On second thoughts the puzzle had dissolved.
She accepted his negations, and, woman-like, improved
on them. The marriage service was humbug; therefore
she had willed to have none of it. The attitude
was touching. It might have been convenient,
had he been less in love.
But he was deeply in love, so deeply that in good
earnest he longed to lift and set her above all women.
For this, nonsensical though they were, due rites
must be observed.
At the last pinch she had broken away. Was it
possible, then, that after all she did not love him?
She had crossed her arms once and called herself
his slave. . . .
Not for one moment did he understand that other scepticism
which, forced out of faith, clasps and clings to reverence;
which, though it count the rite inefficient, yet sees
the meaning, and counts the moment so holy that to
contaminate the rite is to poison all.
Not as yet did he understand one whit of this.
But he vehemently desired her, and his desire was
straight. Because it was straight, while he
rode some inkling of the truth pierced him.
For, as he rode, he recalled how she had cast up an
arm and turned to flee. His eyes had rested
confusedly on the breast-knot of scarlet leaves, and
it seemed to him, as he rode, that he had seen her
heart beating there through her ribs.
“YET HE WILL COME—“.
The cabin stood close above the fall. It was
built of oak logs split in two, with the barked and
rounded sides turned outward. Pete Vanders would
have found pine logs more tractable and handier to
come by, and they would have outlasted his time; but,
being a Dutchman, he had built solidly by instinct.
Also, he had chosen his ledge cunningly or else with
amazing luck. A stairway shaped in the solid
rock—eight treads and no more—led
down to the very brink of the first cascade; yet through
all these years, with their freshets and floods, the
cabin had clung to its perch. Within doors the
ears never lost the drone of the waters. There
were top-notes that lifted or sank as the wind blew,
but below them the deep bass thundered on.
Ruth had doffed her riding-dress for a bodice and
short skirt of russet, and moved about the cabin tidying
where she had tidied a score of times already.
Through the window-opening drifted wisps of smoke,
aromatic and pungent, from the fire she had built
in an angle of the crags a few yards from the house.
(It had been the Dutchman’s hearth. She
had found it and cleared the creepers away, and below
them the rock-face was yet black with the smoke of
old fires.) Some way up the gorge, where, at the foot
of a smaller waterfall, the river divided and swirled
about an island covered with sweet grass—a
miniature meadow—her mare grazed at will.
About a fortnight ago, having set aside three days
for the search, on the second Ruth had found a circuitous
way through the woods. A part of it she had cleared
with a billhook, and since then Madcap had trodden
a rough pathway with her frequent goings and comings.
It had immensely lightened the labour of furnishing,
but she feared that the pasturage would last but a
day or two. Her lover, when he came, must devise
means of sending the mare back.
