200CHAPTER XXV
The Person on the Other Horse
“Yet am I sure of one pleasùre,
And shortly, it is this:
That, where ye be, me seemeth, pardè,
I could not fare amiss.”
–Ballad of the Nut Brown Maid.
Din Driscoll had never remotely imagined that there could be such intoxication in a horseback ride. The person on the other horse made for the difference. How the joy of her filled him that instant of his bursting through the black prison wall into the bright morning of the world! She, the splendid first thing to gladden his eyes! Could liberty be really so glorious? Ravishing horsewoman, she was coming to save him. He had supposed her on her way to Mexico, and ’twas she whom he saw first of all.
And now, she rode beside him. They two, they were riding together, alone. The smell of the wild free air of the universe thrilled them both with an exquisite recklessness. Vague, limitless, subtle in mystery, the seduction of it was ineffable. Out of the corner of his eye he peeped at her. But wasn’t she perched entrancingly on that dragoon saddle, wasn’t she, though? The richly heavy coils of burnished copper had loosened, and they were very disconcerting in their suggestion of flowing wealth. If they would but fall about her shoulders! And the lace from the slanting hat brim, and the velvet patch near the dimple–the velvet patch called an assassin. And–what dress was that? Flowered calico? Yes, and light blue. His cheeks burned as of one surprised in crime, but the 201 self-possessed young woman herself was oblivious. So was it this, a blue flowered gown, that made her so suddenly tangible, so tangible and maddening? The haughty Parisienne of imperial courts was gone. In fact, she had become so distractingly tangible that–well, he didn’t know. But a lump got into his throat. She might be a Missouri girl, this moment. And there came to him the vision of one, of a Missouri girl molding biscuits, patting them, and her arms were bared, in a simple piquancy just like Jacqueline’s now. He even saw the pickaninnies in the shade of the porch outside, worshiping the real Missouri girl from the very whites of their eyes. How he had loved to tease her! He could not help it; she was so daintily prim. That he should thus think of his sister, the while gazing on the one-time gilded butterfly–to say the least, it was a pertinent comment on the transmuting magic that lurks in blue flowered percale.
They slowed to a trot.
“Monsieur is my prisoner, yes,” said she in her wonderful English.
He took the other meaning. “I don’t know–yet,” he returned soberly.
She laughed, and he realized that he had spoken aloud.