“Let me see it,” Lute cried, seizing the paper and devouring the handwriting with her eyes. She was thrilling with unexpressed love for the mother she had never seen, and this written speech from the grave seemed to give more tangibility to her having ever existed, than did the vision of her.
“This IS remarkable,” Mrs. Grantly was reiterating. “There was never anything like it. Think of it, my dear, both your father and mother here with us to-night.”
Lute shivered. The lassitude was gone, and she was her natural self again, vibrant with the instinctive fear of things unseen. And it was offensive to her mind that, real or illusion, the presence or the memorized existences of her father and mother should be touched by these two persons who were practically strangers—Mrs. Grantly, unhealthy and morbid, and Mr. Barton, stolid and stupid with a grossness both of the flesh and the spirit. And it further seemed a trespass that these strangers should thus enter into the intimacy between her and Chris.
She could hear the steps of her uncle approaching, and the situation flashed upon her, luminous and clear. She hurriedly folded the sheet of paper and thrust it into her bosom.
“Don’t say anything to him about this second message, Mrs. Grantly, please, and Mr. Barton. Nor to Aunt Mildred. It would only cause them irritation and needless anxiety.”
In her mind there was also the desire to protect her lover, for she knew that the strain of his present standing with her aunt and uncle would be added to, unconsciously in their minds, by the weird message of Planchette.
“And please don’t let us have any more Planchette,” Lute continued hastily. “Let us forget all the nonsense that has occurred.”
“‘Nonsense,’ my dear child?” Mrs. Grantly was indignantly protesting when Uncle Robert strode into the circle.
“Hello!” he demanded. “What’s being done?”
“Too late,” Lute answered lightly. “No more stock quotations for you. Planchette is adjourned, and we’re just winding up the discussion of the theory of it. Do you know how late it is?”
* * *
“Well, what did you do last night after we left?”
“Oh, took a stroll,” Chris answered.
Lute’s eyes were quizzical as she asked with a tentativeness that was palpably assumed, “With—a—with Mr. Barton?”
“Why, yes.”
“And a smoke?”
“Yes; and now what’s it all about?”
Lute broke into merry laughter. “Just as I told you that you would do. Am I not a prophet? But I knew before I saw you that my forecast had come true. I have just left Mr. Barton, and I knew he had walked with you last night, for he is vowing by all his fetishes and idols that you are a perfectly splendid young man. I could see it with my eyes shut. The Chris Dunbar glamour has fallen upon him. But I have not finished the catechism by any means. Where have you been all morning?”
“Where I am going to take you this afternoon.”
“You plan well without knowing my wishes.”
“I knew well what your wishes are. It is to see a horse I have found.”
Her voice betrayed her delight, as she cried, “Oh, good!”
“He is a beauty,” Chris said.
But her face had suddenly gone grave, and apprehension brooded in her eyes.
“He’s called Comanche,” Chris went on. “A beauty, a regular beauty, the perfect type of the Californian cow-pony. And his lines—why, what’s the matter?”
“Don’t let us ride any more,” Lute said, “at least for a while. Really, I think I am a tiny bit tired of it, too.”
He was looking at her in astonishment, and she was bravely meeting his eyes.
“I see hearses and flowers for you,” he began, “and a funeral oration; I see the end of the world, and the stars falling out of the sky, and the heavens rolling up as a scroll; I see the living and the dead gathered together for the final judgement, the sheep and the goats, the lambs and the rams and all the rest of it, the white-robed saints, the sound of golden harps, and the lost souls howling as they fall into the Pit—all this I see on the day that you, Lute Story, no longer care to ride a horse. A horse, Lute! a horse!”
“For a while, at least,” she pleaded.
“Ridiculous!” he cried. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?—you who are always so abominably and adorably well!”
“No, it’s not that,” she answered. “I know it is ridiculous, Chris, I know it, but the doubt will arise. I cannot help it. You always say I am so sanely rooted to the earth and reality and all that, but—perhaps it’s superstition, I don’t know—but the whole occurrence, the messages of Planchette, the possibility of my father’s hand, I know not how, reaching, out to Ban’s rein and hurling him and you to death, the correspondence between my father’s statement that he has twice attempted your life and the fact that in the last two days your life has twice been endangered by horses—my father was a great horseman—all this, I say, causes the doubt to arise in my mind. What if there be something in it? I am not so sure. Science may be too dogmatic in its denial of the unseen. The forces of the unseen, of the spirit, may well be too subtle, too sublimated, for science to lay hold of, and recognize, and formulate. Don’t you see, Chris, that there is rationality in the very doubt? It may be a very small doubt—oh, so small; but I love you too much to run even that slight risk. Besides, I am a woman, and that should in itself fully account for my predisposition toward superstition.
“Yes, yes, I know, call it unreality. But I’ve heard you paradoxing upon the reality of the unreal—the reality of delusion to the mind that is sick. And so with me, if you will; it is delusion and unreal, but to me, constituted as I am, it is very real—is real as a nightmare is real, in the throes of it, before one awakes.”
“The most logical argument for illogic I have ever heard,” Chris smiled. “It is a good gaming proposition, at any rate. You manage to embrace more chances in your philosophy than do I in mine. It reminds me of Sam—the gardener you had a couple of years ago. I overheard him and Martin arguing in the stable. You know what a bigoted atheist Martin is. Well, Martin had deluged Sam with floods of logic. Sam pondered awhile, and then he said, ‘Foh a fack, Mis’ Martin, you jis’ tawk like a house afire; but you ain’t got de show I has.’ ‘How’s that?’ Martin asked. ‘Well, you see, Mis’ Martin, you has one chance to mah two.’ ‘I don’t see it,’ Martin said. ‘Mis’ Martin, it’s dis way. You has jis’ de chance, lak you say, to become worms foh de fruitification of de cabbage garden. But I’s got de chance to lif’ mah voice to de glory of de Lawd as I go paddin’ dem golden streets—along ‘ith de chance to be jis’ worms along ‘ith you, Mis’ Martin.’”
“You refuse to take me seriously,” Lute said, when she had laughed her appreciation.
“How can I take that Planchette rigmarole seriously?” he asked.
“You don’t explain it—the handwriting of my father, which Uncle Robert recognized—oh, the whole thing, you don’t explain it.”
“I don’t know all the mysteries of mind,” Chris answered. “But I believe such phenomena will all yield to scientific explanation in the not distant future.”
“Just the same, I have a sneaking desire to find out some more from Planchette,” Lute confessed. “The board is still down in the dining room. We could try it now, you and I, and no one would know.”
Chris caught her hand, crying: “Come on! It will be a lark.”
Hand in hand they ran down the path to the tree-pillared room.
“The camp is deserted,” Lute said, as she placed Planchette on the table. “Mrs. Grantly and Aunt Mildred are lying down, and Mr. Barton has gone off with Uncle Robert. There is nobody to disturb us.” She placed her hand on the board. “Now begin.”
For a few minutes nothing happened. Chris started to speak, but she hushed him to silence. The preliminary twitchings had appeared in her hand and arm. Then the pencil began to write. They read the message, word by word, as it was written:
There is wisdom greater than the wisdom of reason. Love proceeds not out of the dry-as-dust way of the mind. Love is of the heart, and is beyond all reason, and logic, and philosophy. Trust your own heart, my daughter. And if your heart bids you have faith in your lover, then laugh at the mind and its cold wisdom, and obey your heart, and have faith in your lover.—Martha.
“But that whole message is the dictate of your own heart,” Chris cried. “Don’t you see, Lute? The thought is your very own, and your subconscious mind has expressed it there on the paper.”
“But there is one thing I don’t see,” she objected.
“And that?”
“Is the handwriting. Look at it. It does not resemble mine at all. It is mincing, it is old-fashioned, it is the old-fashioned feminine of a generation ago.”
“But you don’t mean to tell me that you really believe that this is a message from the dead?” he interrupted.
“I don’t know, Chris,” she wavered. “I am sure I don’t know.”
“It is absurd!” he cried. “These are cobwebs of fancy. When one dies, he is dead. He is dust. He goes to the worms, as Martin says. The dead? I laugh at the dead. They do not exist. They are not. I defy the powers of the grave, the men dead and dust and gone!
“And what have you to say to that?” he challenged, placing his hand on Planchette.
On the instant his hand began to write. Both were startled by the suddenness of it. The message was brief:
BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE!
He was distinctly sobered, but he laughed. “It is like a miracle play. Death we have, speaking to us from the grave. But Good Deeds, where art thou? And Kindred? and Joy? and Household Goods? and Friendship? and all the goodly company?”
But Lute did not share his bravado. Her fright showed itself in her face. She laid her trembling hand on his arm.
“Oh, Chris, let us stop. I am sorry we began it. Let us leave the quiet dead to their rest. It is wrong. It must be wrong. I confess I am affected by it. I cannot help it. As my body is trembling, so is my soul. This speech of the grave, this dead man reaching out from the mould of a generation to protect me from you. There is reason in it. There is the living mystery that prevents you from marrying me. Were my father alive, he would protect me from you. Dead, he still strives to protect me. His hands, his ghostly hands, are against your life!”
“Do be calm,” Chris said soothingly. “Listen to me. It is all a lark. We are playing with the subjective forces of our own being, with phenomena which science has not yet explained, that is all. Psychology is so young a science. The subconscious mind has just been discovered, one might say. It is all mystery as yet; the laws of it are yet to be formulated. This is simply unexplained phenomena. But that is no reason that we should immediately account for it by labelling it spiritism. As yet we do not know, that is all. As for Planchette—”
He abruptly ceased, for at that moment, to enforce his remark, he had placed his hand on Planchette, and at that moment his hand had been seized, as by a paroxysm, and sent dashing, willy-nilly, across the paper, writing as the hand of an angry person would write.
“No, I don’t care for any more of it,” Lute said, when the message was completed. “It is like witnessing a fight between you and my father in the flesh. There is the savor in it of struggle and blows.”
She pointed out a sentence that read: “You cannot escape me nor the just punishment that is yours!”
“Perhaps I visualize too vividly for my own comfort, for I can see his hands at your throat. I know that he is, as you say, dead and dust, but for all that, I can see him as a man that is alive and walks the earth; I see the anger in his face, the anger and the vengeance, and I see it all directed against you.”
She crumpled up the scrawled sheets of paper, and put Planchette away.
“We won’t bother with it any more,” Chris said. “I didn’t think it would affect you so strongly. But it’s all subjective, I’m sure, with possibly a bit of suggestion thrown in—that and nothing more. And the whole strain of our situation has made conditions unusually favorable for striking phenomena.”
“And about our situation,” Lute said, as they went slowly up the path they had run down. “What we are to do, I don’t know. Are we to go on, as we have gone on? What is best? Have you thought of anything?”
He debated for a few steps. “I have thought of telling your uncle and aunt.”
“What you couldn’t tell me?” she asked quickly.
“No,” he answered slowly; “but just as much as I have told you. I have no right to tell them more than I have told you.”
This time it was she that debated. “No, don’t tell them,” she said finally. “They wouldn’t understand. I don’t understand, for that matter, but I have faith in you, and in the nature of things they are not capable of this same implicit faith. You raise up before me a mystery that prevents our marriage, and I believe you; but they could not believe you without doubts arising as to the wrong and ill-nature of the mystery. Besides, it would but make their anxieties greater.”
“I should go away, I know I should go away,” he said, half under his breath. “And I can. I am no weakling. Because I have failed to remain away once, is no reason that I shall fail again.”
She caught her breath with a quick gasp. “It is like a bereavement to hear you speak of going away and remaining away. I should never see you again. It is too terrible. And do not reproach yourself for weakness. It is I who am to blame. It is I who prevented you from remaining away before, I know. I wanted you so. I want you so.
“There is nothing to be done, Chris, nothing to be done but to go on with it and let it work itself out somehow. That is one thing we are sure of: it will work out somehow.”
“But it would be easier if I went away,” he suggested.
“I am happier when you are here.”
“The cruelty of circumstance,” he muttered savagely.
“Go or stay—that will be part of the working out. But I do not want you to go, Chris; you know that. And now no more about it. Talk cannot mend it. Let us never mention it again—unless... unless some time, some wonderful, happy time, you can come to me and say: ‘Lute, all is well with me. The mystery no longer binds me. I am free.’ Until that time let us bury it, along with Planchette and all the rest, and make the most of the little that is given us.
“And now, to show you how prepared I am to make the most of that little, I am even ready to go with you this afternoon to see the horse—though I wish you wouldn’t ride any more... for a few days, anyway, or for a week. What did you say was his name?”
“Comanche,” he answered. “I know you will like him.”
* * *
Chris lay on his back, his head propped by the bare jutting wall of stone, his gaze attentively directed across the canyon to the opposing tree-covered slope. There was a sound of crashing through underbrush, the ringing of steel-shod hoofs on stone, and an occasional and mossy descent of a dislodged boulder that bounded from the hill and fetched up with a final splash in the torrent that rushed over a wild chaos of rocks beneath him. Now and again he caught glimpses, framed in green foliage, of the golden brown of Lute’s corduroy riding-habit and of the bay horse that moved beneath her.
She rode out into an open space where a loose earth-slide denied lodgement to trees and grass. She halted the horse at the brink of the slide and glanced down it with a measuring eye. Forty feet beneath, the slide terminated in a small, firm-surfaced terrace, the banked accumulation of fallen earth and gravel.
“It’s a good test,” she called across the canyon. “I’m going to put him down it.”
The animal gingerly launched himself on the treacherous footing, irregularly losing and gaining his hind feet, keeping his fore legs stiff, and steadily and calmly, without panic or nervousness, extricating the fore feet as fast as they sank too deep into the sliding earth that surged along in a wave before him. When the firm footing at the bottom was reached, he strode out on the little terrace with a quickness and springiness of gait and with glintings of muscular fires that gave the lie to the calm deliberation of his movements on the slide.
“Bravo!” Chris shouted across the canyon, clapping his hands.
“The wisest-footed, clearest-headed horse I ever saw,” Lute called back, as she turned the animal to the side and dropped down a broken slope of rubble and into the trees again.
Chris followed her by the sound of her progress, and by occasional glimpses where the foliage was more open, as she zigzagged down the steep and trailless descent. She emerged below him at the rugged rim of the torrent, dropped the horse down a three-foot wall, and halted to study the crossing.
Four feet out in the stream, a narrow ledge thrust above the surface of the water. Beyond the ledge boiled an angry pool. But to the left, from the ledge, and several feet lower, was a tiny bed of gravel. A giant boulder prevented direct access to the gravel bed. The only way to gain it was by first leaping to the ledge of rock. She studied it carefully, and the tightening of her bridle-arm advertised that she had made up her mind.
Chris, in his anxiety, had sat up to observe more closely what she meditated.
“Don’t tackle it,” he called.
“I have faith in Comanche,” she called in return.
“He can’t make that side-jump to the gravel,” Chris warned. “He’ll never keep his legs. He’ll topple over into the pool. Not one horse in a thousand could do that stunt.”
“And Comanche is that very horse,” she answered. “Watch him.”
She gave the animal his head, and he leaped cleanly and accurately to the ledge, striking with feet close together on the narrow space. On the instant he struck, Lute lightly touched his neck with the rein, impelling him to the left; and in that instant, tottering on the insecure footing, with front feet slipping over into the pool beyond, he lifted on his hind legs, with a half turn, sprang to the left, and dropped squarely down to the tiny gravel bed. An easy jump brought him across the stream, and Lute angled him up the bank and halted before her lover.
“Well?” she asked.
“I am all tense,” Chris answered. “I was holding my breath.”
“Buy him, by all means,” Lute said, dismounting. “He is a bargain. I could dare anything on him. I never in my life had such confidence in a horse’s feet.”
“His owner says that he has never been known to lose his feet, that it is impossible to get him down.”
“Buy him, buy him at once,” she counselled, “before the man changes his mind. If you don’t, I shall. Oh, such feet! I feel such confidence in them that when I am on him I don’t consider he has feet at all. And he’s quick as a cat, and instantly obedient. Bridle-wise is no name for it! You could guide him with silken threads. Oh, I know I’m enthusiastic, but if you don’t buy him, Chris. I shall. Remember, I’ve second refusal.”
Chris smiled agreement as he changed the saddles. Meanwhile she compared the two horses.
“Of course he doesn’t match Dolly the way Ban did,” she concluded regretfully; “but his coat is splendid just the same. And think of the horse that is under the coat!”
Chris gave her a hand into the saddle, and followed her up the slope to the county road. She reined in suddenly, saying:
“We won’t go straight back to camp.”
“You forget dinner,” he warned.
“But I remember Comanche,” she retorted. “We’ll ride directly over to the ranch and buy him. Dinner will keep.”
“But the cook won’t,” Chris laughed. “She’s already threatened to leave, what of our late-comings.”
“Even so,” was the answer. “Aunt Mildred may have to get another cook, but at any rate we shall have got Comanche.”
They turned the horses in the other direction, and took the climb of the Nun Canyon road that led over the divide and down into the Napa Valley. But the climb was hard, the going was slow. Sometimes they topped the bed of the torrent by hundreds of feet, and again they dipped down and crossed and recrossed it twenty times in twice as many rods. They rode through the deep shade of clean-bunked maples and towering redwoods, to emerge on open stretches of mountain shoulder where the earth lay dry and cracked under the sun.
On one such shoulder they emerged, where the road stretched level before them, for a quarter of a mile. On one side rose the huge bulk of the mountain. On the other side the steep wall of the canyon fell away in impossible slopes and sheer drops to the torrent at the bottom. It was an abyss of green beauty and shady depths, pierced by vagrant shafts of the sun and mottled here and there by the sun’s broader blazes. The sound of rushing water ascended on the windless air, and there was a hum of mountain bees.
The horses broke into an easy lope. Chris rode on the outside, looking down into the great depths and pleasuring with his eyes in what he saw. Dissociating itself from the murmur of the bees, a murmur arose of falling water. It grew louder with every stride of the horses.
“Look!” he cried.
Lute leaned well out from her horse to see. Beneath them the water slid foaming down a smooth-faced rock to the lip, whence it leaped clear—a pulsating ribbon of white, a-breath with movement, ever falling and ever remaining, changing its substance but never its form, an aerial waterway as immaterial as gauze and as permanent as the hills, that spanned space and the free air from the lip of the rock to the tops of the trees far below, into whose green screen it disappeared to fall into a secret pool.
They had flashed past. The descending water became a distant murmur that merged again into the murmur of the bees and ceased. Swayed by a common impulse, they looked at each other.
“Oh, Chris, it is good to be alive... and to have you here by my side!”
He answered her by the warm light in his eyes.
All things tended to key them to an exquisite pitch—the movement of their bodies, at one with the moving bodies of the animals beneath them; the gently stimulated blood caressing the flesh through and through with the soft vigors of health; the warm air fanning their faces, flowing over the skin with balmy and tonic touch, permeating them and bathing them, subtly, with faint, sensuous delight; and the beauty of the world, more subtly still, flowing upon them and bathing them in the delight that is of the spirit and is personal and holy, that is inexpressible yet communicable by the flash of an eye and the dissolving of the veils of the soul.
So looked they at each other, the horses bounding beneath them, the spring of the world and the spring of their youth astir in their blood, the secret of being trembling in their eyes to the brink of disclosure, as if about to dispel, with one magic word, all the irks and riddles of existence.
The road curved before them, so that the upper reaches of the canyon could be seen, the distant bed of it towering high above their heads. They were rounding the curve, leaning toward the inside, gazing before them at the swift-growing picture. There was no sound of warning. She heard nothing, but even before the horse went down she experienced the feeling that the unison of the two leaping animals was broken. She turned her head, and so quickly that she saw Comanche fall. It was not a stumble nor a trip. He fell as though, abruptly, in midleap, he had died or been struck a stunning blow.
And in that moment she remembered Planchette; it seared her brain as a lightning-flash of all-embracing memory. Her horse was back on its haunches, the weight of her body on the reins; but her head was turned and her eyes were on the falling Comanche. He struck the road-bed squarely, with his legs loose and lifeless beneath him.
It all occurred in one of those age-long seconds that embrace an eternity of happening. There was a slight but perceptible rebound from the impact of Comanche’s body with the earth. The violence with which he struck forced the air from his great lungs in an audible groan. His momentum swept him onward and over the edge. The weight of the rider on his neck turned him over head first as he pitched to the fall.
She was off her horse, she knew not how, and to the edge. Her lover was out of the saddle and clear of Comanche, though held to the animal by his right foot, which was caught in the stirrup. The slope was too steep for them to come to a stop. Earth and small stones, dislodged by their struggles, were rolling down with them and before them in a miniature avalanche. She stood very quietly, holding one hand against her heart and gazing down. But while she saw the real happening, in her eyes was also the vision of her father dealing the spectral blow that had smashed Comanche down in mid-leap and sent horse and rider hurtling over the edge.
Beneath horse and man the steep terminated in an up-and-down wall, from the base of which, in turn, a second slope ran down to a second wall. A third slope terminated in a final wall that based itself on the canyon-bed four hundred feet beneath the point where the girl stood and watched. She could see Chris vainly kicking his leg to free the foot from the trap of the stirrup. Comanche fetched up hard against an outputting point of rock. For a fraction of a second his fall was stopped, and in the slight interval the man managed to grip hold of a young shoot of manzanita. Lute saw him complete the grip with his other hand. Then Comanche’s fall began again. She saw the stirrup-strap draw taut, then her lover’s body and arms. The manzanita shoot yielded its roots, and horse and man plunged over the edge and out of sight.
They came into view on the next slope, together and rolling over and over, with sometimes the man under and sometimes the horse. Chris no longer struggled, and together they dashed over to the third slope. Near the edge of the final wall, Comanche lodged on a buttock of stone. He lay quietly, and near him, still attached to him by the stirrup, face downward, lay his rider.
“If only he will lie quietly,” Lute breathed aloud, her mind at work on the means of rescue.
But she saw Comanche begin to struggle again, and clear on her vision, it seemed, was the spectral arm of her father clutching the reins and dragging the animal over. Comanche floundered across the hummock, the inert body following, and together, horse and man, they plunged from sight. They did not appear again. They had fetched bottom.
Lute looked about her. She stood alone on the world. Her lover was gone. There was naught to show of his existence, save the marks of Comanche’s hoofs on the road and of his body where it had slid over the brink.
“Chris!” she called once, and twice; but she called hopelessly.
Out of the depths, on the windless air, arose only the murmur of bees and of running water.
“Chris!” she called yet a third time, and sank slowly down in the dust of the road.
She felt the touch of Dolly’s muzzle on her arm, and she leaned her head against the mare’s neck and waited. She knew not why she waited, nor for what, only there seemed nothing else but waiting left for her to do.