Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905

Jarvis had recognized the fall of the trunk, and in the one quick glance back he was able to give he saw the mare go down. His team, startled afresh by the crash, leaped ahead. Although he had been using every muscle more and more strenuously for the last fifteen minutes, new power rushed into his arms. He used every means in his power to quiet the pair, and, after a little, it began to tell. The ceasing of the mare’s hoofbeats upon the road behind withdrew from the situation what had been its most dangerous element, and at length, coming to a sudden sharp rise in the road, Jarvis succeeded in pulling the colts down to a walk. The instant it became possible he turned them about.

“Now,” he said, aloud, to them – and his voice was harsh with anxiety – “spoil you or not, you may go back at the top of your speed,” and he sent them, wild-eyed and breathing hard, straight back over their tracks. And as he neared the place where the mare had fallen, he held his breath and his heart grew sick within him.

It was an unfrequented road, and no one had come over it since himself. As he turned the bend he saw just what he had expected to see, and a great sob shook him. Then he gathered himself, with a mighty grip upon his whole being, for what there might be left to do for her.

The brown mare lay in a pitiful heap, her fore legs doubled under her. Beneath her, kept from being thrown over Betty’s head by her foot in the stirrup, and caught under the roll of the mare’s body, lay the slender figure of her rider.

“Oh – God!” groaned the man, as he threw himself upon the ground beside her. But as he fearfully turned her head toward him, that he might see first the worst there was, two dark-lashed, gray eyes slowly unclosed and looked up into his, and a smile, so faint that it was but the hint of a smile, trembled about her mouth.

In the swiftness of his relief Jarvis had to lay stern hands upon his own impulses. He smiled back at her with lips not quite steady. Then he set about releasing her.

When he had her out upon the grass she lay very white and still again. “Can you tell me where you are hurt?” he begged. Then, as she did not answer, he dashed off to a brook which gurgled in a hollow a rod away, and, coming back with a soaked handkerchief, gently bathed her face and hair. After a little her eyes unclosed again.

“I – don’t think I’m – badly hurt. My shoulder and – my – knee – ”

“I’ll get you home as soon as you feel able.”

She turned her head slowly toward the road. Divining her thought, Jarvis quietly placed himself between her eyes and the body of the brown mare. She understood.

“Is she dreadfully hurt?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Alive?”

He nodded. The girl lay still an instant, then she threw one arm across her eyes, and Jarvis saw that she was softly sobbing. He watched her for a little, then he took her other hand in his, holding it close and tenderly, as one would soothe an unhappy child.

“When I have taken you home,” he said, very gently, “I will come back to Betty.”

She drew her hand away quickly. “Take me home now,” she whispered.

So Jarvis, as best he could, took her home. It was a hard journey, which he would have made easier for her if he could have got her to lean against him. But she sat erect, holding herself with a white face and compressed lips, and Jarvis, thinking things he dared not put into words, drove with as little jolt and jar as might be back to the Hempstead Farms.

Joe, coming across the barnyard, saw them, looked at them a second time, and strode hurriedly forward. Jarvis would have given the horses into his charge and looked after the girl himself, but she forestalled him, and it was Joe, the man of overalls and wide straw hat, who helped her to her room, the porch being for the moment mercifully bereft of boarders. It was the sunny hour of the morning there.

But presently she sent for him. He went at once, for he was preparing, with Joe, to go to the injured horse. Mrs. Hempstead took him to Miss Farnsworth’s room, and stayed stiffly by while he crossed to the bed where the girl lay, still in her riding habit. As he came to her she held out her hand.

“Please forgive me,” she said, with her head turned away. “I might have killed – you.”

“No – you couldn’t. I’ve something to live for, so I’m invulnerable – till I get it.”

“Will you do something for me?” she asked. As she lay, with her head turned from him, the warm white curves at the back of her neck appealed to him more irresistibly than ever.

“Anything!”

She thrust one hand down under the folds of her skirt, drew out something heavy and shining which had lain there, and put it into his hand. Then she buried her face in the pillow. “Please – ” she began – and could not finish.

Jarvis looked around at his landlady, standing by like the embodiment of propriety. He turned again to the girlish figure shaking with its passionate regret. Then he took the little revolver from her, bent and whispered, “I understand,” and went quickly and silently away.

When Jarvis returned to Joe Hempstead, getting ready the flat drag known in country parlance as a “stone boat,” his first words were eager.

“Joe, I don’t know that there’s the slightest hope of saving the mare, but I’d like to bring her home and try. It was out of the question to look her over much there. She went down on her knees – smash – and one leg was certainly broken below the knee. But I’ve a hope the leg I couldn’t get at may only be bruised.”

Joe nodded. “We’ll do the best we can by her – for the little girl’s sake,” he declared. “She’s a high-spirited young critter – the human one, I mean – but I guess she’s a-takin’ this pretty hard, and I’d like to help her out.”

So presently brown Betty, lifting dumb eyes full of pain at the sound of a caressing voice, found herself in the hands of her friends.

“Well – it’s a question, Joe,” said Jarvis, slowly, ten minutes later. He was sitting with a hand on the mare’s flank, after a thorough and skillful examination. Betty’s head lay in Joe’s lap, held firmly by hands which were both strong and tender. “It’s a question whether it wouldn’t be the kindest thing to end her troubles for her. I expect she’d tell us to, if she could talk. She’ll have to be put in a sling, of course, and kept there for weeks.”

“That there sprained leg – ” Joe began, doubtfully.

“Yes – it’ll be about as tough a proposition as the broken one. But – ”

The two men looked at each other.

“If you say so – ” agreed Joe.

“Let’s try it,” urged Jarvis. “It’s a question of human suffering, or brute – and there’s a possibility of success. I shall be here a day or two longer – over the Fourth. I’ll play nurse as long as I stay – I’d like nothing better. I was born and brought up with horses – in Kentucky.”

“What I ain’t picked up about ’em I knew when I was born,” said Joe, with a laugh and a pat of the mare’s head. “All right – we’ll turn ourselves into a couple of amachure vet’rinaries – seein’ they ain’t none hereabouts.”

Between them they had soon bestowed the mare upon the stone boat in the best possible position for enduring the ride.

“Seems as if she understands the whole thing,” Joe said, at length, looking down into the animal’s face as her head lay quietly upon the blanket. “You’re a lady,” he said, softly, to Betty. The mare’s beautiful liquid eyes looked dumbly back at him, and he stooped and rubbed her nose. “Yes, you’re a lady,” he repeated, “and we’ll do our level best to deserve your trustin’ us – poor little wreck.”

In a roomy stall they put Betty. It was an afternoon’s work to arrange it for the scientific treatment of the broken leg. Joe, with the readiness of a surgeon – he was, indeed, an amateur veterinary, and was consulted as such by the whole countryside – set the leg and put it in plaster of Paris. The two men rigged a sling which should keep the weight of the mare off the injured legs and support her body. With the help of two farm hands, Betty was put into this gear in a way which made it impossible for her to move enough to hurt the broken leg. A rest was provided for her head, and her equine comfort was in every way considered. When all was done, the farmer and the electrical engineer looked at each other with exceeding satisfaction.

“She’ll get well,” said Jarvis, with conviction. “I never saw it better done than you have managed it.”

“Me?” returned Joe, with a laugh. “Well, say – I wouldn’t mind havin’ you for chief assistant when I go into the business perfessionally.”

Jarvis spent the rest of the day, more or less, in the box stall. The evening was occupied in assisting Betty to receive the entire houseful of boarders, whom the news of the accident had reached at about supper time.

At midnight, having tried without success for an hour to sleep, he got up, dressed and went out through the warm July starlight to tell the brown mare he was sorry for her. He found a man’s figure standing beside that of the animal.

“Well!” Joe greeted him. “You’re another. I can’t seem to sleep, thinkin’ about this poor critter, slung up here – sufferin’ – and not understandin’. They like company – now I’m sure of it. It’s a good thing she can’t know how many days and nights she’s got to be strung here, ain’t it?”

His hand was gently stroking the mare’s shoulder, as if he thought it must ache. He looked around at Jarvis, standing in the rays of light from a lantern hanging on a peg near by.

“Go back to bed, Joe,” advised Jarvis. “You’ve plenty to do to-morrow. I’ll stay with the patient a while. I shall like to do it – I’m as bad as you, I can’t sleep for thinking of her.”

“Course you can’t,” thought Joe, going back to the house. “But you didn’t say which ‘her’ ’twas that keeps you awake. I guess it’s one’s much as ’tis t’other.”

It was about two o’clock in the morning that Jarvis, in a corner of the box stall, where the mare could see him, lying at full length upon a pile of hay, his hands clasped under his head, heard light and uneven footsteps slowly approaching across the barn floor. He was instantly alert in every sense, but he did not move.

“Betty dear,” said a soft voice. Then a slender figure came into view in the dim light, walking with a limp and painfully. A loose blue robe trailed about her, and two long brown braids, curling at the ends, hung over her shoulders. She came slowly into the stall and stood and looked at Betty. Suddenly she put both arms around the mare’s neck, laid her cheek against the animal’s face, and spoke to her.

“Poor Betty,” she said, pitifully. “Did you fall into the hands of a cruel girl, who hurt you for all the rest of your life? Can you forgive her, Betty? She didn’t mean to do it, dear. She was out of temper herself, because she couldn’t have her own way – when she didn’t want her own way – Betty – can you understand? You were doing the best you could – she made you act such a silly part. Dear little Betty – she would stand beside you all night long, just to punish herself, if she could – but – ”

She leaned against the side of the stall, and sank slowly down to the ground, with a hand pressed to her knee. Jarvis, on the hay, stirred involuntarily, and with a little cry of alarm the girl struggled to her feet again. At the next instant, as Jarvis spoke gently and his face came into view in the lantern light, she leaned once more, breathing quickly, against the side of the stall. Her face as she stared at him was like that of a startled child.

“You mustn’t stand, you’re not fit,” he said, anxiously. “You ought not to have come. Let me help you back.”

She gazed at him beseechingly. “Please let me stay a few minutes,” she said. Was this meek creature the willful young person of the morning? “I can’t sleep for thinking of her, and I want to make her understand that I’m sorry.”

“I think she does. If she doesn’t, she at least appreciates the tone of your voice. Even a horse might have sense enough for that. Let me bring you something for a seat, if you will stay.”

He found an empty box, covered it with a new blanket, and set it by the side of the stall. She sat down and studied the arrangement of the appliances for the keeping of the mare in the quiet necessary to the healing of the broken leg. Jarvis explained it all to her, and she listened eagerly and attentively. But when he had finished she asked him abruptly:

“Did you hear what I said to Betty?”

“I could hardly help it.”

“Then you heard me say that about being out of temper at not having my own way this morning – when I – really didn’t want my own way.” Her eyes were on Betty’s patient little head.

“Do you expect me to believe that?” he asked, smiling.

“Did I seem to want it?”

“Very decidedly.”

“Yet – if you had let me have it – do you know how I should have felt toward you?”

“I know how I should have felt toward myself.”

“How would you?” she asked, curiously.

He shook his head. “I believe I’d better not try to explain that.”

“Why not?”

“Dangerous ground.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When you admit,” he said, “that when you seem to want your own way, you really don’t want it – ”

“That was just in this instance,” she interrupted, quickly.

“Such a thing never happened before?”

“Certainly not.”

“How about the time you lost your slipper off under the table the night we were dining at the Dennisons’ and you forbade me to get it? Then when you thought I hadn’t – ”

“Oh – that was a silly thing – don’t mention it. This was different. You knew the horses weren’t safe for me to drive – ”

“You admit that?”

“For the sake of the argument, yes. But since you thought they weren’t safe, it would have been a weak thing for you to have given in to me.”

“Thank you – that’s precisely the way I felt.”

“But it doesn’t prevent – it wouldn’t prevent my wanting my own way – always – about everything – ”

“When?”

She turned a brilliant color under the lantern rays.

He bent forward. “Are you warning me?”

“I’m trying to let you know the sort of person I am.”

“Well,” he said, leaning back again, and studying her with attention, noting the picture she unconsciously made in her blue robe, with the brown braids hanging over her shoulders, “I’ve been observing you with somewhat close scrutiny for about three years now, and it occurs to me that I’m fairly conversant with your moods and tenses. Perhaps I ought to be warned, but – I’m not.”

“I’ve always been told that sort of thing grows upon one,” she observed.

“What sort of thing? Having one’s own way?”

She nodded.

“You’re right there,” he agreed. “I’ve been wanting mine, more or less strenuously, for three years.”

“Elaine Dennison,” she observed – somewhat irrelevantly, it might seem – “is the dearest, most amiable girl. She loves to make people happy.”

“Yes – and doesn’t succeed. And you – don’t want to make them happy – and – could.”

She shook her head. “No – I never could. Anybody who had much to do with me would have to learn at once that I must have my own way.”

“And if he should chance to be the sort of person who always wants his own way, it would be disastrous. Yes – I see. And I comprehend your ideal. I saw such a man once. It was in a railway station. He stood at one side holding all the luggage, and his wife bought the tickets. She was larger than he – I should say about one hundred and fifty pounds larger. To take and hold such an enviable position as this woman held needs, I think, an excess of avoirdupois.”

He was laughing down at her, for she had got to her feet, and he had risen with her. One hundred and twenty pounds of girlish grace and slenderness looked even less beside one hundred and eighty of well-distributed masculine bulk. But it was only his lips which laughed. His eyes dwelt on her with no raillery in their depths, only a longing which grew with each jesting word he spoke.

“Will you let me carry you in?” he asked, as she moved slowly toward Betty. She shook her head. She laid a caressing hand on the mare’s smooth nose and whispered in her ear.

“Good-night, Betty,” she said.

“You ought not to walk, with that knee. You can’t fool with a knee – it’s a bad place to get hurt. I’m going to carry you.”

She stood still, looking up at him at last. “Good-night, Mr. Jarvis,” she said.

He came close. “See here,” he said, rapidly, under his breath, “I can’t stand this any longer. You’ve put me off and put me off – and I’ve let you. You’ve had your way. Now I’m going to have mine. You shall answer me, one way or the other, to-night – now. I love you – I’ve told you so – twice with my lips – a hundred times in every other way. But I’m not going to be played with any longer. Will you take me – now – or never?”

“What a singular way – what a barbaric way,” she said, with proud eyes.

“It may be singular – it may be primitive – it’s my way – to end what I must. Will you answer me?”

“Yes, I’ll answer you,” she said, with uplifted head.

“Look at me, then.”

She raised her eyes to his. Given the chance he so seldom got from her, he gazed eagerly down into their depths, revealed to him in the half light, half shadow, of the strange place they were in. She met the look steadily at first, then falteringly. At length the lashes fell.

In silence he waited, motionless. She tried to laugh lightly. “You’re so tragic,” she murmured.

There was no answer.

“We should never be happy together,” she began, slowly. “You’ve a will like iron – I’ve felt it for three years. Mine is – I don’t know what mine is – but it’s not used to being denied. We should quarrel over everything, even when I knew, as I did to-day, that you were right. I – don’t know how to tell you – but – I – ”

She hesitated. He made no answer, no plea, simply stood, breathing deep but steadily, and steadily watching her.

“You’re such a good friend,” she went on, reluctantly, after a little. She was drooping against the door of the box stall like a flower which needs support, but he did not offer to help her. “Such a good friend I don’t want to lose you – but I know by the way you speak that I’m going to lose you if – I – ”

She raised her eyes little by little till they had reached his shoulders, broad and firm and motionless.

“Good-by, Mr. Jarvis,” she said, very low, and in a voice which trembled a little. “But please don’t mind very much. I’m not – worth it. I – ”

She lifted her eyes once more from his shoulder to his face, to find the same look, intensified, meeting her with its steady fire. She paled slowly, dropped her eyes and turned as if to go, when a great breath, like a sob, shook her. She stood for an instant, faltering, then turned again and took one uncertain step toward him.

“Oh – I can’t – I can’t – ” she breathed. “You’re the stronger – and I – I – want you to be!”

With one quick stride he reached her. “Of course you do,” he said, his voice exultant in its joy.

Behind them brown Betty watched with dumb eyes, wondering, perhaps, how so stormy a scene could be succeeded by such motionless calm. As for her, this new, strange way of standing, always standing, too full of pain to sleep, was a thing to be endured as best she might.

R. H. – A PORTRAIT

Not credulous, yet active in beliefThat good is better than the worst is bad;A generous courage mirrored in the gladChallenging eyes, that gentle oft with griefFor honest woe – while lurking like a thief,Peering around the corners, humor creeps,Into the gravest matters pries and peeps,Till grimmest face relaxes with relief;A heart belovèd of the wiser godsGrown weary of solemnity prolonged —That snatches scraps of gladness while Fate nods,Varying life’s prose with stories many-songed:One who has faced the dark and naught denied —Yet lives persistent on the brightest side.Allan Munier.

THE FUTURE MRS. THORNTON

By Sarah Guernsey Bradley

From a worldly point of view there could be no question as to the wisdom and desirability of the match, and Miss Warren’s family was worldly to the core.

It had been a crushing blow to Mrs. Warren’s pride, and, incidentally, a blow in a vastly more material direction, that her two older daughters had made something of a mess of matrimony, pecuniarily speaking.

She was confessedly ambitious for Nancy – Nancy, the youngest, the cleverest, the fairest of the three. Position she always would have, being a Warren, but she wanted the girl to have all the other good things of this life, that for so many years had been unsatisfied desires. Not, of course, that she would want Nancy to marry for money, she assured herself virtuously; that, in addition to being an indirect violation of an article of the Decalogue, was so distinctly plebeian. But it would be so comfortable if Nancy’s affections could only be engaged in a direction where the coffers were not exactly empty. In other words, money would be no obstacle to perfect connubial bliss.

And think of the future which awaited Nancy if she would but say the word! Even the fondly cherished memory of the Warrens’ past glory dwindled into nothingness in comparison.

To be sure, Mr. James Thornton was not so young as he had been ten years ago – “What’s a man’s age? He must hurry more, that’s all,” Mrs. Warren was fond of quoting – nor, in point of girth, did he assume less aldermanic proportions as time rolled on, but there was such a golden lining to these small clouds of affliction, that he was very generally looked upon as an altogether desirable parti.

It must be admitted that, among other minor idiosyncrasies, Mr. James Thornton would now and then slip into the vernacular. Under great stress of feeling, in the heat of argument and the like, he had been known to break the Sixth Commandment in so far as the English of the king was concerned.

“You was,” “those kind,” “between you and I,” would slip out, but these variations from the strictly conventional were looked upon as little eccentricities in which a man whose fortune went far above the million mark could well afford to indulge.

“James is so droll,” the aristocratic Mrs. Warren would say comfortably, resolutely closing her eyes to the fact that James’ early environment, and not his sense of humor, was responsible for his occasional lapses. For James’ father, old Sid Thornton, as he was always called, could not have boasted even a bowing acquaintance with the very people who were now not only falling over each other in their mad anxiety to entertain his son, but were even more than willing to find that same son a suitable wife among their own fair daughters. Old Sid Thornton’s homely boy, Jim, running away to sea, and Mr. James Thornton, back to the old town with a fortune at his disposal, and living in a mansion that was the admiration and envy of the whole county, were two totally different entities.

Temptingly did the mothers with marriageable daughters display their wares. But of all the number, and many of them were passing fair, Mr. James Thornton cast longing eyes on only one, and that was Nancy Warren. Frankly, he wanted to get married, settle down, perhaps go into politics when he had time; he wanted a mistress for that beautiful house on the hill, some one who would know how to preside at his table and dispense his hospitality; some one, in short, who would know, instinctively, all the little niceties which were as a sealed book to him, and the tall, fair, thoroughbred Miss Warren seemed ideally fitted for the post.

Encouraged thereto by the tactful Mrs. Warren, James had poured into her eager ears the secrets of his honest soul, and Mrs. Warren had listened with a sweet and ready sympathy that had caused James quite to forget a certain stinging snubbing he had received from the selfsame lady, because once, back in the dark ages – before Nancy had opened her blue eyes on this naughty world – when he was a gawky, freckle-faced boy of sixteen, he had dared to walk home from church with Mildred, the eldest daughter of the house of Warren.

That was long before Mrs. Warren had felt poverty’s vicious pinch, and before her life had become one continual struggle to make both ends meet. Somehow, her point of view had changed since then – points of view will change when the howl of the wolf is heard in the near distance, and yet one must smile and smile before one’s little world – and, all other things being equal, Mr. James Thornton’s home, garish with gold and onyx, and fairly shrieking with bad tapestries and faulty paintings and ponderous furniture, seemed as promising and fair a haven as she could possibly find for the youngest and only remaining daughter of the house of Warren. As for any little jarring notes in the decorative scheme of the Thornton abode, Mrs. Warren knew that she could trust Nancy to change all that, if she were once established there as the bride of Mr. James Thornton.