Part 11 (1/2)
”Rose,” demanded Helene, in a low aside, but with a tragic countenance, ”you surely are not going to leave me?”
The girl laughed as she accepted Mr. Elmsley's proffered a.s.sistance from one vehicle into the other. ”Why, you are quite a grown woman,”
observed that gentleman, apparently much impressed by her mature proportions, ”and it seems like only the other day that you were seven years old, and used to kiss me when we met.”
”Well, I'll kiss you again,” replied the saucy Rose, adding after a moment's pause,--”when I am seven years old.”
”I warn you, Mrs. Elmsley,” said Edward, shaking his head with doleful foreboding, ”that girl knows how to look like the innocent flower she is named after, and be the serpent under it.”
”Did you know,” said his slandered sister, addressing the same lady, and indicating the pair she had basely forsaken, ”those are the very two that were with me when I was so badly hurt last summer. Do you wonder that I am glad to escape from them?”
The party drove off amid jests and laughter, while the young ladies, applying their lips once more to a leaf of gra.s.s-ribbon each had in her hand, produced such sounds as, according to their father, might, Orpheus-like, have drawn stones and brickbats after them, but from a murderous rather than a magnetic motive.
”I wonder if Rose is really nervous,” said Edward, breaking the silence that bound them after the departure of the others.
”I think she is really nonsensical,” said Rose's friend, not very blandly.
”Are you then so sorry to be left alone with me?”
The young lady evaded the question, but became extremely loquacious.
She intimated that almost any companions.h.i.+p, or none at all, could be endured on this beautifully melancholy autumn day, and called his attention to the leaves underfoot, which had grown brown and ragged, like the pages of a very old book on which the centuries had laid their slow relentless fingers. In a burst of girlish confidence she told him that always, after the wild winds had stripped from the shuddering woodland its last leaves, and the pitiless rains had washed it clean, the spectacle of bare-branched trees, standing against the gentle gloom of a pale November sky, reminded her of a company of worldings, from whom every vestige of earthly ambition, pride and prosperity had fallen away. ”Anything,” she said to herself, ”_anything_ to keep the talk from becoming personal.”
”I can understand that,” said Edward, ”but the influences of unworldliness--I was almost saying other-worldliness--are nowhere felt as in the woods. Sometimes they exert a strange spell upon me. The petty pride and shallow subterfuges of fas.h.i.+onable life are impossible in nature's solitudes. Don't you think so?”
”Yes;” a.s.sented Helene, not seeing whither her unthinking acquiescence might lead her.
”That is why I dare to ask you why you have been so cold and formal towards me, so unlike your old self, for the last three months?”
No petty pride could help her now, no shallow subterfuges come to her aid. She had declared that they were impossible here. She could not turn her face away from his truth-compelling gaze. Why had Rose left her alone to be tortured in this dreadful way? How could she confess to him that jealousy and wounded vanity had caused the change in her demeanour? ”I cannot tell you,” she said at last. She had turned paler even than usual, but her eyes burned.
”I am sorry to have given you pain,” he said almost tenderly, and then the confession broke from her in a little storm of pent-up emotion.
”It was because I ceased to respect you! How could I respect a man who would allow a wild ignorant creature to caress his hands and hang upon his words?”
He turned a face of pure bewilderment upon her. ”If you mean the Algonquin girl, Wanda,” he said, ”she has never treated me otherwise than with indifference, anger and contempt.” He explained the scene of which Helene had been an involuntary witness, and the proud girl felt humiliated and belittled. But he was too generous and perhaps too clever to allow her to suppose that he attributed her coldness to weak jealousy. That would have placed her at a disadvantage which her pride would never have forgiven.
”So you believed me to be a vain contemptible idiot,” he said, ”Then you did perfectly right to scorn me.” He drove on furiously, with tense lips and contracted brow. She had misjudged him cruelly, but he would not descend to harsh accusation. Helene was decidedly uncomfortable. ”I have never scorned you,” she said. ”It was because I believed you superior to the folly and weakness of ordinary men that it grieved me to think you were otherwise.”
”It grieved you,” he repeated in a softer tone. ”Hereafter I wish you would confide all your griefs to me the moment you are aware of them.”
”To tell the truth, I don't expect to have any more.” She laughed her old joyous friendly laugh, and he stretched his arm across her lap to adjust the robe more closely to her form. Her att.i.tude towards him had completely changed, concretely as well as abstractly, for now she sat cosily and contentedly by his side, instead of perching herself a yard away, and allowing the winter winds to emphasize the coldness that had existed between them. This wonderful improvement in the mental atmosphere made them oblivious to a change in the outer air until Helene remarked upon the peculiar odour of smoke about them. This increased until it became almost stifling. Evidently the blazing brush heap, lit by the hand of some thrifty settler, had extended further than he was aware of. The smoke blew past them, and they were in the midst of that vividly picturesque spectacle--a fire in the forest. The flames ran swiftly up the dry, dead limbs, turning trees into huge blazing torches, and the light underbrush beneath them took on beautiful and fantastic shapes of fire. The gray sky was illumined with fiery banners, while, like scarlet-clothed imps at a carnival, the flames leaped and danced among the twigs and smaller branches.
The hot breeze blowing on her cheek filled Helene with sudden alarm, and Edward urged the horse to a quicker pace. But the frightened creature needed no urging. With a great shuddering leap he sprang forward as though a thousand fire-fiends from the infernal regions had been after him. Helene uttered a half-suppressed shriek, and clung strenuously to Edward's arm. Suddenly he gave a loud gasp of dismay.
On the road directly before them a pile of brush had caught the blaze and stretched before their startled eyes like a burning bridge. All attempts to stop or turn around were useless. The horse was wholly beyond control. For a moment they were enveloped in smoke and flame, shut into a fiery furnace, from which an instant later they emerged from danger, but with a badly singed steed and an unpleasant odour of fire upon them. Edward had pushed Helene to the bottom of the carriage, and flung the robe over her. Now he drew her trembling, and sobbing a little, back to his side. She was shaking excessively, and in order to restore her equanimity there was clearly nothing else to be done but to hold her closely in his arms, let fall his face to hers, and breathe in her ear every word of sympathy and comfort that came to his mind. She lay weakly with closed eyes upon his breast, while the excitement in her pulses gradually died away. When she opened her eyes the short November day was nearly at its close, and York was in sight. She drew away to her own corner of the seat, not with any visible blushes, for her complexion never lost its warm whiteness, but her eyes glowed, and her lips were 'like a thread of scarlet.'
”I am glad Rose was not with us,” she said, feeling a pressing need to say something, and in default of anything better to say, ”as she is even more nervous than I am.”
”Yes, I am _very_ glad she was not with us,” a.s.sented Edward, with an unusual amount of brotherly fervour, while he turned his horse in the direction of the only available hotel in the Capital, where the wearied travellers were content to rest for a few days before setting out in search of a new home.
CHAPTER X.