CHAPTER XV

The earliest manifestations of spring had ripened into a warmer fullness. Everywhere the rhododendron was bloom-loaded, and the large-petaled flower of the "cuc.u.mber tree" spread its waxen whiteness.

Hill-sides were pink with the wild-rose and underfoot violets and the dandelions made a bright mosaic.

Again Alexander was approaching her door with her face set toward the sunset and again she saw before her own house the figure of a man who loomed tall, and who for a brief s.p.a.ce remained a featureless silhouette against the colored sky.

She hastened her step a little, resolved that this time she would teach Jerry, in an unforgettable fashion, that her edicts of banishment were final and that they could not be lightly disobeyed--but this time it was not Jerry.

Indeed she had realized that almost immediately and her heart had missed its beat. The man was Halloway himself and he was looking in another direction just then, so he did not see the fleet, yet instantly repressed eagerness that flashed into and out of her eyes. It was a self-collected young woman, with a distinctly casual manner who crossed the stile and confronted her visitor.

As he turned and saw her, he started impulsively forward, but recovered himself and also adopted the matter-of-fact demeanor, which she had, herself, a.s.sumed.

"Howdy, Jack," said the girl carelessly. "I didn't know ye war hyarabouts. I'd jest erbout forgot ye altogether."

"I reckon thet would be a right easy thing ter do," he handsomely admitted, then each having indulged in the thrust and parry of an introductory lie, they stood there in the sunset, eying each other in silence.

But Alexander recognized a transformation in the man's appearance, and if she seemed tepid of interest, the semblance belied her throbbing pulses. Halloway was too accomplished an actor to have abandoned his pose or makeup. He must remain in character and dress the part, but he had used a consummate skill in doing so. In every detail of clothing he remained the mountaineer, yet there was no longer any trace of the slovenly or unclean.

He was close shaven and trim of hair. His flannel shirt, still open on his throat, was of good quality. The trousers that were thrust into high laced boots were not so new as to attract undue attention, but they fitted him. The note of carelessness was maintained--but with artistry to accentuate the extraordinary effect of physique and feature. He was eye-filling and rather splendid.

Alexander felt that some recognition of this metamorphosis was expected of her, but she had no intent of admitting the true force of its impression.

"Hit's a right smart wonder I knowed ye a-tall, ye've done spruced up so," was the dubious compliment with which she favored him after a deliberate scrutiny. "I hain't nuver seed ye with yore face washed afore."

"I 'lowed I'd seek ter make a killin' with ye," he bantered easily, and she sniffed her simulated disdain. They had moved together up the steps of the porch, and he stood there looking at her, quelling the up-rush of admiration and avid hunger in his eyes. Then she said curtly, for in these days she was always on the defensive, and meant to be doubly so with him whom she secretly feared, "Ye're in ther house now. Ef ye wants ter mek a killin' with me, tek off yore hat. Don't folks hev no manners whar ye comes from?"

Halloway shook his head, not forgetful that one playing a part must remain in character.

"I don't tek off my hat ter no man," he replied, stressing the final word ever so lightly.

"I'm a man when I wants ter be, an' when I wants manners I aims ter hev 'em," she declared, but her visitor stood, still covered, in her presence, and after a moment she said curtly--yet rather breathlessly, "Wait hyar," and turning, disappeared into the house.

Floods begin slowly with trickles, but they break suddenly with torrents. A flood had seized Alexander at that moment. Perhaps she did not herself pause to recognize or a.n.a.lyze her motive. She merely acted on an impulse that had come with an onsweep of conscious and subconscious tides. It was a motive that had to do with her activities that day when she had gone to the nearby town.

Halloway remained there, frankly puzzled. Unless she was like himself acting, her interest in his arrival was pallid and lukewarm. He had counted much on appearing suddenly before her at his best--and the impression seemed to have been negligible.

Where had she gone? He asked himself that question several times during the considerable interval of his waiting. The sunset was coming to its final splendor behind mountains that were ash of violet.

Through the blossom-laden air stole a seductive intoxication that mounted to his head. The voices of the Red G.o.ds had mastered him, and he had come.

Then he saw a vision in the doorway, and his senses reeled.

Alexander stood there as he had never seen her before. She was in a woman's dress, very simple of line and unadorned. But her beauty was such as could support and glorify simplicity. Indeed it required simplicity as a foil for its own delicate gorgeousness. The lithe slenderness of her figure was enhanced by the transformation. Her long hair hung in heavy braids that gave an almost childlike girlishness to her appearance. Alexander, he thought, was wholly delectable.

But as he stared at Alexander she flung him look for look and commanded:

"Now, tek off your hat."

He tossed the thing away from him, and hesitated for a moment gazing at her while his eyes kindled, then with an inarticulate sound in his throat and no other word, he sprang forward and caught her to him, in arms that would not be denied.

Alexander made no struggle. It would have been futile to match even her fine strength against the herculean power of those arms--and suddenly the girl felt faint.

For that unwarned and tumultuous conduct on the part of the man she had been totally unprepared and it was as though the wave of amazement which swept over her had left her gasping; bereft of both nerve-force and breath. But other waves were sweeping her too, so that she of the ready and invincible spirit for the moment rested inert in Halloway's arms as her brain reeled. In one way she was dazed into semiconsciousness. In another way, she was so staringly wide awake as she had never before been in life. She had thought of this man with feelings that she had neither named to herself nor a.n.a.lyzed, but the unadmitted s.e.x call of the strong man to the strong woman had sounded like a bugle note through her nature. Now while the beginnings of an indescribable fury stirred within her, she none the less thrilled to his embrace with a flooding of her heart under which she almost swooned. While she felt his kisses on her temples, her cheeks and her lips, she had no power of speech or protest.

To Jack Halloway, it seemed that this non-resistance was unconditional surrender and through him in a current of fluid fire, ran the fierce ecstasy of victory.

But after a little Alexander straightened up and the pliant softness of her body stiffened in his arms. She pushed against his shoulders with steady hands. They were not struggling hands but firm and definite of meaning, and Halloway released her. He released her readily as a man may who can afford to be deferential in his moment of victory.

But when she was quite free, she stood unsteadily for a moment and then stepped back and leaned against the wall of the house. Her hands pressed against the weather-boarding with outspread fingers. Out of a white face she looked straight before her with eyes preternaturally wide and full of dazed wonderment.

At first there was no resentment, no denunciation. The girl only leaned there with parted lips and heaving bosom and that fixed gaze which, for all its rigid tensity, seemed groping.

It was not as the individual that she now thought of Jack Halloway but of the terrifying and unexplained force that he had awakened in herself; the force of things that she never until now realized.

Halloway did not speak. He bent a little toward her, looking at her as his own breath came fast. At first he did not even marvel at the stunned, groping blankness of the unmoving features.

He had known that when she awoke it would be with the shock of latent fires set loose. Now it was a time to go very gently with her, until she found her footing in fuller comprehension again.

Then the girl said so faintly that he could hardly hear her:

"Thet's ther fust time thet. . . ." She broke off there.

"I know it, Alexander. I couldn't stay away. I had to come!"

He took a step forward with outstretched arms but she lifted a pleading hand.

"Don't," she said. "I've got ter think . . . go away now."

And triumphantly confident of what would come out of her meditation, he turned and picked up his hat and left her standing there. He might have talked to her of pa.s.sionate love, he told himself, to the end of time and it would have meant nothing. Instead he had brought her face to face with it--and now there was no need of talk.

Jack Halloway had meant it when he admitted to Brent in New York that it would not do to give rein to his thoughts of Alexander. They were all lawless thoughts of a love not to be trammeled by the obligations of marriage.

If he hated the civilized world at times, there were other times when he could not live without it, and into its conventionalized pattern, Alexander could never fit. She was not civilized enough or educated enough to take her place there at his side, nor was she pagan enough to come to him without terms or conditions. So he had resolved to stay away, and put her out of his mind and in that determination he failed.

Now he had flung away all heed. He had held her in his arms and consequences could care for themselves!

But when he had left the porch and Alexander had begun to grope her way out of the vortex of confusion, that small figment of wrath that she had known she should feel and yet had so far failed to feel, began to grow until it engulfed and merged into itself every other element of her reflections.

She had been scornful when Brent questioned her ability or her permanent wish to repulse suitors, and yet after only two had come, she no longer knew her own mind. But she told herself with a solemn indignation, she at least wanted to make her own terms. She had no intent of being swept off her feet by the masterful whim of a man who had never pleaded. Yet that was the thing that had just occurred.

Slowly the stunned eyes in the waxen white face became less wonder-wide and began to smoulder with outraged realization. She rose with the fixed determination that before the sun set, she would kill Halloway or compel him to kill her. One of them must die. But her own ideas of fairness challenged that edict. If she had the right to a.s.sume such a ground, she should have taken it without any instant of faltering. She should never have acknowledged an impulse of thrill while she was close-held in his arms. She had let him think that she had not resented it, and she was as much to blame as he.

So when Halloway came back the next morning with the glow of eagerness in his face, he found a very quiet girl waiting to receive him, and when he would have taken her in his arms she once more put out that warning hand, but this time with a different expression of lip and eye.

"Stop," she said. "Me an' you hev got ter talk together."

"Thet suits me," he a.s.sured her. "Thar hain't nothin' else I'd ruther do--save ter hold ye in my arms."

"I reckon ye knows I've done took oath thet no man could ever come on this place--sparkin'."

"I war right glad ter hev ye say that-- Hit kept other fellers away, an' any man thet hit _could_ skeer off wasn't hardly wuth hevin' round nohow. But thet war afore ye fell in love with me."