CHAPTER V
IMPROBABILITIES
AS long as his mind remained astonished into receptiveness, passive to the sharp point of the scholar's thought, so long Carron believed the conviction that had been thrust upon him. For that time he saw his adventure simplified. It spread before him definite and clear to get through as open land come upon abrupt from forest. But, no sooner had the recoiled reason time to gather itself than the reaction of feeling began; the rallying of logic, when the positive combative brain seized the question, pulling it apart; the rushing in of doubts from all sides; the swift review by skepticism of what was probable or improbable; and, last, the laughter! It was inaudible. It shook him inwardly. A woman? What had the sound of that word to do with the idea of a wild horse? Women, those creatures without initiative, compelled in their excursions into the wilderness to certain spaces and to limited hours, whose adventures, when they had them, were always unoriginal—the mere repetition of some man's greater adventure—how should one of these chance upon a discovery unusual and heroic?
The scholar had come a step forward, and now tentatively lifted his voice. "Blanche?" he said.
She turned, startled from her dream, wavered in uncertain balance, and snatched at something to support herself. Carron grasped her outflung hand. It was warm and smooth, with a remarkable live feeling as of some captured little animal. It rested unconscious of what held it, preoccupied, intense. Whatever feeling possessed this girl seemed to possess her completely, head to heel. Her surprise at sight of her father had run into her finger-tips. "What is it?" she asked, leaning forward.
"Your mother says she is waiting for you to stitch the quilts," he explained, advancing. "I've been looking for you all over the hill."
"But why didn't she blow the horn? Why shouldshe send you? I don't believe she did," Blanche Rader objected mischievously to the scholar's diffident glance. "It is Mr. Carron who has waked you up and got you out." She lowered her eyes to the young man with a smile, realized her hand was still in his, smiled a little more with a faint nervous quiver at the corners of her mouth, and her fingers slipped from his. She slid from the well-curb before he could help her. "I'm sorry," she said, "I shall have to go back." She seemed to interrogate as to whether the two men would accompany her.
The print of her fingers was still warm in Carron's palm, the brief part she had played of principal in his drama keen in his fancy, the impulse was, follow! But Rader was the person his logic wanted, and Rader showed no disposition to move from the spot where he stood. He put thumb and finger into his pocket, drew out a little yellow-bowled pipe, lit it and leaned back against the edge of the well. "You will have to hurry, won't you?" he asked his daughter.
"Don't let us detain you," Carron said.
She gave an amused, puzzled glance, as if she thought her father's behavior a little odd. "Very well," she said, "then, since you're so good, I will run."
She did not turn back along the way they had come, but dipped into the wood where the hill rose steepest, running like a lapwing, enjoying the quick motion, smiling as she darted among the trees. Golden-brown and white in the sun, and dusky white and dark-brown in shadow, she retreated up the irregular aisle of branches, and Carron, watching her flight, wondered. A woman like that, long-throated, light moving, pliant and elusive! When she had frowned on him, asking if she were a hunter; when she had leaned on the balcony as the high priestess of housework, even when she had spoken of currying his horse, there had been no hint of the Amazon. She had worn a graceful air, social and schooled, suggesting the walled inclosure where women are supposed to play. There was no hint of the Amazon now—not that; only a suggestion of wildness afield, of moods that might not be held to the beat of regulated hours. And there had been other moments that morning, curious moments, when she had shown inexplicable looks. He recalled how she had sat dreaming on the old spring curb with eyes of imagination fixed on some place far off. "Splendid trampling things like horses," she had said, and he remembered how the color had come up in her face. Well, a girl's fancies! but what of that time he had called the spot of alarm to her cheeks? What of the glance she had darted at him and his joke about the selling of a horse, suspicious, quick as a sword? His mind fluctuated between credulity and a smile.
The scholar was pulling thoughtfully on his pipe, his eyes, at intervals, making excursions to the young man's face. "He believes it," Carron reflected, "yes, by Jove, he does!" The singular old chap, always in the clouds, knowing nothing real until it was translated into the unreal, his belief was not much reassurance! How could a man tell in what foggy ways he came by his ideas? Evolved them out of his own imagination, perhaps. That was the devilish part of people with imaginations. But there was the man on the road. Certainly that fellow had seemed to have his feet firmly planted on earth, and his eyes sharp for the things of it. Certainly he had betrayed the qualities of the materialist, who will make sure of his fact before he takes it seriously. And had not he looked toward the girl as the keeper of the secret? "Try Raders," he had said. Hadn't he meant, "Try Blanche Rader?" The memory of how those two had looked when they had stood together on the drive, and the fellow had taken the gold piece from her, came back a clear little picture. In the light of his new knowledge the thing had an ugly look. He could see how the man might sell her confidence; but to take the money from her hand! To be sure it had been only a way by which the thing had reached a destination for which it was first intended. But there were ways, Carron thought, which were worse than the object they gained.
He caught himself drifting just on the edge of credulity. So many appearances thrust him there; yet, when he thought, after all, they were but appearance—looks surprised out of faces, at the moment more convincing than a vocabulary, but, as soon as they disappeared, leaving the reason doubtful they had ever existed. He had not had the reassurance of the audible word, which leaves an echo in the ear as well as in the mind, and gives a basis to think from. Not even that, yet the scholar who had come out to find him was evidently confidently expecting he had something to tell.
He drew a deep breath for his dive into unknown waters. He thrust his hands in his pockets, walked a little meditative half circle on the soft piny floor of the forest, and came to a stop square in front of Rader. "Well!" he said with a falling inflection.
"Well?" Rader replied interrogatively and smiling.
"You might have told me in the first place. You would have saved me some trouble."
Rader breathed a cloud of smoke, and waited.
"What does she want of the horse?" Carron said. quietly. He said it so quietly one could hardly think any risk attached to it or any suspense for him.
Rader took his little yellow-bowled pipe out of his mouth, "Didn't she tell you?"
The question fell pat and natural as if this were some old, often discussed matter which both understood well enough. Carron felt that he was smiling rather foolishly. He shook his head.
Rader's pipe, still suspended in his hand, sent up a little cloud before his face as he leaned forward. "What did she tell you?" he asked.
"The truth is, I don't believe she knows she's told me anything," Carron confessed. "In a manner of speaking, I got it out of her."
Rader knitted his forehead. This way of approaching the matter seemed scarcely to his fancy. "Better ask her straight," he said laconically.
"What she wants of it?"
"Yes, and whether she's seen it, too. Better have it all square from the first; let her know what you're after."
"Do you think she would tell me?"
"Lord knows," said the scholar, with a humorous eye; "I never do!"
"She told you." He was making assumptions as fast as he could find them, and every time Rader transformed them into facts.
"That is different. She tells me everything because I don't care. What would an old fellow like me care? She might just as well go whisper it to one of those stone heads on the mountain up yonder."
Carron restrained a smile at the scholar's idea of what a tight vessel he was for a secret. "She told Ferrier," he urged.
"Did she say that?"
"No; you did."
"I did?" Rader looked distressed. "I haven't said anything!"
Carron realized his slip, but there was nothing now for it but to brazen the thing out. "Not in so many words. But you did say last night, don't you remember? that Ferrier hadn't given away your confidence. From which I inferred that he had given away some one else's; from which I now infer that he had given away Miss Rader's, and therefore that she must have told him something in the first place—you see?"
"Lord," said Rader, "you infer a good deal, don't you?" Both of them were at broad grin, but the scholar's was a little sheepish. "I did let go of it there, didn't I?" he admitted. He mused. "All the same, I don't think she told Bert Ferrier about it." He turned, and looked thoughtfully down into the dark mouth of the well as if he hoped to see truth lurking in it. Then, putting his pipe back in his mouth and getting gradually into his long slipshod stride, he began to saunter away across the clearing toward the trees, following the direction his daughter had taken a little while before.
Carron caught step with him. He was afraid by that unlucky remark of his that he had startled his man to caution; and indeed, striding on through sun and shadow, Rader kept silence for some minutes. Yet he had not so much the air of a person mum as of one musing, and turning over a question. Carron could see it ruminating in his eyes, and expressed in the fluctuating cloud of his pipe as they climbed the ascent among the pines, startling the blue wings of birds into flight among the branches. Noon was in the air, the languor of it. They dipped into a little depression, began another more gradual rise, and presently sighted the line of the hotel roof; a little higher, glimpses of windows came into view between the trunks of trees; and, last, a long white-washed covered passage, with a little round room at the end of it, extending from the back of the house. It projected into the pines like a promontory into the sea, and they, the incoming craft, voyaging toward it. Carron recognized this must be the scholar's study. A piazza was in front of it, evidently but the continuation of the broader one that clung all around the house. Three wooden steps led up to it. At the foot of these Rader paused. He leaned back against the rail and spoke as if no silence had intervened.
"It wouldn't have been like her to tell him," he said argumentatively. "She's too close-mouthed, and, besides—" he mused and puffed—"not that his knowing would matter any more than mine," he took up another sentence. "He's nothing of a rider. He wouldn't want the horse himself. She's been sure enough that he would never take it away from her."
The way he put it struck coldly on Carron's expectant nerves. He heard in it the explanation of the whole mysterious business—the explanation, and that always meant the descent from the high idea to the reasonable and the ordinary. There was a horse, oh, no doubt! He could believe that now; but it was not the thing it had been represented. It was not his leader of herds, Son of the Wind, but a creature less than marvelous, already touched by the hand of man. He looked the possibility in the face. Over the ruin of his crazy expectations he could smile at it. "Then the horse isn't afraid of her?"
Rader looked at him in astonishment. "Isn't afraid? Why, bless my soul, it's as wild as the wind."
"As wild as the wind!" The mere sound of the words in his ears was delight. "And she can't even come near it?"
"Bless my soul," said Rader again, "it's never even seen her. She has been very careful about that."
"But how does she see it? Where?" He was all a-wonder.
"Ask her—ask her!" Rader insisted.
"And suppose she won't answer?"
Rader shrugged, as who would say, "Then, that will be the end of it'
The young man laughed. The thing would not end as simply as all that. If Blanche Rader would not speak— His conjecture didn't get further, for he believed that she would. Rader was looking at him expectantly, as if he thought to see the question put to test on the instant. And why not? Now was a better time than any; and the scholar's eye, quizzical, hinting that perhaps the undertaking was a daunting one, put him on his mettle. He pulled his hat over his nose, ran up the steps, and turning to the right, walked quickly down the side piazza.
For an interval there was wall, without opening; and then began a series of low-set square windows, which "Janfer," in his celebrated "Folly," had ornamented with wooden cornices of acanthus. He passed the first, since it was covered with a curtain, the curtains to the second were drawn back, and from within he heard a sound like a large and much occupied bee. Broad noon made it hard to look into the house, but by stepping back to the railing, holding his hand over his eyes and tipping his head, he was able to see the room. The greater part of it was in shadow. Mrs. Rader's figure was barely distinguishable, back toward him, stooping above a table, and, like the clipping "Fate," with shears in her hand, but drawn near to the window and the light was a sewing-machine over which flowed a cascade of stuff, heavy and white; and moving this through the machine, manipulating it delicately, Blanche Rader sat. Her head was bent. He saw the greater mass of her hair like a shadow, the light on her forehead, and the long, dim line of her throat as she leaned sidewise. She was very intent, seeing no one, all her wits apparently stitching into that sewing. He smiled. Anything more gentle, and accessible, one could not imagine. But the figure in the background made him wary. He had had an impression of it as an interfering element. He reached in his pocket and found a scrap of paper and a pencil. Resting this on his address-book he wrote, "Eight-thirty A. M. to-morrow, horseback. Will you?"
He went up to the window, pressed the card against the glass and drummed his fingers softly on the pane.
The machine stopped, ran back a little way. She looked up quickly, and though he must have been but a black figure against daylight to her, he saw she recognized him immediately; then her eyes fixed on the white paper. She was a while about it. He could not tell whether she was re-reading his message to get a better understanding of it, or whether she was merely considering it as a proposition. At last she looked at him. Eyes and lips smiled with pleasure. She nodded. Then, bending forward again and reaching into the intricacies around the needle, she disentangled the long thread, and resumed her seam, as if nothing had shadowed in the window to snap it, or to put a fresh thought in her mind.