Hetty Dorval Read Free Page B

breeches; and how neatly she handled the beautiful mare. She turned in her saddle and waited, looking at me. She must have seen a small figure of the country in a shabby buckskin jacket, riding a pony which could have done with a bit of grooming.
    When I came up close to Mrs. Dorval I saw only that her face was very pretty as she smiled gently at me, and so I smiled back, I suppose.
    Mrs. Dorval said to me in a very light voice, “Are you riding in to Lytton?” and I said, “Yes.”
    Then she said, “What a nice pony, is he yours?” and I said, “Yes.”
    And then she said, as we started walking our horses together as though it were taken for granted that we should, “What is your name, little girl?”
    Now I would have resented “little girl,” for I was twelve, if it had not been said in that light soft voice of Mrs. Dorval’s. So I said, “My name is Frankie, at least Frances Burnaby,” and then I added, “Mrs. Dorval.”
    Mrs. Dorval turned to me with that brilliant expression that I learned to know and said, “How did you know my name?”
    I was much too shy to explain that of course everyone in Lytton and for miles round knew her name even if they hadn’t seen her, and that they would know her the minute they saw her; that they knew she “had money,” and had two horses, and a big black dog called Sailor, and lived in the square bungalow standing alone east of Lytton; that a Mrs. Broom lived with her and seemed to do the work, and that Mrs. Dorval never came into Lytton, but that Mrs. Broom did the shopping. I could have told her that people in houses, and on verandahs, and in bedrooms, and in stores, and in stables, asked each other if they knew whether Mrs. Dorval had a husband, and was he dead, and why had she come here? This all swept through my mind, but was so impossible to tell her, that I only stammered, “Oh, I thought you must be.”
    We walked our horses side by side, I feeling at the same time diffident and important. Mrs. Dorval did not “make conversation.” I discovered that she never did. It began to seem so easy and natural riding beside her there and no one making an effort at conversation that I was able to steal a few looks at her side face. This was especially easy because she hardly seemed to know that I was beside her; she just took me for granted in a natural fashion. Through the years in the various times and places in which I came to know Mrs. Dorval, I never failed to have the same faint shock of delight as I saw her profile in repose, as it nearly always was. I can only describe it by sayingthat it was very pure. Pure is perhaps the best word, or spiritual, shall I say, and I came to think that what gave her profile this touching purity was just the soft curve of her high cheekbone, and the faint hollow below it. Also the innocence of her slightly tilted nose, which afterwards I called in my mind a flirt’s nose, and the slight droop of her mouth whose upper lip was perhaps a little over-full.
    We rode along the dusty highway which had a series of hairpin turns at the edge of deep dusty sage-dotted gullies, and this made the distance to Lytton much longer than as the crow flies. We came out on the point of one of the hairpin turns and my ears, which were used to country silences and sounds, heard that sound that will thrill me till I die. I reined Maxey in at once, and, quite forgetting the importance of Mrs. Dorval, pointed up and said, “Look!”
    Mrs. Dorval reined in too, and said, “What? Where?” She shaded her eyes with her hand and looked up as I did. She could not see as quickly as I could that out of the north came a thin long arrow, high in the sky. Then her eyes picked up the movement of the fluid arrow rapidly approaching overhead, and the musical clamour of the wild geese came more clearly and loudly to us. The valley of the Fraser lay broad below, lit by the September afternoon, and the geese, not too high, were now nearly overhead, travelling fast. The