2
They rode side by side down the steep slope of the mound. The horses were eager to return, and once in the road their riders let them canter. Louise was ahead and as she came abreast of the Dixon ranch she reined in and waited. Her cheeks were still flushed, her eyes restless. She smiled with a blend of humor and frustration which Dare mistook for regret. In his face she saw a reply to her own countenance, a reply which took the form of a little plea for pardon, a plea grotesquely beside the point,—as if she hadn’t manoeuvred the lapse from grace! Her frustration was physiological, the eternal waiting for an ecstasy which Keble and Dare could command at will, but which Fate still withheld from her. It was unfair and it was discouraging.
Dare drew up at her side. He was more handsome, more authoritative than ever, also more tender and humble than she would ever have guessed him capable of being. Yet also a little annoying. Men could be so insultingly sure of themselves. Here was a man who by all the signs ought to have been the man. She had assumed as much and behaved accordingly. But instead of bringing about the miracle, the duet for the sake of which she had been willing to risk Keble’s dignity, he had merely achieved the old solo, with her as instrument. “Why can’t they understand? Why don’t they learn?” her outraged desires were crying in protest. She tried to read them a moral lecture, but that was of no avail. She was, after all, an animal, and it was folly to pretend that she was not.
Dare smiled tentatively, inquiringly, waiting for her to speak.
She looked down at Sundown’s ears. “I suppose that is what I would have done, if I had been a man. Just once.”
He shook his head. “The ‘just once’ would have been like diving into a sea in which you would have to sink or swim. I hope you don’t mean just once literally, for that would be as good as letting me drown.”
She was too proud to explain, and she would not raise false hopes. “We must forget that it happened,” she finally announced.
He was bewildered. “You mean, you can forget!”
She made no reply.
“It was you who said that the fulfilment is no more disgraceful than the desire.”
At that moment she hated him for his masculine obtuseness.
She gave Sundown’s head a jerk. “I’m glad you’re going to Japan,” she said, and dug her heels into the horse’s sides. A moment later she was lost to view in a cloud of dust.
Like some parched and hungry wanderer who had dreamt of orchards, only to wake up under a bruising hail of apples and pears that startled him into forgetfulness of his thirst, Dare gasped. “Already!” It was an ominously precipitate reminder of his theory that they were each leaders, that neither would be content to subordinate his individuality to the other’s.
His mind bit and gnawed at the baffling knot in a tangle which a few moments since seemed to have yielded for good and all. As a psychologist he was somewhat too clever, and was capable of overlooking a factor that might have leapt to the mind of a kitchen-maid.
He took a trail that served as a short-cut to the ridge, and caught up with Louise on the new road that branched off towards the Castle. She turned in her saddle, and patted Sundown’s flank. “Slowpoke!” she flung back at him, teasingly, but already relentingly. Men were such helpless, clumsy, cruel, selfish, amiable babies.
“Been thinking,” Dare explained.
“To any purpose?”
“To excellent but piteously sad purpose. I’ve been breaking to my unhappy ego the meaning of your parting shot.”
“What did it mean?”
“That I’m defeated.”
“In a way, I’m sorrier than you are.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
She smiled with a trace of bitter humor, earnestly. “Well, some one ought to be able to subdue me. God, I need it!” Angry tears came to her eyes, and she thrust her foot petulantly into the stirrup. Riding alone, she had just been marveling at the narrowness of the margin by which she had avoided the disruption of her present life. But for a grotesque trifle, she might have been riding at this very moment away from Hillside, forever, with Dare at her side. “That’s where I score,” he reflected, lugubriously. “For at least now I taste the desolate joy of capitulation to a stronger opponent. While we were opponents I wished to keep a few points ahead. The fact that I no longer wish to do so, but ask nothing better than to be trampled on till I can’t bear it another minute,—well, what do you make of that?”
“You’re off your game,” she evaded. “Buck up!”
They rode on in silence until they came within sight of the broad meadow at the edge of the pine ridge.
“Louise!”
“What!”
“Do I have to go to Japan?”
“More than ever.”