was purely wicked. In all the range of sentient creatures there is none so innately and barbarously cruel as the human boy-child; and this was the first time Thomas Jefferson had ever had a helplessly pliable subject.

The better she kept up, the more determined he became to break her down; but at the very last, when she stumbled and fell in an old leaf bed and cried for sheer weariness, he relented enough to say: "I reckon you'll know better than to go projectin' round in the woods the next time. Come on--we're 'most there, now."

But Ardea's troubles were not yet at an end. She stopped crying and got up to follow him blindly over more hills and through other brier tangles; and when they finally emerged in the cleared lands, they were still on the wrong side of the creek.

"It's only about up to your chin; reckon you can wade it?" asked Thomas Jefferson, in a sudden access of heart-hardening. But it softened him a little to see her gather her torn frock and stumble down to the water's edge without a word, and he added: "Hold on; maybe we can find a log, somewhere."

There was a foot log just around the next bend above, as he very well knew, and thither he led the way. The dog made the crossing first, and stood wagging his tail encouragingly on the bank of safety. Then Thomas Jefferson pa.s.sed his trembling victim out on the log.

"You go first," he directed; "so 't I can catch you if you slip."

For the first time she humbled herself to beg a boon.

"Oh, you please go first, so I won't have to look down at the water!"

"No; I'm coming behind--then I can catch you if you get dizzy and go to fall," he said stubbornly.

"Will you walk right up close, so I can know you are there?"

Thomas Jefferson's smile was cruelly misleading, as were his words. "All you'll have to do will be to reach your hand back and grab me," he a.s.sured her; and thereupon she began to inch her way out over the swirling pool.

When he saw that she could by no possibility turn to look back, Thomas Jefferson deliberately sat down on the bank to watch her. There had never been anything in his life so tigerishly delightful as this game of playing on the feelings and fears of the girl whose coming had spoiled the solitudes.

For the first few feet Ardea went steadily forward, keeping her eyes fixed on the Great Dane sitting motionless at the farther end of the bridge of peril. Then, suddenly the dog grew impatient and began to leap and bark like a foolish puppy. It was too much for Ardea to have her eye-anchor thus transformed into a dizzying whirlwind of gray monsters.

She reached backward for the rea.s.suring hand: it was not there, and the next instant the hungry pool rose up to engulf her.

In all his years Thomas Jefferson had never had such a stab as that which an instantly awakened conscience gave him when she slipped and fell. Now he was her murderer, beyond any hope of future mercies. For a moment the horror of it held him vise-like. Then the sight of the Great Dane plunging to the rescue freed him.

"Good dog!" he screamed, diving headlong from his own side of the pool; and between them Ardea was dragged ash.o.r.e, a limp little heap of saturation, conscious, but with her teeth chattering and great, dark circles around the big blue eyes.

Thomas Jefferson's first word was masculinely selfish.

"I'm awful sorry!" he stammered. "If you can't make out to forgive me, I'm going to have a miser'ble time of it after I get home. G.o.d will whip me worse for this than He did for the other."

It was here, again, that she gave him the feeling that she was older than he.

"It will serve you quite right. Now you'd better get me home as quick as ever you can. I expect I'll be sick again, after this."

He held his peace and walked her as fast as he could across the fields and out on the pike. But at the Dabney gates he paused. It was not in human courage to face the Major under existing conditions.