Suddenly Virginia turned and swung out of Roden’s coat with one of her swift movements. “Please put it on,” she said to him.
“Why, no,” he said; “I don’t want it. I’m perfectly comfortable. I don’t know why I brought it—unless from a happy inspiration in regard to you,” he added, pleasantly. She turned from him, and stooping, wrapped the shivering Popo in it.
“They feel the cole so!” she said to Roden, standing erect again. “An’ I never wrop up.” Roden did not know whether to laugh or to swear.
When the rain had abated somewhat, and they returned to Caryston, he told himself, as he soothed his inner man with some excellent Scotch whiskey, that he “really rather liked it in the girl; but—d—n the little nigger!—that was my pet coat!”
III.
Roden was the younger son of an Englishman of title. He was also what is sometimes graphically described as being sans le sou. It was his intention to try stud-farming in Virginia. No better horseman than Roden ever put boot in stirrup. He had, as an old pad-groom once remarked, “a genus for osses.” It was a mania, a fad of the most pronounced type, with him. No woman’s eye had ever possessed for him half the charm that did the full orbs of his favorite mare, Bonnibel, as she gazed lustrously upon him over her well-filled manger. No sheen of woman’s hair had ever vied, in his opinion, with the satin flanks of Bonnibel. What was it to love a woman? Was it half the zest, the delight, of feeling a good horse between one’s knees, what time the welcome cry of “Gone away!” makes glad delirium in one’s veins, while the music of the spotted darlings thrills air and soul? Roden would bluntly and unpoetically have informed you that you were a “duffer” had you attempted to argue the point. He had never cared much for women, either collectively or as individuals. They had perhaps played too small a part in his life. “Egad, sir!” his father had cried to him one day in a fit of anger, “you’ll grow up with a pair of legs like pot-hooks!”
Mr. Herrick informed him, on the second day after his arrival, that “the beauty of the question were, he cert’n’y did have a mighty good foothold on a hawse.”
It was on that day also that most of the horses arrived from New York—Bonnibel among them. She was as beautiful a daughter as Norseman ever sired. Deep of girth, clean of limb, broad of loin, with splendid oblique shoulders, bossed with sinew and muscle which quivered with restrained power beneath the silky, supple hide; a small compact head with ample front, over which the sensitive leaf-like ears kept restless guard; great limpid eyes, a crest like a rainbow, and quarters to have lifted Leander clean over the Hellespont. In color she was a rich brown, touched with tan on muzzle and flanks, while the slight floss of mane and tail had also flecks of gold towards the ends, like those in the locks of some dark-haired women. Like her great-granddam, Fleur-de-Lis, she stood full sixteen hands, but was neither leggy nor light of bone.