Leave Her to Heaven (9 page)

The fortnight that followed, at the ranch and then at Robie's fishing lodge in the mountains, was for Ellen a time of breathless wonder, of longing almost insupportable, of suspense almost too keen to be borne. She was caught in a torrent of emotions so strange and new that she was at first bewildered and overwhelmed; a torrent so strong that she could not resist it.

At first, instinctively, she sought to avoid Harland and the others too; and she took a horse every morning, disappearing
sometimes for the whole day, returning only at dinnertime. But though she went alone, yet in her thoughts Harland was beside her. There was one day when she rode to a lofty outlook and secured her horse and sat for long hours on a bold rim high above a hidden canyon, basking in the sun, her eyes ranging unseeingly; and in her fancy she welcomed him there to share her solitude, speaking aloud, carrying on with him long conversations that were tinglingly impersonal and polite, rich with unuttered meanings. She lay for a while, her arms tight across her breast, her big hat shading her face against the sun, her eyes closed; and at every near-by sound she seemed to hear his step, imagined him coming ardently to seek her here.

This complete and absorbed attention to everything a man did or said, this constant hope that Harland would turn to her, coupled with a breathless anticipation that was something like terror, was new in her life. Her devotion to her father had armored her against those hours of tremulous and unadmitted longings which almost any chance-met boy may provoke in a girl still in her teens, rendered intensely sensitive to masculine approaches by forces within herself which she has been taught she must not recognize. Once when Ellen was twelve there had been a senior at Tech who sometimes came home with her father to discuss a thesis upon which he was at work, and who for weeks seemed to her the most completely wonderful person she had ever seen, so that she dreamed of him both awake and asleep and gave him openly a youthful adoration which she was not yet old enough to conceal. But this keen awareness of Harland was at once less frank and more profound; for she had been incapable at that time of those reactions — a quickened pulse, a warm flush on cheeks and throat, a faintness, a soft readiness for surrender — which even the sound of Harland's voice could provoke in her now.

Hoping his thoughts might be drawn to her as hers were drawn to him, she wondered whether he knew from Robie their errand here; and she wished her habit of seeking the solitudes would provoke his curiosity, lead him to question her. She planned her answers, planned the very words in which she would tell him,
wistfully, about her father; and she pictured the sympathy and the new understanding which would appear in his eyes as he listened. She played, without admitting it even to herself, the part of one silently enduring a hopeless grief; and she imagined him observing and conjecturing.

But he made no approach to her; and when at breakfast one morning she saw an opportunity to suggest that they go together to seek turkeys, she seized upon it, hiding her eager hopes beneath a casual tone. He assented, and it was a flurry of soft panic, a delicious fear of what these hours alone with him might bring, which led her to say that they need not go till afternoon. All morning alone she blamed herself for that weakness. They might, if she had been bold, have spent the long day together. Till the lunch hour she waited in dread lest he change his mind, cancel this plan.

Yet when the time came for them to start, she was — at least outwardly — perfectly composed. She led the way, sure that his eyes rested upon her as he followed close behind. She rode well, and knew it, and wished him to remark it. He did not speak, but she was as conscious of his watching her as though she saw his eyes.

All her senses seemed on that ride together to be sharpened. The sky and the mountains had never been so beautiful, the odor of the sun-warmed pine spills upon the ground never so keen, the occasional bird song in the thickets never so liquid and clear and true. Even to watch the sliding shoulder-muscles of her horse as he breasted a steep climb or picked his way down an abrupt descent contented and delighted her. She had an extraordinary awareness of the life currents within her, and of Harland close behind, and of the solitudes in which they rode; and alone with him she felt a breathless terror which was half longing too.

At the spot she chose they hid their horses in the wood and walked out to the middle of the park-like canyon floor; and she led him to a shallow grassy depression and bade him lie beside her. Then for a while they did not speak, and she lay with her chin on her hands, staring up the canyon, feeling her heart pound against
the turf beneath her breast, not looking at him yet seeing every line of his profile and the bulk of his shoulders thrust upward by the position of his crossed arms, and feeling the length of him along her own, so near that a careless movement of her foot might have touched his.

He spoke at last, some laughing word about the ant she brushed from her throat, and she found herself talking of her father; and though their talk was commonplace she felt in every word she spoke and in every word of his a quality of suspense, of overwhelming forces held for the present in abeyance yet which might at any moment break all bounds. She turned her head at last to look at him, and met his eyes, and he said he knew her errand at the lodge; and this knowledge on his part seemed to her to draw them close together, so that in an instinctive defensive gesture she looked away again. He spoke of his brother Danny. She had, as have many whole and healthy people, an innate repugnance for any sickness or deformity, so that she shivered slightly when he referred to Danny's illness. Then she remembered that she knew so little about Harland, only his name and his work and that he had this brother who was crippled. It was even fearfully possible that he was married, and she found herself questioning him; and when he said he was not married she controlled her breathing so that he might not see her sudden relief. Then he spoke of her ring. She had for these days completely forgotten Quinton. She told Harland about him and added calmly:

‘But I will never marry him.'

Until that moment she had not known this, but as soon as she remembered Quinton she knew it certainly and beyond doubting.

From that quiet word of hers, she thought as she spoke, much might have followed; but then Harland saw turkeys coming, and at her direction, when the time came, he shot one. It was only wounded, and he had to run to dispatch it, and the unaccustomed exercise at these high altitudes exhausted him, and she wished to take him in her arms and cherish him, and forced herself to look at the turkey instead, and to speak, as though this were important, of the fact that a shot had cut its beard. Yet even then, on
pretext of fetching the horses, she hurried to leave him so that he might not guess the tenderness which his distress had provoked in her; and when she returned with the animals she was controlled again. He was triumphant and gay and laughing and full of eager conversation, and she entered into his mood and they rode merrily back to camp. She thought exultantly that night that she would never lose what this day she had gained.

Next morning before breakfast her mother announced — she had been lamed till now by the all-day ride from ranch to lodge — that she was ready to go to see her husband's ashes sown across the high meadows. Ellen had almost forgotten this duty; but she welcomed it now as one welcomes the turning of the last page of a book, when another, full of promise, waits to be opened. She agreed that this should be the day; but when Harland and Lin and Tess planned at breakfast to ride to the horse parks, Ellen wished she might go with them, thinking that Tess was beautiful and that Harland might find her so. She could not change plans already made, but she was wretched all morning, her thoughts following them jealously.

On the ride up to the heights that afternoon, Mrs. Berent groaned and complained; for the way was steep and she was ill at ease in the saddle. Professor Berent's ashes were in a sealed bronze casket which till now had been in Ellen's charge, and which now, wrapped in sweater and slicker, rode at her cantle. When they came to their goal, she left Robie and her mother and Ruth sitting their horses together in the center of the basin, and rode out toward its rim; and at an easy lope, she began a wide circle around them, carrying the casket in the curve of her arm, lifting the ashes a handful at a time, letting them sift through her fingers as she rode.

Then the pricking ears of her horse led her to look across to the trees that fringed the basin, and she saw the two children and Harland come there into view. Almost at once they drew back out of sight again; but to know that Harland was sharing this moment with her sharpened her emotional reaction, and — unconsciously dramatizing her own part — she put her horse to a faster gait,
feeling Harland watching her; and she rode like a soldier on parade, eyes straight ahead, looking neither right nor left, sowing the ashes broadcast with a rhythmic sweep of her arm. When with the circle of the basin not half completed, she found the casket almost empty, she had a sense of anticlimax; but since no one could at a distance guess the deception, she continued that motion of a sower till, completing the circuit, coming back to the head of the trail, she saw the chance for an effective exit and plunged into the forest and was gone.

She rode halfway back to camp before a new thought occurred to her, and she took a side trail to avoid the others and circled back to the heights again. If she did not return to the lodge for dinner, Harland — after their hour together yesterday — would surely come to seek her. She found the basin deserted, and on the highest point along its rim she built of scattered rocks a cairn where she bestowed the empty casket upon which her father's name had been engraved. Staying there where she could overlook the open sweep below her, she waited for Harland to appear.

At sunset he had not come, nor at dark; but the waxing moon made night as light as day, and still she waited, at first surely, then half-angrily, then in deep self-pity, telling herself none cared, not even he, whether she returned. She decided stubbornly to wait here till he came. Sweater and slicker were scant protection against the chill, frosty night, and she built a small fire and huddled near it. Night had no terrors for her, and she began wistfully to enjoy the part she played, thinking of herself as a bereft daughter mourning here on the heights the whole night long. When her horse, tethered to an oak sapling, became restless, she unsaddled him and secured him in such a way that he had more freedom. The saddle blanket, unfolded, served as a ground sheet on which she sat and which when she grew chilly she drew over her shoulders. The horse was cold and uneasy, stamping and blowing; but she kept the blanket, let him endure the penetrating chill.

She stayed there stubbornly till dawn, at once hungry for Harland to come and furious because he did not. If he had from the
first revealed an eagerness as great as hers, she might before this have been ready to forget him; but since he had not, and since any denial of her wishes was always a spur to her determination, this night alone fused her vague dreams into a hot resolution. The fact that, returning, she met him on the trail seemed to promise the victory she coveted; but to whet his appetite she devoted herself that evening to Lin and Tess, and next morning she rode away with Lin and Charlie Yates and one of the cowboys who had ranch business to do. Because she was an overflowing vessel full of tenderness which must find some outlet, she was that day extravagantly sweet to Lin; and after lunch they left the others and rode home alone, and in a charming fashion she made laughing love to the youngster till his head was whirling, giving him all the smiles, the winning glances, the affectionate words, the entrancing laughter she was ready to offer Harland.

That evening after dinner, since he still held aloof, she sum moned Harland to walk down the brook with her in the moon light; and when she came back to the cabin which she and Ruth and her mother shared, Mrs. Berent demanded:

‘Ellen, are you trying to start a flirtation with that young man?'

Ellen answered quietly: ‘No, Mother.' ‘Flirtation' was not the word for the passionate certainty which filled her.

Mrs. Berent tossed her head. ‘You act mighty like it to me!' she declared. ‘Butter wouldn't melt in your mouth! But you're engaged to another man, and I'm going to see to it that Mr. Harland knows it! You'll have your trouble for your pains!'

Ellen smiled icily. ‘You ought at least to ask what his intentions are before you warn him off,' she said, and went to her room. But next day at the branding, remembering that their stay here was almost done, something like panic seized her. She had so little time! Recalling her mother's threat, that night before dinner she laid aside Quinton's ring, and when Harland noticed this and spoke of it, she looked at him, meaning him to read her eyes, meaning him to know she was his if he would have her. When his eyes fell, she knew he had understood.

After dinner he excused himself and disappeared, and she was sure that when the others had retired he would come to her, and she stayed on the lodge veranda to wait for him. But he did not come, and she wished to go to him and could find no pretext to do so. The longing in her was almost unbearable, and she went to her room at last, her lips dry, her heart wrung, her breath coming shakenly.

Next morning before breakfast, making her decision irrevocable, she packed Quinton's ring and addressed it and put it in the mail pouch. She told herself Harland would surely turn to her that day, but he did not, and tomorrow they would ride out to the ranch, and the day after or the day after he would go his way and she must go hers! That night she lay long awake, considering — and discarding — a thousand devices by which she might draw Harland to her side, sure only that in the few hours which remained she must somehow win him to be hers forever.

When she came to breakfast on the last morning, Harland was not there. At her carefully casual question, Robie explained that he had made an early start, that he meant to fish down through the canyon below the lodge, following the brook to where a horse would meet him in the late afternoon and fetch him to the ranch.