in Carter's coat, she might have been the young wife of her imaginings.
Her sentimental expression moved Helen to laughter. "You look so domestic!" she tittered. "So soft and contemplative. One would think – "
Mrs. Leslie was too clever for transparent denial. "I don't care," she answered. "I like him. He's awfully dear." And her expressed preference affected Helen – helped to break down the last barriers of caste feeling between herself and Carter. Till then she had always maintained a slight reserve towards him, but when, coming in unexpectedly, he caught them at their labors, she was as free and frank with him as she had ever been with a man of her old set. The change expressed itself in her hand-shake at parting, though it fell far short of Mrs. Leslie's lingering pressure.
In his surprise at the quantity and quality of the latter, Carter may have returned it, or Mrs. Leslie may have mistaken the reaction of her own grip for answer. Anyway, she thought he did, and on the way home plead weariness as an excuse to indulge luxurious contemplations. She fed on his every look, tone, accent, coloring them all with her own feeling, an indulgence for which she would pay later; indeed, she was even then paying, in that it was eating away her weak moral fibre as acid eats a metal, preparing her for greater licenses. At first, however, she was timorous – content with small touches, accidental contacts, the physical sense of nearness when, as often happened, they coaxed him to take them for a drive behind his famous ponies.
But such slight fare could not long suffice for her growing passion. Having observed, outwardly, the laws of social morality only because, so far, they had consorted with inclination; knowing, inwardly, no law but that of her own pleasure, it was only a question of time until she would become desperate enough to balance reputation against indulgence.
This came to pass a couple of months after Helen had opened up school, and would have happened sooner but that even a reputation cannot be given away without a bidder. Not that Carter was ignorant or indifferent to her feeling. Two thousand years have failed to make man completely monogamous and he is never displeased at a pretty woman's preference. A condition had interposed between the fire and the tow. In every man's life there comes a time when, for the moment, he is impervious to the call of illicit passion. A first pure love bucklers him like a shining ægis, and while certain pure eyes looked out upon Carter from earth, air, and sky, wherever his fancy strayed, he would not barter a sigh for the perishable commodity Elinor Leslie offered. Having, however, formed her judgments of men from the weak masculinity about her, she could not realize this. Imagining that he would come at the crook of her finger, she tried to recapture Opportunity.
"Mr. Carter was so kind and considerate of Helen that I think we ought to take him up," she said to her husband one day; and Leslie, whose good-natured stupidity lent itself to every suggestion, readily agreed.
Unfortunately for her scheme, Carter proved unfelicitously blind to his interest – as she saw it. Negatively, he refused to be "taken up," offering good-natured excuses to all of Leslie's invitations. So nothing was left but the occasional opportunities afforded by Helen's week-end visits. And these did not always lend themselves to Mrs. Leslie's purpose. When Molyneux brought her up – as happened half the time – he made full use of his monopoly; while Carter, in his turn, often drove her down to see Jenny in Lone Tree.
To do the young lady justice, she held a fairly even balance between those, her two cavaliers. According to the canons of romance she ought to have fallen so deeply in love with one as to hate the other. Instead she found herself liking them both.
There was, of course, a difference in the quality of her feeling. Strange feminine paradox! she was drawn to Molyneux by the opposite of the qualities on which she based her feeling for Carter. At heart woman is a reformer, and once convinced of his sincerity towards herself, the fact that Molyneux was reputed something of a sinner increased rather than lessened her interest. She experienced the joys of driving the lion in leading-strings, ignoring the danger of the beast turning upon her with rending fangs. Feeling her power, she tried to exercise it for his good, and felt as virtuous over the business as if it were not a form of vanity, and a dangerous one at that. Anyway, she rode and drove with him so much that spring and summer that she practically annihilated Mrs. Leslie's chances of seeing Carter.
That lady could, however, and did observe him in secret. Riding from home while Leslie was busy seeding, she would make a wide détour, keeping the lowlands, and so bring up, unobserved, in a poplar clump that afforded a near view of Carter's fields.
One day will example a score of others. It was, as aforesaid, seeding-time. Stripped of her snowy bodice, the earth lay as some brown virgin, her bosom bared to man's wooing and the kisses of the sun and rain. From her covert Mrs. Leslie could see his ox-team slowly crawling upon the brown fields which, as yet, had known no bearing yoke. Those days love was suggested by everything in nature. The air quivered in passionate lines down the horizon. Warmth, light, love were omnipresent. By every slough the mallard brooded. Overhead the wild goose winged northward to bring forth her kind on the rim of polar seas. Prairie cocks primped and ruffled on every knoll before their admiring hens. To her it seemed that birds and beasts, flesh and fowl were happier than she in their matings. Passionately, with bursting sighs, she strained at her chains, wildly challenging the marriage institution which has slowly evolved from the travail of a thousand generations.
Hers was the old struggle between the flesh and the spirit, the struggle that gave the sexless desert its hermit population. With this difference: Ancestry had bequeathed to her no spirit. She had nothing to pit against the flesh but her own unruly inclination. For her the battle offered no meed of victory in the form of chastity triumphant. The "dice of God were loaded"; she was striving against the record of foolish or vicious fathers. And she played so hard! At times, little heathen in spite of her culture, her eyes looked out upon him from the spring greenery with the tender longing of a mother deer; again they blazed with baffled fires; often she threw herself down in a passion of tears. So, feeding upon its very privations, her distemper waxed until, one June evening, it burst all bounds.
Returning through late gloaming with his weekly mail, Carter came on her holding her horse by the trail. Her voice, low yet vibrant, issued from the gloom.
"I'm afraid I shall have to trouble you for a ride, Mr. Carter; my saddle-girth has burst."
"Your hand is wet. It's blood!" he exclaimed, as he handed her in.
"I fell on a sharp stone. Will you please tie this handkerchief."
Bending to comply, he saw that the wound was clean-cut, and this may have caused him to examine the girth before he threw the saddle on behind. Then he knew – was certain as though he had seen her slash it with the penknife that lay in the scrub near by.
Picking up a stone, he pounded the severed edges on the wheel-tire; pounded them to a frazzle while she looked on, her pupils dilated in the half light, large, soft, black as velvet, intensifying a curious mixture of expectation and content. But if she read consent in the pains he was at with her excuse, alarmed surprise displaced expectation when, climbing in, he drove on without a word.
She glanced up, tentatively, once, twice, a dozen times at the erect figure, but always he stared ahead. Again and again her scarlet lips trembled, but she choked; sound halted on its bitten thresholds. Once she touched his arm, but he drew sharply away and his hand rose and flung beaded sweat from his brow. So, for a tumultuous age it seemed to her, they whirled through the gathering night, rattled on until a slab of light burst through the darkness.
Followed Leslie's voice. "Hullo, Elinor! What's the matter?"
She stiffened – Carter felt her stiffen as in a mortal rigor – but she answered, in level tones: "Oh, nothing much. My saddle-girth burst and Mr. Carter kindly drove me home. Won't you come in? Well – I'm ever so much obliged. Good-night."
Whirling homeward
