Lady Good-for-Nothing Part 41

"But I shall need Bayard to bring home a sack of lime for my mortar.

And you are over thoughtful for Madcap. I walked up to inspect the pasture, and there is enough to last the pair for a week. It is odds, too, we find some burnt lands at the back of these woods, with patches of good gra.s.s. Let us keep the horses up here, at any rate until the nights turn colder. A taste of hard faring will be good for their pampered flesh, as for mine. Besides--though you may not know it--I am a first-cla.s.s groom."

"As well as a mason? You will have to turn hunter, too, before long, else your cook will be out of work. Dear, dear, how we begin to crowd the days!"

For a whole week he worked at intervals, building his chimney with stones from the river bed, and laying them well and truly. Ruth helped him at whiles, when household duties did not claim her. Now and then, when his back ached with the toil, he would break off for a spell and watch her as she stooped over the cooking-pot, or knelt by the stream-side, bare-legged, with petticoat kilted high, beating the linen on a flat stone.

When the chimney was finished they were in great anxiety lest, being built close under the cliff, it should catch a down-draught of the wind and fill the dwelling with smoke. But the wind came, and, as it turned out, made a leap from the cliff to the valley, singing high overhead and missing the chimney clear. When they lit their first fire indoors and ran forth to see the smoke rising in a thin blue pillar against the pines, they laughed elated, and at supper drank to their handiwork.

Ruth's first sacrifice on the new hearth was the solemn heating of a flat iron, to crimp and pleat her lover's body-linen.

Next day he shot a deer and flayed it; and, the next, set to work to build a bed. Their couch had been of white linen laid upon skins, the skins resting on a thick mat of leaves. Now he raised it from the ground on four posts, joining the posts with a stout framework and lacing the framework with cords criss-crossed like the netting of a hammock. Also he replaced the curtain at the entrance with a door of split pinewood, and fas.h.i.+oned a wooden bolt.

The halcyon weather held for two weeks, the delicate weather of Indian summer. Day by day the forest dropped its leaves under a blue windless sky; but the nights sharpened their frosts. Ruth, stealing early to her bathing-pool, found it edged with thin ice, and paused, breaking it with taps of her naked foot while she braced her body for the cold shock.

The flat rock over the fall was still their supper-table. After supping they would wrap themselves closer in their cloaks of bearskin, and sit for long, his arm about her body. The stars wheeled overhead.

At a little distance shone the open window inviting them.

From their ledge they overlooked the world.

She marvelled at the zest he threw into every moment and detail of this strange honeymooning. He had taken pride even in skinning and cutting up the slain deer.

She had, in fact, being fearful of her experiment; had planned it, in some sort, as a test for him. She was no sentimentalist. She had believed that he loved her--well she knew it now. But for him this could not be first love. Many times she had bethought her of the dead Margaret Dance, and as a sensible girl without resentment. But, herself in the ecstasy of first love, she marvelled how it could die and anything comparable spring up in its room; and she had only her own heart to interrogate. Her own heart told her that it was impossible.

"Fool!" said her own heart. "Is it not enough that he condescends--that you have found favour in his sight--you, that asked but to be his slave?"

"Fool!" said her heart again. "Would you be jealous of this dead woman?

Then jealousy is not cruel as the grave, but crueller."

And she retorted, "The woman is dead and cannot grudge it.

Ah, conscience! are you the only part of me that has not slept in his arms. I want him all--all!"

"How can that be--since you are not his first love?" objected conscience, falling back upon its old position.

"Be still," she whispered back. "See how love is recreating him!"

Indeed, the secret may have lain in her pa.s.sing loveliness--by night, beside their fire on the rock, he would sit motionless watching her face for minutes together, or the poise of her head, or the curve of her chin as she tilted it to ponder the stars; and, in part, the woodland life, chosen by her so cunningly, may have bewitched him for a s.p.a.ce. Certain it is that during their sojourn here he became a youth again, eager and glad as a youth, pa.s.sionate as a youth, laughing, throwing his heart into simple things and not shrinking from coa.r.s.er trials--as when he plunged his hands into the blood of the deer.

This story is of Ruth, not of Oliver Vyell; or of him only in so far as his star ruled hers. For the moment their stars danced together and the common cares of this world stood back for a s.p.a.ce and left a floor for them.

Their bliss was absolute. But the seed of its corruption lay in him.

Her spirit was chaste, as her life had been. For him, before ever Margaret Dance met and crossed his path, he had lived loosely, squandering his manhood; and of this squandering let one who later underwent it record the inevitable sentence.

"But ah! it hardens all within, And petrifies the feeling."

Nor could this temporary miracle do more for Oliver Vyell than wake in him a false springtide of the heart and delay by so long the revenge of his past upon his present self.

Midway in the third week the weather broke. He had foreseen this, and early one morning set forth upon Bayard, the mare following obediently as a dog, along the downhill circuit to the village. There he would leave them in stall at the Ferry Inn, to be fetched by his grooms.

Ruth walked some way beside him, telling off a list of purchases to be made at the village store to replenish their household stock.

She left him and turned back, under boughs too bare to hide the lowering sky. She had gained the hut and he the village before the storm broke.

Indeed it gave him time to make his purchases and reach the Inn, where a heavy mail-bag awaited him. He was served with bread, cheese, and beer in the Inn parlour, and dealt with the letters then and there; answering some, tearing up others, albeit still with a sense of bringing back his habits of business to a world with which he had no concern. While he wrote, always in haste, on the cheap paper the Inn supplied, the storm broke and with such darkness that he pulled out his watch. It was yet early afternoon. He called for candles and wrote on.

The last letter, addressed to Batty Langton, Esquire, he superscribed "_Most urgent_," and having sealed it, arose and shouldered his sack for the homeward tramp. By this time the wind howled through the village street, blowing squall upon squall of rain before it. It blew, too, dead in his path; but he faced it cheerfully.

Before he gained what should have been the shelter of the woods, the gale had increased so that they gave less than the road had given.

The trees rocked above him; leaves and dead twigs beat on his face, and at length the blast forced him almost to creep on all fours. It was dark, too, beneath the swaying boughs. But uppermost in his mind was fear for his love, lest the hut should have given way before the tempest, and she be lying crushed beneath it.

Still he fought his way. Darkness--the real darkness--was falling, and he was yet a mile from the hut when in his path a figure arose from the undergrowth where it had been crouching.

"Ruth!"

"Ah, you are safe! . . . I could not rest at home--"

They took hands and forced their way against the wind.

"The cabin?"

"It stands, please G.o.d!"

After much battling they spied the light s.h.i.+ning through the louvers of its closed shutter. The gale streamed down the valley as through a funnel, but once past the angle of the cliff they found themselves almost in a calm. He pushed the door open.

On the hearth--the hearth of his building--a pile of logs burned cheerfully. Over these the kettle hissed; and the firelight fell on their bed, with its linen oversheet turned back and neatly folded.

She entered and he closed the door behind her. She laughed as he pushed its bolt. They were drenched to the skin, the pair.

"This is best," said she with another soft and happy laugh.

"This is best," he repeated after her. "Better even than in fair weather."

Chapter VIII.

HOME-COMING.

A week later they broke camp and set forth to climb to the head of the pa.s.s.

Behind it--so Sir Oliver had learnt from old Strongtharm--lay an almost flat table-land, of pine-forest for the most part, through which for maybe half a dozen miles their river ran roughly parallel with another that came down from the north-west. At one point (the old fellow declared) less than a mile divided their waters.

"Seems," he said, "as if Nature all along intended 'em to jine, and then, at the last moment, changed her mind." He explained the cause of their severance--an outcropping ridge of rock, not above a mile in length; but it served, deflecting the one stream to the southward, the other to north of east, so that they reached the ocean a good twenty leagues apart.

He showed a map and told Sir Oliver further that at the narrowest point between the two rivers there dwelt a couple of brothers, Dave and Andy M'Lauchlin, with their households and long families, of whom all the boys were expert log-drivers, like their fathers. They were likewise expert boatmen, and for money, no doubt, if Sir Oliver desired, would navigate the upper reaches of either stream for him. Of these reaches the old man could tell little save that their currents ran moderately-- "nothing out of the way." The M'Lauchlins sent all their timber down to sea by the more northerly stream. "Our river 'd be the better by far, three-fourths of its way, but--" with a jerk of his thumb--"the Gap, yonder, makes it foolishness."

Sir Oliver asked many questions, studying the map; and ended by borrowing it.