The Troll Garden and Selected Stories Read online

to. Remember your own theory that contrast is about the only thing

  that makes life endurable. This is my party and Mr. Lockhart's;

  your whole duty tomorrow night will consist in being nice to the

  Norwegian girls. I'll warrant you were adept enough at it once.

  And you'd better be very nice indeed, for if there are many such

  young Valkyries as Eric's sister among them, they would simply tie

  you up in a knot if they suspected you were guying them."

  Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his

  fate, while his sister went on.

  "And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?"

  Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the sole of

  his plowshoe.

  "Well, I guess we'll have a couple dozen. You see it's pretty

  hard to get a crowd together here any more. Most of 'em have gone

  over to the Free Gospellers, and they'd rather put their feet in

  the fire than shake 'em to a fiddle."

  Margaret made a gesture of impatience. "Those Free Gospellers

  have just cast an evil spell over this country, haven't they?"

  "Well," said Lockhart, cautiously, "I don't just like to pass

  judgment on any Christian sect, but if you're to know the chosen by

  their works, the Gospellers can't make a very proud showin', an'

  that's a fact. They're responsible for a few suicides, and they've

  sent a good-sized delegation to the state insane asylum, an' I

  don't see as they've made the rest of us much better than we were

  before. I had a little herdboy last spring, as square a little

  Dane as I want to work for me, but after the Gospellers got hold of

  him and sanctified him, the little beggar used to get down on his

  knees out on the prairie and pray by the hour and let the cattle

  get into the corn, an' I had to fire him. That's about the way it

  goes. Now there's Eric; that chap used to be a hustler and the

  spryest dancer in all this section-called all the dances. Now he's

  got no ambition and he's glum as a preacher. I don't suppose we

  can even get him to come in tomorrow night."

  "Eric? Why, he must dance, we can't let him off," said

  Margaret, quickly. "Why, I intend to dance with him myself."

  "I'm afraid he won't dance. I asked him this morning if he'd

  help us out and he said, 'I don't dance now, any more,' " said

  Lockhart, imitating the laboured English of the Norwegian.

  "'The Miller of Hofbau, the Miller of Hofbau, O my Princess!'"

  chirped Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.

  The red on his sister's cheek deepened a little, and she

  laughed mischievously. "We'll see about that, sir. I'll not admit

  that I am beaten until I have asked him myself."

  Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in

  the heart of the French settlement, for the mail. As the road lay

  through the most attractive part of the Divide country, on several

  occasions Margaret Elliot and her brother had accompanied him.

  Tonight Wyllis had business with Lockhart, and Margaret rode

  with Eric, mounted on a frisky little mustang that Mrs. Lockhart

  had broken to the sidesaddle. Margaret regarded her escort very

  much as she did the servant who always accompanied her on long

  rides at home, and the ride to the village was a silent one. She

  was occupied with thoughts of another world, and Eric was wrestling

  with more thoughts than had ever been crowded into his head before.

  He rode with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as

  though he wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it

  in his brain forever. He understood the situation perfectly. His

  brain worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of

  things. This girl represented an entirely new species of humanity

  to him, but he knew where to place her. The prophets of old, when

  an angel first appeared unto them, never doubted its high origin.

  Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but

  he was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost

  its self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were

  not afraid of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had

  prospects before him when his father went down off the North Cape

  in the long Arctic night, and his mother, seized by a violent

  horror of seafaring life, had followed her brother to America.

  Eric was eighteen then, handsome as young Siegfried, a giant in

  stature, with a skin singularly pure and delicate, like a Swede's;

  hair as yellow as the locks of Tennyson's amorous Prince, and eyes

  of a fierce, burning blue, whose flash was most dangerous to women.

  He had in those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain

  confidence of approach, that usually accompanies physical

  perfection. It was even said of him then that he was in love with

  life, and inclined to levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide.

  But the sad history of those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an

  arid soil and under a scorching sun, had repeated itself in his

  case. Toil and isolation had sobered him, and he grew more and

  more like the clods among which he laboured. It was as though some

  red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those delicate

  fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or pleasure, in

  which lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them

  quite away. It is a painful thing to watch the light die out of

  the eyes of those Norsemen, leaving an expression of impenetrable

  sadness, quite passive, quite hopeless, a shadow that is never

  lifted. With some this change comes almost at once, in the first

  bitterness of homesickness, with others it comes more slowly,

  according to the time it takes each man's heart to die.

  Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a

  year before they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the

  windy hill where exiles of all nations grow akin.

  The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of

  his people sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric until

  that night at the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his

  violin across his knee. After that, the gloom of his people

  settled down upon him, and the gospel of maceration began its work.

  "If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out," et cetera. The

  pagan smile that once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was

  one with sorrow. Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it

  embitters, but when it destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and

  where the agony of the cross has been, joy will not come again.

  This man understood things literally: one must live without

  pleasure to die without fear; to save the soul, it was necessary to

  starve the soul.

  The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her

  cavalier left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch of

  road that runs for some three miles through the French settlement,

  where the prairie is as level as the surface of a lake. There the

  fields of flax and wheat and rye are bordered by precise rows of

  slender, tapering Lombard poplars. It was a yellow world that br />
  Margaret Elliot saw under the wide light of the setting sun.

  The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, "It

  will be safe to run the horses here, won't it?"

  "Yes, I think so, now," he answered, touching his spur to his

  pony's flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old

  saying in the West that newcomers always ride a horse or two

  to death before they get broken in to the country. They are

  tempted by the great open spaces and try to outride the horizon, to

  get to the end of something. Margaret galloped over the level

  road, and Eric, from behind, saw her long veil fluttering in the

  wind. It had fluttered just so in his dreams last night and the

  night before. With a sudden inspiration of courage he overtook her

  and rode beside her, looking intently at her half-averted face.

  Before, he had only stolen occasional glances at it, seen it in

  blinding flashes, always with more or less embarrassment, but now

  he determined to let every line of it sink into his memory. Men of

  the world would have said that it was an unusual face, nervous,

  finely cut, with clear, elegant lines that betokened ancestry. Men

  of letters would have called it a historic face, and would have

  conjectured at what old passions, long asleep, what old sorrows

  forgotten time out of mind, doing battle together in ages gone, had

  curved those delicate nostrils, left their unconscious memory in

  those eyes. But Eric read no meaning in these details. To him

  this beauty was something more than colour and line; it was a flash

  of white light, in which one cannot distinguish colour because all

  colours are there. To him it was a complete revelation, an

  embodiment of those dreams of impossible loveliness that linger by

  a young man's pillow on midsummer nights; yet, because it held

  something more than the attraction of health and youth and

  shapeliness, it troubled him, and in its presence he felt as the

  Goths before the white marbles in the Roman Capitol, not knowing

  whether they were men or gods. At times he felt like uncovering

  his head before it, again the fury seized him to break and despoil,

  to find the clay in this spirit-thing and stamp upon it. Away from

  her, he longed to strike out with his arms, and take and hold; it

  maddened him that this woman whom he could break in his hands

  should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never

  questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he

  admitted the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him.

  Tonight, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched

  her, he knew that he might as well reach out his hand to

  take a star.

  Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly

  in her saddle.

  "This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride fast,"

  she said.

  Eric turned his eyes away.

  "I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe

  hear music like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand to

  work," he asked, timidly.

  Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied

  the outline of his face, pityingly.

  "Well, you might--but you'd lose a good deal else. I shouldn't

  like you to go to New York--and be poor, you'd be out of

  atmosphere, some way," she said, slowly. Inwardly she was

  thinking: There he would be altogether sordid, impossible--a

  machine who would carry one's trunks upstairs, perhaps. Here he is

  every inch a man, rather picturesque; why is it? "No," she

  added aloud, "I shouldn't like that."

  "Then I not go," said Eric, decidedly.

  Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle

  amused and a trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.

  "But I'll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want you

  to dance with us tomorrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian

  dances; they say you know them all. Won't you?"

  Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed

  as they had done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke his

  violin across his knee.

  "Yes, I will," he said, quietly, and he believed that he

  delivered his soul to hell as he said it.

  They had reached the rougher country now, where the road wound

  through a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along the creek, when a

  beat of hoofs ahead and the sharp neighing of horses made the

  ponies start and Eric rose in his stirrups. Then down the gulch in

  front of them and over the steep clay banks thundered a herd of

  wild ponies, nimble as monkeys and wild as rabbits, such as horse-

  traders drive east from the plains of Montana to sell in the

  farming country. Margaret's pony made a shrill sound, a neigh that

  was almost a scream, and started up the clay bank to meet them, all

  the wild blood of the range breaking out in an instant. Margaret

  called to Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and

  caught her pony's bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and

  was kicking and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the

  range were all about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and

  striking her with their forefeet and snapping at her flanks. It

  was the old liberty of the range that the little beast fought for.

  "Drop the reins and hold tight, tight!" Eric called, throwing

  all his weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic

  forefeet that now beat at his breast, and now kicked at the wild

  mustangs that surged and tossed about him. He succeeded in

  wrenching the pony's head toward him and crowding her withers

  against the clay bank, so that she could not roll.

  "Hold tight, tight!" he shouted again, launching a kick at a

  snorting animal that reared back against Margaret's saddle. If she

  should lose her courage and fall now, under those hoofs-- He

  struck out again and again, kicking right and left with all his

  might. Already the negligent drivers had galloped into the cut,

  and their long quirts were whistling over the heads of the herd.

  As suddenly as it had come, the struggling, frantic wave of wild

  life swept up out of the gulch and on across the open prairie, and

  with a long despairing whinny of farewell the pony dropped her head

  and stood trembling in her sweat, shaking the foam and blood from

  her bit.

  Eric stepped close to Margaret's side and laid his hand on her

  saddle. "You are not hurt?" he asked, hoarsely. As he raised his

  face in the soft starlight she saw that it was white and drawn and

  that his lips were working nervously.

  "No, no, not at all. But you, you are suffering; they struck

  you!" she cried in sharp alarm.

  He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.

  "No, it is not that," he spoke rapidly now, with his hands

  clenched at his side. "But if they had hurt you, I would beat

  their brains out with my hands. I would kill them all. I

  was never afraid before. You are the only beautiful thing that

  has ever come close to me. You came like an angel out of the sky.

>   You are like the music you sing, you are like the stars and the

  snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little boy. You

  are like all that I wanted once and never had, you are all that

  they have killed in me. I die for you tonight, tomorrow, for all

  eternity. I am not a coward; I was afraid because I love you more

  than Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope

  for heaven. I was never afraid before. If you had fallen--oh, my

  God!" He threw his arms out blindly and dropped his head upon the

  pony's mane, leaning ]imply against the animal like a man struck

  by some sickness. His shoulders rose and fell perceptibly with his

  laboured breathing. The horse stood cowed with exhaustion and

  fear. Presently Margaret laid her hand on Eric's head and said

  gently:

  "You are better now, shall we go on? Can you get your horse?"

  "No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not

  safe. I will not frighten you again." His voice was still husky,

  but it was steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped home in

  silence.

  When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the pony's

  head until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.

  "The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis. I think I was pretty

  thoroughly scared myself," she said as she took her brother's arm

  and went slowly up the hill toward the house. "No, I'm not hurt,

  thanks to Eric. You must thank him for taking such good care of

  me. He's a mighty fine fellow. I'll tell you all about it in the

  morning, dear. I was pretty well shaken up and I'm going right to

  bed now. Good night."

  When she reached the low room in which she slept, she sank

  upon the bed in her riding dress, face downward.

  "Oh, I pity him! I pity him!" she murmured, with a long sigh

  of exhaustion. She must have slept a little. When she rose again,

  she took from her dress a letter that had been waiting for her at

  the village post-office. It was closely written in a long,

  angular hand, covering a dozen pages of foreign note-paper, and

  began:

  My Dearest Margaret: if I should attempt to say how like

  a winter hath thine absence been, I should incur the risk of

  being tedious. Really, it takes the sparkle out of everything.

  Having nothing better to do, and not caring to go anywhere in

  particular without you, I remained in the city until Jack Courtwell

  noted my general despondency and brought me down here to his place

  on the sound to manage some open-air theatricals he is getting up.

  As You Like It is of course the piece selected. Miss

  Harrison plays Rosalind. I wish you had been here to take the

  part. Miss Harrison reads her lines well, but she is either a

  maiden-all-forlorn or a tomboy; insists on reading into the part

  all sorts of deeper meanings and highly coloured suggestions wholly

  out of harmony with the pastoral setting. Like most of the

  professionals, she exaggerates the emotional element and quite

  fails to do justice to Rosalind's facile wit and really brilliant

  mental qualities. Gerard will do Orlando, but rumor says he is

  epris of your sometime friend, Miss Meredith, and his memory

  is treacherous and his interest fitful.

  My new pictures arrived last week on the Gascogne. The

  Puvis de Chavannes is even more beautiful than I thought it in

  Paris. A pale dream-maiden sits by a pale dream-cow and a

  stream of anemic water flows at her feet. The Constant, you

  will remember, I got because you admired it. It is here in

  all its florid splendour, the whole dominated by a glowing

  sensuosity. The drapery of the female figure is as wonderful

  as you said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold, painted

  with an easy, effortless voluptuousness, and that white,

  gleaming line of African coast in the background recalls

  memories of you very precious to me. But it is useless to

  deny that Constant irritates me. Though I cannot prove the