"It is one of the many little absurdities in American customs; the old story of the survival of the two buttons at the back of the coat, and, by the way, Miss Esmeralda, the two buttons on the back of your habit are out of place, not because of your tailor's fault, but because of yours. They should make a line at right angles with your horse's spinal column. Draw yourself back a little, until you can feel the pommel under your right knee.
'Draw' yourself back; don't lean, but keep yourself perfectly erect, your back perpendicular to your horse's. Sit a little to the left; lean a little to the right. Let your left shoulder go forward a little, your right shoulder backward. Now you are exactly right. Try to remember your sensations at this minute, in order to be able to reproduce them. When I say 'Careful,' pass yourself in review and endeavor to feel where you are wrong.
But," addressing the cavalryman, who was in advance with Versatilia, "is this procession a funeral?"
"Not exactly," said the cavalryman, and the, after a backward glance, he cried, in the fashion of a military riding-school master: "Pr-r-re-pare to tr-r-r-ot--Trot!"
Esmeralda remembered to shorten her reins, and resigned herself to the Fates, who were propitious, enabling her to catch the cadence of the trot, and to rise to it during the few seconds before the cavalryman slackened rein. "Careful," said the master, and she shook herself into place, eliciting a hearty "Good!" from him. "Look at your pretty girl," he growled softly, but savagely, and truly the beauty solicited attention. Slipping to the left in her saddle, one elbow pointing toward Cambridgeport and the other toward Dorchester, her right foot visible through her habit, and her left all but out of the stirrup, she was attractive no longer, and to complete the master's disgust she ejaculated: "My hair is coming down!"
"Better bring a nurse and a ladies' maid for her," he muttered to Esmeralda, confidentially. "Hairpins in your saddle pocket? Well, you are a sensible girl," and he rode forward with the little packet, giving it to the lawyer to pass to the unfortunate young woman. But here arose a little difficulty. The space between the lawyer's horse and the beauty's as they stood was too wide to allow him to lay the parcel in her outstretched fingers. The Texan, on her right hand, had enough to do to keep her horse and his own absolutely motionless that she might not be thrown by any unexpected motion of either animal. Versatilia exclaimed in remonstrance, "Don't leave me," when the cavalryman said, "Wait a second, I'll come and give them to her;" the master sat quiet and smiling.
"Why don't you dismount and give them to her?" cried Theodore, and was out of his saddle, had placed the parcel in her hand, and was back in his place again before either of the other three men could speak.
"Very well done," said the master, approvingly, "but not the right thing to do. Never leave your saddle without good cause, and never leave your horse loose for a moment. Yes, I saw that you retained your hold of the reins; I was talking at Miss Esmeralda."
"Why didn't you make your horse step sideways?" he asked the lawyer.
"I can't. He won't. See there!"
Sundry pulls, precisely like those which he might have used had he intended the horse to turn, a pair of absolutely motionless legs, and an unused whip were accepted as evidence that the lawyer's "I can't" was perfectly true, and the master and the cavalryman exchanged comprehending glances as the latter said: "Well, don't mind. An eminent authority announced after the Boston horse show of 1889 that high-school airs were of no use on the road. To make a horse move a step sideways is the veriest little zephyr of an air, but it would have been of some use to you, then. Are we ready now? What's that? Dropped your whip?"
Up went the Texan's left heel, catching cleverly on the saddle as he dropped lightly to the right, after the fashion of the Arab, the Moor, the Apache, of all the nations which ride for speed and for fighting rather than for leaping and hunting, and he caught the whip from the ground and was back in his place in a twinkling. The ladies were unmoved, because inappreciative; the lawyer looked savagely envious, the cavalryman and the master approving, and Theodore, frankly admiring, but no one said anything, the little cavalcade rearranged itself, and once more moved on at a footpace until an electric car appeared.
"Ronald is like a rock," said the master, "and you need not be afraid, but I'll take this beast along in advance. He will shy, or do some outrageous thing, and he has a mouth as sensitive as the Mississippi's, and no more."
The "beast" did indeed sidle and fret and prance, and manifest a disposition to hasten to drown himself in the reservoir, beyond the reach of self-propelling vehicles, and he repeated the performance a the sight of two other cars, although evidently less alarmed than at first, but the fourth car was in charge of a kindly-disposed driver, who came to a dead stop, out of pure amiability.
This was too much for the "beast" to endure; a moving house he was beginning to regard as tolerable, but a house which stopped short and glared at him with all its windows was more than horse nature could endure, and he started for the next county to institute an inquiry as to whether such actions were to be allowed, but found himself forced to stop, and not altogether comfortable, while the master cried good-naturedly: "Go along and take care of your car. I'll take care of my horse!"
"More than some other folks can do," said the driver, with a quiet grin at the lawyer, whose angry, "Here, what are you doing!" shouted to his plunging steed, had brought all the women in the car to the front, to explain to one another that "that man was abusing his horse, poor thing."
The car glided off, and Versatilia turned to look at it; her horse stumbled slightly, jerking her wrists sharply, and but for the cavalryman's quick shifting of the reins to his right hand and his strong grasp of her reins with his left, she might have been in danger.
"Never look back," lectured the master. Esmeralda was his pupil, and he would have taken the whole centennial quadrille and all the cabinet ladies to point his moral, had he seen them making equestrian blunders. "Where your horse has been, where, he is, is the past. Look to the future, straight before you."
"The cavalryman looked back just now," Esmeralda ventured to say.
"Yes, but he turned his horse very slightly to do it, and he may do almost anything because he has a perfect seat, and is a good horseman."
"Suppose I hear something or somebody coming up behind me?"
"If it have any intelligence, it will not hurt you. If it have none, looking will do you no good. Turn out to the right as far as you can and look to the front harder than ever, so as to be ready to guide your horse and to avoid any obstacles in case he should start to run. What is the trouble with the ladies now?"
"O, dear!" cried the beauty to the society young lady, "your horse."
"What's the matter with him?" asked the other, still very stately and not turning.
"Oh! The dreadful creature has caught his tail on my horse's bit," said the beauty.
"Then you'd better take your horse's bit away," retorted the other. "My horse's eyes are not at that end of him, and he can't be expected to look at his tail."
"And you may be kicked," added the Texan. "Check him a little; there! We ought not to be so close together, and we ought to be moving a little, I think. Shall we trot again?"
Everybody assented, the cavalryman and Versatilia set off, the others followed as best they might, the beauty "going to pieces"
in a minute or two, according to the master, the society young lady stiffening visibly, losing the cadence of the trot very soon, but making no outcry as she was tossed about uncomfortably, and not bending her head to look at her reins, as Versatilia did.
"There's the advantage of training in other things," said the master. "She's a good dancer and a good amateur actress, and she is controlling herself as she would on a ballroom floor, and remembering the spectators as she would on the stage. She's no rider, but is perfectly selfish and self-possessed, and she will cheat her escort into thinking that she is one. Glad she's no pupil of mine, however! She always heads the conversation, one of her friends told me the other day. That is to say, she is always acting. I can't teach such a person anything; nobody can. She can teach herself, as she can think of herself and love herself, but she can't go outside of herself--and the lawyer will find it out after he has married her."
Esmeralda and Theodore stared in astonishment.
"Walk," said the master, noticing that his pupil looked too warm for comfort, and the three allowed the others to go on without them. "Careful," he added, and Esmeralda, adjusting herself studiously, asked: "Is it really easier to ride on the road than it is in the school? It seems so."
"It is a little, especially if the corners of the ring are so near together that the horse goes in a circle, for then the rider has to lean to the right, while on the road she may sit straight.
Give me the right kind of horse for my pupil to ride, and I would as leif give lessons on the road as anywhere, but it is not well for the pupil, whose attention is distracted by a thousand things, and who learns less in a year than she would in a month in school. There is no finish about the riding of a woman so taught. She may be pretty, as you said of one of your friends, she may be self-possessed, like the other, but she will betray her ignorance every moment. You were surprised just now at what I said of the society young lady. A woman can't cheat an old riding-master, after he has seen her in the saddle. He knows her and her little ways by heart. Shall we start up? Ah!"
Ronald, the "steady as a rock," was off and away at a canter; Theodore was starting to gallop in pursuit, but was sharply ordered back by the master, who went on himself at a rather slow canter, ready to break into a gallop if his pupil were thrown, but keeping out of Ronald's hearing, lest he should be further startled by finding himself followed. There was a clear stretch of road before her, and Esmeralda sat down as firmly as possible, brought her left knee up against the pommel, clung firmly with her right knee, held her hands low and her thumbs as firm as possible, and thought very hard.
"Very soon," she said to herself, "I shall be thrown and dragged, and hat a figure I shall be going home, if I', not killed! But I sha'n't be! I shall be ridiculous, and that's worse." Here she swept by the riding party, but as Versatilia and the beauty turned to look at her, and forgot to control their horses, the cavalryman and the Texan had to do it for them, and could do nothing for Esmeralda except to shout "Whoa," which Ronald very properly disregarded. The master came up, and the society young lady addressed him with, "Very silly of her to try to exhibit herself so, isn't it?"
"That's no exhibition; that's a runaway," said the master grimly.
"She's doing well too, poor girl," and he and Theodore went on after the flying rider. Two or three carriages, the riders staring with horror; a pedestrian or two, innocently wondering why a lady should be on the road alone; a small boy whistling shrilly; these were all the spectators of Esmeralda's flight. She felt desolate and deserted, and yet sure that it was best that she should be alone, since the master could overtake her if he would, and she wondered if she should be very seriously injured when thrown at last, but all the time she was talking to Ronald in a voice carefully kept at a low pitch, and her hands were held with a steadiness utterly new to them, and the good horse went on regularly, but faster and faster.
"That isn't a real runaway," said the master to himself. "Ah, I see! Her whip is down and strikes him at every stride, and so she unconsciously urges him forward. If there were a side road here, I'd gallop around and meet her, or if there were fields on either side, I'd leap the fence and make a circuit and cut her off, but through this place, with banks like a railway cutting on each side, there is nothing to do."
Swifter and swifter! Esmeralda began to feel weaker, thought of Theodore, and of some other things of which she never told even him, said a little prayer, but all the time remembered her master's injunctions, and kept her place firmly, waiting for the final, and, as she believed, inevitable crash, when lo! She saw that just in front of her lay a long piece of half-mended road, full of ugly little stones, and she turned Ronald on it, with a triumphant, "See how you like that, sir," and then sawed his mouth. In half a minute he was walking. In another the master was beside her with words of approval. Theodore galloped up, pale and anxious, and between the two she had quite as much praise as was good for her, and, being told of the position of the whip, found her confidence in Ronald restored.
"But you should never start up hastily," said the master. "Take time for everything, and check your horse the instant he goes faster than you mean to have him. You are a good girl, and you shall not be scolded, or snubbed, either," he muttered, and the party came up, the cavalryman and the Texan loud in praise, the other four clamorous with questions and advice.
"You look quite disheveled," said the society young lady agreeably.
"Ladies often do after they have been on the road a little while.
Excuse me, but one of your skirt buttons is unfastened," said the master, and, not knowing how to pass her reins into her right hand so as to use her left to repair the accident, the society young lady was effectually silenced, while the master, holding Esmeralda's horse, made her wipe her face, arrange the curly locks flying about her ears, readjust her hat, and generally smooth her plumage, until she was once more comfortable.
After a little, the master proposed a trot up the hill, and instructed Esmeralda to lean forward as her horse climbed upward, "If you should have to trot down hill, lean back a little, and keep your reins short," he said.
The lawyer and the society young lady, essaying to descend the next hill brilliantly, barely escaped going over their horses'
heads, and all four ladies were glad when they perceived that they were going homeward.
"I like it," Esmeralda said to the master, "but I wish I knew more, and I'm going to learn, and I see now that three lessons isn't enough, even for a beginning."
"I knew a girl who took seventeen lessons and then was thrown,"
said the society young lady. "Native ability is better than teaching. I don't believe any master could make a rider of you, Esmeralda."
"A good teacher can make a rider out of anyone who will study,"
said the master, to whom she looked for approval. "As for seventeen lessons, they are better than seven, of course, but they are not much, after all. How many dancing lessons, music lessons, elocution lessons have you taken? More than seventeen? I thought so. Here's a railroad bridge, but no train coming. Had one been approaching, and had there been no chance to cross it before it came, I should have made you turn Ronald the other way, Miss Esmeralda, so that if he ran he would run out of what he thinks is danger, and not into it. And now for an easy little trot home."
An easy little trot it was, and Esmeralda, left at her own door, where a groom waited to take her horse to the stable, was happy, but puzzled. "Theodore," she cried, as soon as he appeared in the evening, "did you ask the master to go with us? He treated me just as he does in school."
"Yes, I did," said Theodore boldly. "I was afraid to take charge of you alone. That was a 'road lesson.'"
"You--you--exasperating thing!" cried Esmeralda. "But then, you were sensible."