"As CONVENTIONAL,Mr.Grant;always excepting this lovely creature beneath me,whom I can't make out and who doesn't seem to care that I should.There!look!I told you so!"Her mustang had suddenly bounded forward;but as Grant followed he could see that the cause was the example of Phemie,who had,in some mad freak,dashed out in a frantic gallop.A half-dozen of the younger people hilariously accepted the challenge;the excitement was communicated to the others,until the whole cavalcade was sweeping down the slope.Grant was still at Mrs.
Ashwood's side,restraining her mustang and his own impatient horse when Clementina joined them."Phemie's mare has really bolted,Ifear,"she said in a quick whisper,"ride on,and never mind us."Grant looked quickly ahead;Phemie's roan,excited by the shouts behind her and to all appearance ungovernable,was fast disappearing with her rider.Without a word,trusting to his own good horsemanship and better knowledge of the ground,he darted out of the cavalcade to overtake her.
But the unfortunate result of this was to give further impulse to the now racing horses as they approached a point where the slope terminated in two diverging canyons.Mrs.Ashwood gave a sharp pull upon her bit.To her consternation the mustang stopped short almost instantly,--planting his two fore feet rigidly in the dust and even sliding forward with the impetus.Had her seat been less firm she might have been thrown,but she recovered herself,although in doing so she still bore upon the bit,when to her astonishment the mustang deliberately stiffened himself as if for a shock,and then began to back slowly,quivering with excitement.
She did not know that her native-bred animal fondly believed that he was participating in a rodeo,and that to his equine intelligence his fair mistress had just lassoed something!In vain she urged him forward;he still waited for the shock!When the cloud of dust in which she had been enwrapped drifted away,she saw to her amazement that she was alone.The entire party had disappeared into one of the canyons,--but which one she could not tell!
When she succeeded at last in urging her mustang forward again she determined to take the right-hand canyon and trust to being either met or overtaken.A more practical and less adventurous nature would have waited at the point of divergence for the return of some of the party,but Mrs.Ashwood was,in truth,not sorry to be left to herself and the novel scenery for a while,and she had no doubt but she would eventually find her way to the hotel at San Mateo,which could not be far away,in time for luncheon.
The road was still well defined,although it presently began to wind between ascending ranks of pines and larches that marked the terraces of hills,so high that she wondered she had not noticed them from the plains.An unmistakable suggestion of some haunting primeval solitude,a sense of the hushed and mysterious proximity of a nature she had never known before,the strange half-intoxicating breath of unsunned foliage and untrodden grasses and herbs,all combined to exalt her as she cantered forward.Even her horse seemed to have acquired an intelligent liberty,or rather to have established a sympathy with her in his needs and her own longings;instinctively she no longer pulled him with the curb;the reins hung loosely on his self-arched and unfettered neck;secure in this loneliness she found herself even talking to him with barbaric freedom.As she went on,the vague hush of all things animate and inanimate around her seemed to thicken,until she unconsciously halted before a dim and pillared wood,and a vast and heathless opening on whose mute brown lips Nature seemed to have laid the finger of silence.She forgot the party she had left,she forgot the luncheon she was going to;more important still she forgot that she had already left the traveled track far behind her,and,tremulous with anticipation,rode timidly into that arch of shadow.
As her horse's hoofs fell noiselessly on the elastic moss-carpeted aisle she forgot even more than that.She forgot the artificial stimulus and excitement of the life she had been leading so long;she forgot the small meannesses and smaller worries of her well-to-do experiences;she forgot herself,--rather she regained a self she had long forgotten.For in the sweet seclusion of this half darkened sanctuary the clinging fripperies of her past slipped from her as a tawdry garment.The petted,spoiled,and vapidly precocious girlhood which had merged into a womanhood of aimless triumphs and meaner ambitions;the worldly but miserable triumph of a marriage that had left her delicacy abused and her heart sick and unsatisfied;the wifehood without home,seclusion,or maternity;the widowhood that at last brought relief,but with it the consciousness of hopelessly wasted youth,--all this seemed to drop from her here as lightly as the winged needles or noiseless withered spray from the dim gray vault above her head.In the sovereign balm of that woodland breath her better spirit was restored;somewhere in these wholesome shades seemed to still lurk what should have been her innocent and nymph-like youth,and to come out once more and greet her.Old songs she had forgotten,or whose music had failed in the discords of her frivolous life,sang themselves to her again in that sweet,grave silence;girlish dreams that she had foolishly been ashamed of,or had put away with her childish toys,stole back to her once more and became real in this tender twilight;old fancies,old fragments of verse and childish lore,grew palpable and moved faintly before her.The boyish prince who should have come was there;the babe that should have been hers was there!--she stopped suddenly with flaming eyes and indignant color.For it appeared that a MAN was there too,and had just risen from the fallen tree where he had been sitting.