She watched him narrowly as he prepared his drink. The decanter was so low that she thought he must be feeling what he had taken, and she wondered if it might not have softened him, released some generosity in his poor soul.
"You must have suffered, Randall, in all this. But won't it hurt you still more, doing what you mean to do—when you makehimsuffer?"
"His suffering!" He waved a deprecating hand. "What can he suffer compared to me? Disgust I've suffered, yes, and mortification. He could feel nothing approaching that if I flayed him here. Why, Nell, I pulled a rose from its bush this morning in Neville's garden, and crushed a worm crawling on its stem. A poor, tiny green thing, yet it had lived, and had its successes and failures after a fashion. But you can't imagine its actual suffering in death to equal my own mere disgust at crushing it."
The brandy had not softened him, she thought. Could it have made him cautious?
"Have you never suspected, Randall, that there may be a sleeping fighter in him?" There was a glitter in her tormented eyes, a sudden fierce wish to behold battle between this puny insulter and Ewing aroused to his might.
"Bah! a fighter!" He snapped contemptuous fingers. "There's the look in his eye sometimes, but I've disarmed him. Hecan'tfight me, his benefactor, his best friend. Never fear; he'll wilt, wither, shrivel up. Oh, trust me for that. And suppose the impossible, suppose the worm turns in some fit of wormish desperation. I've thecoup, have I not? You know what his mother is to him, a damned romantic memory of pure womanhood and all that rot. Suppose him capable of so much as an eye-flash of defiance. Why, then, my child, he'll know who—he'll knowwhat—his mother was; and he'll know my right to describe her. He'll know whatheis. And the words won't puzzle him: he'll need no lexicon—crisp, Anglo-Saxon words. Do you think that will leave any fight in him—her shame and his? By Gad! Nell, it's too good to keep from him. He shall have it anyway, though I'd meant to keep it back for my own sake. But that shall be the clincher. Before her face there I'll tell him what she was."
"Not that, Randall, surely not that!" Her veil of calmness had flown on the wind of his hate. She knew she must reveal herself. Her words had been so near a cry that he turned on her in amazement.
"Listen, Randall, don't—don't do that. Let him off. I promise to take him away. It's all true; you've handled him well, and you can break him now—butdon't. Please, please let him go. I'll take him away, I tell you. I promise he shall never bother you again."
He looked at her, incredulous.
"You're asking me to considerhim—really?"
"No, no—to consider me. Please, please listen—please consider me."
"But you—I thought you——"
"Randall"—she had regained a little of her first coolness—"I'm done for. I found that out to-day. I've a year to live, at most. A scant year, if it's to be like this. Try to grasp it. I've wanted so much, had so little of life. But, I must go, they tell me. Can you understand what that means, as well as I understood what this meant to you—a sentence of death, a few little months to snatch at happiness?"
He stared at her uncertainly, but half comprehending. She saw that the drink was affecting him at last. His eyes were dulled, his face had lost its centered look.
"Going to die, Eleanor? Die in a year? What rot! Don't talk rot. Nobody dies in a year." He spoke carefully, with a deliberate attack on each word, as if he mistrusted his tongue.
"But it's true, Randall, I swear it's true. Can you understand?"
"Understand?" he repeated, and through her tense absorption she was astonished to see on his face an incredible look of pity. "Understand? Why, of course! And it's too bad, my girl. Poor Eleanor! Die in a year—why wouldn't I understand? But never mind"—he seemed to search clumsily for words of cheer. "Death isn't anything but an incident in the scheme of life—a precious contemptible one, I've no doubt. We live, and that's a little thing—but death's littler.I dare say we live as long as we need to. Who was the old chap—Plotinus, wasn't it?—conceived the body to be a penitential mechanism for the soul? All the better if we expiate early. Gad! I must have had a quantity of things to atone for—though I'm really younger than you may think, Nell. Poor girl—poor girl!" He brightened as he drained his glass to her. "Here's to you, wherever you are. Come, be cheerful anyway. What was it struck in my mind yesterday?—a sentence from one of Arbuthnot's letters to Swift—just the meat for you—'A reasonable hope of going—a reasonable hope of going to a good place and an absolute certainty of leaving a bad one.' That's the sentiment—keep it in mind, my dear."
She was nerving herself to new appeals, half fearing she could not hold his attention. She seized on that unprecedented look of compassion.
"But, Randall, you'll let him off—let him off for me—for my sake." In her eagerness she rose and fluttered to the desk, standing before him. He whirled his chair about, and the look of commiseration had gone.
"No, no, no! You can't understand, Nell. I couldn't let him off if I wanted to. It's fate, its retribution—the sins of the father—it's scriptural, I tell you—" His eyes were gleaming again with steely implacability.
"But for me, Randall, for my sake, for me alone—not thinking of him?"
"Ah, lady, set me a harder task, but one of dignity—as difficult, as dangerous as you like, so it has some dignity. But not that. Here"—he gracefully extended the handle of the dagger to her—"slay mean'you will—the blade is keen—a toy, but deadly—I'll die smiling if you wish. But don't ask for that cub's happiness.Don't rob me of my pay, Nell, my pay for all I've endured from him, his boastings and snivelings, and his detestable handshakes. Don't talk rot, I say, even if you must die."
Again she set herself to plead, desperation feeding the fire in her head until she knew not her words. She was conscious only of a torrent of speech, coaxing, imploring, wheedling, even threatening. But all she evoked was the steady, smiling negative, his head shaken unwittingly to the rhythm of her phrases.
She stopped at last, panting, striving to keep back the passionate words of entreaty that still formed, crushing them down in a maddened consciousness of their impotence. She stared wildly, feeling only a still stubborn determination. Ewing would soon come—yet it seemed that she had no resource save appeal. She felt this and raged against it, striding away from Teevan across the room. For the first time in her gentle life she was feeling the sensation she thought a man must feel in fighting. She had an impulse to strike blindly, to wound, to beat down with her hands. Without volition she measured her antagonist and wondered deliriously if she could throw him to the floor. He seemed so small to her, and hateful—hateful and small enough to kill. She closed her eyes to shut him out, but opened them again quickly, for everything rocked in the darkness. She incessantly pictured this creature, naked in his poverty of manhood, smiling up at Ewing, the friendly one, who stood bowed down, blighted and broken of heart. Sometimes Ewing had his arm over his face, and she felt that he would never take it away—move on thus forever, like a figure in an anguished dream.
Constantly beside her thoughts, like a little refrain, went the remembrance that she had brought him there, torn him from his youth and splendid dreams to give him to this—she the betrayer! The fever waxed, the tortured blood trampled in her head like hurrying hoofs.
But she could not strike Teevan, extinguish him with blows, and she set herself again to play the beggar. And she could not beg across the room. Bit by bit she crept to the entreated one, her great eyes full of flame and fear, and laid pitiful hands on his shoulder. Still the shaken head met her, the icy smile, the dulled eyes.
"No good talking, Nell! No good! You mortify me, my word you do. Demand something great, something to task a man; ask me——"
Again he picked up the dagger with a return to that extravagant air of the sighing gallant.
"—here, I point it to my heart, see! A mere thrust—your beautiful hand is still equal to it. I'd be proud of the blow. I'd give you my life gladly—but not my self-respect. You're too stunning a woman, Nell, to waste yourself on that cub—a woman to die for indeed. You were never finer than at this moment." In the excess of his emotion he threw an arm about her waist. She started back but he held her.
"Never finer, Nell, on my soul—too fine for that damned——"
She put out her hands in an instinctive, shuddering movement of repulsion. Still he clung to her, muttering his insupportable phrases. He clung and she could not release herself without doing what she had thought was impossible—exert her unused hands in striking, thrusting, beating off. She hesitated: she did notlike to touch him. He looked very small and low in his chair. How low he seemed from her dizzy height! And yet he held so well. His voice came faintly, too, as if from afar, floating up faint and hateful. So he would hold Ewing and slay him with his voice. He was playing with the dagger again and proffering his heart with maudlin eyes. Prisoning her still with his right arm, he took her hand in his left and clumsily set it on the dagger's hilt.
"It would be a sweet death, Nell. Press home!" He drew her closer, so that she staggered on his shoulder. "Gad! your eyes are fine. What a woman you are! Too great, Nell, for that beaten whelp, even before he took to your sister——"
She gave a desperate little cry and struck out to free herself. It was hardly more than a gesture to have him away, but she was conscious, with a lightning shock, that the blade moved under her hand. She heard Teevan's shrill scream of fright and pain——
"You're killing me—you're killing me!"
But she saw only Ewing with covered face, and pushed the harder, lost to all but her blind sense of opposition. Then she heard a new note in Teevan's cry.
"Ewing! Ewing!"
She turned quickly, while Teevan retreated round a corner of the desk, snarling his rage—turned to see Ewing.
HE stood just inside the door, hat in hand, regarding the scene with a look that was troubled yet cool. She felt her way cautiously back to a chair, afraid of fainting, and grasped it for support. Finding that her hand still clutched the dagger, she dropped it with a shudder of disgust.
Ewing shrewdly noted where the dagger fell, then his eyes flashed to Teevan. There was a stain of blood on the silken shirt, and the little man was staring down at this, incredulous.
"By God! she meant it!" he muttered. Then his eyes rose to meet Ewing's, and a look of sudden malignance blazed into them.
"So you've come!" The cry, like the look, was full of hate. "You've come in time, you whelp! Now you'll hear something you might have heard that first night when I had to fuddle you with tales of a seizure. Now you'll know——"
But the woman started toward him with a suddenness that broke his speech.
"If you tell him he'll kill you—" The words came with a quick, whispering intensity, and there was a rapt, almost rejoicing look on her face, as of one eager for the deed.
Teevan looked scornfully to Ewing again, but waschilled by a certain sharp, cold light in his eyes, the look of one alert and ready. His words gave meaning to this look.
"If you tell me, I'll kill you," said Ewing. The sentence was evenly uttered, and the tone was low, almost deferential, but the intention was not to be mistaken.
Teevan laughed, flourishing a gesture of scorn for the threat.
"I'm no coward"—but he broke off, waiting, watching, with fear in his eyes.
"I'll take this," said Ewing. He lifted the portrait tenderly from the chair and thrust it under his arm with a protecting movement. Teevan stared at this with an air of fine disdain, but did not speak.
The woman had been waiting for his words with parted lips. Now she breathed a long, trembling sigh of relief and turned to Ewing.
"You see, he has nothing to say. Let us go."
He opened the door for her and closed it after them without looking again at Teevan.
"There's a reason why I can't do it for you now," he said, as they went down the stairs. She wondered what he could mean, but was too little alive to ask. When they reached the street she became at once interested in a belated laborer going home with a loosely tied bundle over his shoulder, odds and ends of small boards, refuse from some building. He whistled in a tired way as he trudged on, not looking at them. She felt pleased at the thought that his wife was going to have wood with which to cook the poor fellow's supper. The dark was fast gathering, but children still romped in the street. An elderly stout man passed, his hat off,wielding a palm-leaf fan. She was surprised at this, for the outer air had fallen on her with icy clutch, making her draw the scarf more closely about her.
Ewing would have left her at her door, but she urged him to go in. She took him to sit in the unlighted library, and there, when he could no longer see her face, he was astounded to hear her talk of her girlhood, her schooldays, of the few people they knew in common, of Piersoll's new book, of her brother's ranch life; of a score of little gossipy matters that would occur to the untroubled mind in a twilight chat. But when he rose to go after a little time, she was in an instant wild panic of protest, seizing one of his hands with a convulsive grip. He covered her poor hand with his own and regarded her with pity. She lifted her face to him with a sudden wild entreaty for shelter. "Oh, stay with me—stay—stay—and comfort me. I am so ill, and I—I would comfort you." He soothed her as best he could, protesting that he would stay, and in a few moments she was talking cheerfully of Kensington and of Virginia. She tried to amuse him with tales of Virginia's childhood—how she had been such a droll and merry little creature. She still retained his hand, gripping it with an intensity through which he could feel the quivering of her whole body.
Only once did she refer to Teevan. "Please don't see him again," she urged. "Promise me, promise never to let him tell you—anything. Please, please promise that!"
Believing she pleaded for herself, he felt that old longing to lift her in his arms and show her there without words how little she had to fear. But he controlled himself to answer simply, "I promise; I'll neverlet him speak to me again. Don't be afraid; he shall never say anything to me."
Her father came in presently, grumbling about the lack of light as he stumbled against a chair. He let it be known that he had returned to the city in some alarm about her, inspired by a letter from her aunt. She hastily assured him that she was well—never better. But he demurred at her remaining longer in town.
"You'll have to get out, daughter. It's beastly unpleasant doing those slum things in summer. You need life and gayety. You come with me and dance, play bridge, swim, sail—enjoy yourself with your own kind for a while. You're going on Tom Neville's yacht to-morrow. He's to pick us up about noon with Randy Teevan."
"Will he be there?" she asked.
"He will, and he'll be one of a jolly crowd that will 'liven you up. Here's Clarence—he must come, too."
Her brother had felt his way through the darkness, and before she guessed his intention he had found one of the electric lights and turned it on. She shrank back with a strange, smothered cry, under the sudden light, her hand before her face as if to ward off invisible horrors, her eyes staring at them under it, wild with appeal. They were speechless for the moment, alarmed by her manifest illness, her frightened, haggard face, in which the fever raged. Her brother was the first to speak, going to her and taking the blind, defending hand she had put out. She clung to him when she felt his touch, but turned her face away.
"See here, Nell," he began, in tones of savage decision, "no yachting trip for you, my girl. 'Twon't do, governor,you can see that for yourself. But I'll tell you what she's going to do—she's going to pack up and go back to the mountains with me and stay there till she's well."
She still clung to him, drawing his arms around her with an effect of hiding.
"Yes, yes, that's it—let's go there—out where there's room. It's stifling here. Have you noticed how curiously stifling it is? Too many people, dead people and live people, and all hobnobbing. We must get away, brother."
"You hear that, dad? She'll go back with me. How soon, Nell?—I say, how soon?" he repeated, for she had not seemed to hear him.
"How soon?" She raised her eyes to them with sudden intelligence, then sprang wildly to her feet.
"Oh, soon, at once!—Well, not to-night, perhaps,"—she sank back again—"but to-morrow, next day. We'll all go. Mr. Ewing is going." Her eyes rested on Ewing a moment, then, with a difficult smile, she turned to her brother. "And Virgie must go, too. Telegraph her to-night. She'll make us gay, she'll make us—as we used to be. We couldn't go without Virgie. She will—comfort us."
"She'll go, too, Sis. It's all right. I'll telegraph. But what are you afraid of? You'll be a well woman there in a month."
"Afraid—I afraid?" She looked up at him in wonder. "I don't know. Oh, yes I do. Why, I just tried to kill—I've just killed—killed a hundred people—killed——"
"Good Lord—there—she's fainted! Get some water and a drop of brandy, dad!"
"Poor child—it's so fearfully unpleasant," murmured Bartell as he came back with a glass and decanter. "It's that tenement house thing that's got on her nerves."
"An unpleasant business," returned his father, "all that rot—mighty unpleasant!"
Ewing waited in the outer room until he heard the broken murmur of her voice and knew that she had recovered. Then he went quickly out, the portrait under his arm. He had the feeling that it had been contaminated by Teevan's touch.
He began dismantling his studio that night. He stopped in the work once to look out over the roofs, glowing luridly under a half moon. This was because the pleading of the woman still rang in his ears—"Don't let him tell you anything"—and the whole entreating look of her flashed back to him. Then the big, slow tears of pity gathered in his eyes to set the chimney pots dancing before him.
"If only I hadn't owed him money!" he muttered, beside himself with pity and hatred.
It was not until the day before they started West that Mrs. Laithe learned the secret of this pity of Ewing's that had so puzzled her. Alden Teevan begged a moment with her in the afternoon of that day, and she, sunk in the languor of her sickness, received him where she lay, in her own sitting-room.
He swept her with a long, knowing look as he entered, reading, she saw, the truth about her condition.
"I'd gladly go with you, Nell," he began—"let my own walls close at the same time." But she would have no bald admissions.
"I'm not going, Alden—I'm only a bit run down.I shall pick up in a month out there." He detected her insincerity but only smiled in a hurt way.
"That's one of your rules of the game, isn't it, to keep up the pretense? Of course I can't expect you to break rules for me." She faced him stanchly, looking denial.
"But I must tell you something," he went on quickly, "something horrible and absurd and unbelievable." She listened, and grew faint in an agony of unbelief, while he told her what had inspired Ewing's behavior the night before. She made him repeat it, testing each detail, weighing its credibility against Ewing's inexperience; dazedly trying to see herself as he must see her now. Alden Teevan regarded her with quickening sympathy.
"It wasn't a pretty thing to do, Nell, but I saw he had some deviltry afoot, and I got it from him—I half choked and half wheedled it from him. Fortunately he was drunk or I couldn't have got it either way. But now you know. It began, as nearly as I could gather, one night last spring when Ewing saw you leaving the house. The vain little fool guessed he'd seen you, and told him the tale about a woman who'd been harassing him because he was trying to break off an affair with her."
"I remember——"
"And then last night——"
"Last night—ah, last night!" She laughed weakly, recalling the scene that had met Ewing's eyes, perceiving what he must have thought. "I'd have done it for you," she heard him say again, and shuddered. She recalled, too, her own later urging, "Never let him tell you anything." How pitiful she must have seemed to him, and how monstrous! She laughed again wildly, suddenlystruck by the cunning of this satire on truth. Alden Teevan recalled her from the picture.
"It was like him, wasn't it, Nell?—like both of them—like him to say it, and like the other to believe. But the harm can be undone. You can explain—a word or two."
She stared at him in sudden consternation. It had flashed upon her that no half truth would satisfy Ewing. She knew she would be unequal to any adequate fiction; she would falter and he would see to the heart of her lie. She must let him think as he did—or blacken his dearest memory. But to Alden Teevan she only said:
"Ah, yes—a word will explain—and I'm so grateful to you." She was wondering then if she were glad or sorry that he had told her. She might have lived out her time without knowing, she thought.
"Of course, if you'd like me to tell him, Nell——"
"No, no, Alden, thank you; but that's for me."
They had not spoken Ewing's name, but his concern in the matter, the meaning of his faith in the woman, was a matter that seemed to lie open to them both. Alden Teevan had assumed it and she had made no denial. His recognition of it colored his leave-taking.
"All happiness for you, Nell. The game ought to be worth playing with you—and with him. You both live so hard." He found it difficult to say as little, there was such gratitude and such misery in her eyes as they fell before his, trying to veil at least a part of what she felt. But he left her so.
She lay a long time trying to realize Ewing in this new light. She had never read anything in his eyes but the fullest devotion, and yet for months he had believed this sinister thing. She caught again his young, sorry,protesting look, and the poignancy of it brought her tears. There came into the tenderness she had felt for him something of awe for his unquestioning allegiance, a thing that had not wavered under the worst he could believe. Then the monstrous absurdity of what he did believe came upon her once more and she laughed; but her tears still fell. And so, with laughter and tears, she set him up anew in her heart, her beloved child and her terrible master. She was glad now that she knew. It made him more to her. And the time would be so short.
EWING had looked forward pleasantly to meeting Virginia Bartell again, but it was a new Virginia who met him with a nod when he joined the party on the evening of the start. She had eyes only for her sister, the white, weak, phantom thing who smiled terribly as her brother half carried her into the stateroom of their car. Through the days of the journey he sought to cheer her, wistfully making jests about the flat land and its people as they sped through the little wooden towns, promising her a land that would be "busy every minute." But she would only say, "I'll like your land when it makes sister well."
"It's bound to," he assured her. "Nobody dies there unless he gets careless. Here, this is the way it happens. Here's Ben Crider's last letter. You'll like Ben. Listen to this and see if it doesn't make you hopeful." He opened the scrawled sheet and read:
"'Dear Kid, I thought it about time to write you a few lines. If you seen the lake now you would want to of been here. Life and nature seems very complete here. I heard Chet Lynch shot Elmer Watts. I been building a haystacker for Pierce. Plenty deer sign around the lick. Lee Jennings was killed by a bucker falling back on him. I can sell your saddle for twenty-two dollars to Ben Lefferts. I put a new latigo on it. Let me know. Say, Kid, I sent two dollars to the MysticNovelty Company. The address is Lock Box 1347. The ad. said they would send you a book how to read past, present and future from the hand and a genuine ten-karat Persian diamond pin set in solid gold, if you sent on one dollar in stamps or P. O. order. Well, the diamond may be all right enough Persian, but the solid gold setting has turned black. You go there and ask for the head man and raise particular—'" He broke off the reading.
"You see, they only die by getting shot, or falling off a horse."
The girl shuddered and turned to him with a sudden helpless yielding.
"I can hardly bear it," she said, almost in a whisper. "You don't know what she is to me, how I've loved her and loved her and loved her. And yet I've accepted her as a matter of course, a thing that couldn't be taken from me, like the world itself. How could I think she might be like—like those others? Oh, I never dreamed I could lose my dearest—my dearest!"
He waited a moment, and at last said gently, "You won't lose your dearest—we won't lose her."
"Oh, but she's going, before our eyes."
"Listen to me, listen now! She's going to get well. She'll be strong again—I know it. I say she can't die; but you must be sure of it—as sure as I am—do you hear?—as sure as I am."
"Yes, yes—I will be sure." She tried to look at him through her tear-wet lashes. He smiled at her confidently.
"If we're both sure, we can have your sister crying in a month because Ben won't let her work in the garden."
"Oh, if you only—" She broke off to look at him in wondering gratitude.
"And I'll go in and tell her so now," he added, rising.
"Yes, yes, make her feel sure, too," she implored. She turned quickly to the car window, where twilight was blurring the fields to a far, dreamy horizon, level and vast. He stood a moment, tracing with mental point the line of her profile under the boyish cap pinned to her yellow hair.
Mrs. Laithe lay on a narrow sofa in the stateroom. She had moved from that only to the berth at night since their start, and had betrayed a preference for being alone in the little compartment. Ewing had felt, however, that she liked to talk with him as evening drew on. She had sent for him at this hour the day before and they had sat together in the dusk. He was reassured by the cheerfulness of her tone as she greeted him now.
"We're flying so fast," she said joyously.
"To make you well the sooner. I've just been telling Virginia what we'll do for you even in a month. You'll be riding and climbing, and you'll cry because you can't fell trees or rive out shakes, or something."
"I'm not worrying about that. It will come right very soon."
"We'll make it come right. No one ever dies a natural death there, you know. I was just reading your sister a letter from Ben. Lee Jennings killed breaking a horse, Elmer Watts shot by Chester Lynch. Of course, in a way, that was a natural death for Elmer. He was bound to go that way sooner or later, but you're not going to ride a bucker, and you're not a gunfighter. Oh, you'll thrive, with a little stall feeding."
"And there's so much room out there." She smiled."So much room to—to live. And life is so full. I like to hear it, through Virgie and through you. You are shells that give me the roar of it."
He was sensitive to some pathos of aloofness which her whole being expressed for him, and he strove to meet this with pictures of herself returning, a well woman; but she turned her face from him at length, and did not speak for so long that he thought she might be sleeping. He went carefully out, with a last enveloping look.
When he had gone the woman laughed in a helpless, shuddering way, then raised herself far enough toward the window to see the fields rushing by outside. There was timidity in her look until she had seen a mile of that relentless earth rush back and away from her. She seemed to need this assurance that she was going away from the trouble in the crude, literal sense of earthly distance—going off where there was room "to live," she had told Ewing; "to die," she had amended the phrase to herself. For death was now a solace she faced. She who had been so hot for the fight, so avid of life, had been cheated of a combatant's privileges. She could not tell Ewing the truth, and she could not live while he believed the lie. It was well, she thought, to know that she had only to let herself float down that placid current of the white death. She was amazed at her own calmness and tested it in all subtle ways, making sure of its foundations. She could find no weak spot. She craved only a moderate speed in the descent. Too long a wait would be wearisome, and the wise man had assured her against that. Yet she felt that she had the right to be a little glad when her brother told her the next day of a change in the plan.
"It will be better for you and Virgie to go to Ewing'splace, Nell. It's always quiet there, and my place is pretty busy and noisy. I'll manage to stay over there with you a good deal, and we'll get a woman to come and do for you—I know one that will be glad to come. It will only be for a little while, you know."
She smiled at that well-worn fiction, but applauded the plan.
"I shall like it, dear, and Virgie will, too, I'm sure, if you think it best, and if Mr. Ewing——"
"Ewing suggested it, and he didn't waste any words telling what a good plan he thought it was. We'll have some extra things brought up from Pagosa to make you comfortable, and you can have a bully long rest there."
"A long rest, yes—and let us have a piano. I'd like to hear some music while I'm resting."
"Sure! we'll have one up from Durango. You might need to stay there until—well—into the winter, you know."
"I think so, Clarence." She was tempted sometimes to confide to him the truth about her sickness, but refrained.
"Well, it won't be very long. All you want is a rest."
Her mind echoed it when he had gone. Yes, a rest. She looked up at Virginia, who had entered softly. Her face still shone with the thought of rest and release, and she smiled up at the girl, who had laid a cool hand on her flushing cheek, and now regarded her with devouring eyes. She stood so a moment, then knelt to peer at the wasted face. She looked a long time without speaking, looked shrewdly and, at last, accusingly.
"What is it, dearest? I saw it in your face yesterday. What is it I see? Something has frightened you—beaten you."
The other smiled protestingly, chidingly, with a raised finger; but the girl was not to be appeased.
"You won't tell me, Nell; I know you; you'll keep it in. But, oh, dearest!" She suddenly gathered the sick woman into her strong young arms, raising her head from the pillow, holding the fevered face to her breast, pressing her own cool cheek to the hot brow.
"Dearest dear, let me in. Trust me. Tell me where it hurts. Let me mother you."
"There, there, dear! Everything is all right. Lay me down again and be easy in that mind of yours."
But once more on the pillow she had to endure again the girl's accusing eyes.
"Nell, someone hasn't loved you enough. That's what I feel. Who is it?"
"Nonsense! You're only worried because I'm a little run down. Everyone loves me enough—all I deserve. There, dear, I think I can rest." The girl kissed her shut eyes, and went out, after a long, doubting look. The sick woman raised her arms once, like a child who would be taken, but they fell back, and she painfully laughed the old low laugh of secrecy.
She mused on her brother's words. "A little rest." Yes, a rest. "Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep." She remembered now that it would come to her in the shelter of those hills, perhaps in that room to which her thoughts had flown so many times, where she had seen the awakening man in the sleeping boy, and caught misty shadowings of the portent he bore for her. Her eyes might fall before his now, but they need not fall before the eyes of his mother.
BEN Crider waited for them on the station platform at Pagosa. He was excited to a point of feverish unrest until the train warned its way out of the last cañon. Then, by a masterful effort, he became elaborately nonchalant. That train had brought Ewing back to him, but he constrained himself to handle the occasion as one rising hardly to common levels. He would have considered any other demeanor "shameless."
He nodded to Bartell, who supported his sister from the car, and stared politely at the pretty but anxious-looking girl who followed them. But when Ewing appeared, burdened with handbags, Ben ignored him, and rushed to shake the hand of Beulah Pierce, returning from a three-days' trip to Durango. So effusive was his greeting that Pierce mentally convicted him of having lingered at the "Happy Days" bar for one too many drinks, and broke from his affectionate grasp with some embarrassment.
Ben strolled forward to the baggage car, humming lightly, and, with the bored air of a man creating diversion for himself, laid listless hands on the trunks as they were unloaded. He was whirling one of the heaviest of these to the waiting wagon when Ewing fell on him with a glad shout. Ben paused briefly, balancing thetrunk on a corner, glanced up with moderate surprise, and spoke his welcome.
"Oh, that you, Kid? Howdy!" He resumed his struggle with the trunk, blind to the other's outstretched hand, and when Ewing thereupon hissed at him, "You damned Mexican sheep herder!" he allowed pleasure to show but faintly in his face. But when he was seized by the collar, hurled half across the platform, and slammed brutally against the wall of the station, he protested with pleased annoyance as he picked up his hat, "Aw, quit yer foolin', now, Kid! I got to hustle them trunks." He was sufficiently refreshed by the attack, however, to sing to himself as he labored. And when the start was made he insisted that Ewing should drive. Ben sat in the rear seat. He wanted to look at Ewing's back for five hours.
The sick woman, in another and easier conveyance, rejoiced that she was going still farther into the peace of her last refuge. As they left the brown-floored valley and began to climb the mountain road, she was glad that the green walls closed in behind them; glad of every difficult ascent; every stream forded; every confusing turn of the way. She was hiding herself, cunningly insuring the peace of her last hours.
She was troubled now only by Virginia, who hung upon her with an agonized solicitude. But she promised herself to wear this down by her own cheerfulness and expressed certainty. Virginia would see her peaceful, hopeful, happy; she would become used to the idea of her wasting; and the actual going out would come gently to her as something fit and benign. Life so abounding as Virginia's could not long droop under the shadow of death.
Made at home in the lake cabin, she still felt the world rushing back from her as had the fields rushed by when she looked from the car window. And she rested in this. Affairs went on about her, plans were made, talk of the future or of the day; all went by her unheeded, save for a blurred and pleasant effect of swiftness. Outwardly she was serene, languorous, incuriously placid. Inwardly she thrilled with a luxury of inertness. She had loosed herself in the ebbing tide, and she folded her hands and smiled from this with the assured indolence of one who knows that some earned reward will not long be delayed. The slow-paced even life was a balm to her, the gathering about the table at mealtimes, the evenings in the studio, when her sister played or talked with Ewing; when she could lie still on the couch and try to make herself forgotten, regretting only the short dry cough that racked her night and morning and brought her to the minds of the others.
She had thought that she could adjust herself, after a little, to the new look in Ewing's eyes, knowing as she did its secret spring. It was a look of blind acceptance, of unquestioning adoration—and mingled with it was a maddening pity. But there flashed from him, too, at times, a look of purpose and assurance, steady, secret, determined. She detected this chiefly when he glanced up to her from his drawing. He had brought with him a story to illustrate for theKnickerbocker, and he was, at last, to finish that series of Western scenes for the same periodical. And he had flown to this work with a frantic haste, with the look, as he bent over the board, that seemed to say: "This is for you. Be patient with me, it will soon be done."
When the work did not claim him he stayed by her side, watchful for service, jealous of Virginia for little acts he might not himself perform. His eyes seldom left her, she thought, though she could not long endure their look, and she knew that he read this evasion of hers in the light of what Teevan had told him. Through all his devotion there was a gentle aloofness, a constant withdrawing, as if he knew that he must never come close.
She had laughter and tears again for this when she was alone, though there were times when, in her weakness, her wild craving for the fullness of what she might not have, she would have told it all in one surrendering cry to him but for the eyes of Kitty Teevan. They were always upon her now—Ewing had hung the portrait in the studio—holding her with passionate entreaty, the mother pleading for herself in the son's memory. She could never tell him, she knew, under those eyes. She must live out her few days in content with that wondrous thing his own eyes revealed for her. She thought it comic and tragic and beautiful. One night she dreamed that she was not to die, and woke in horror of what his belief would then mean. But morning restored her serenity, and she reposed placidly again on the unquestioned sureness of her going.
Best of all times she liked the late morning and midday, when she could be alone in the sun-heated nook out of doors and give her body to the warmth. She knew it was a primal, sensuous pleasure, but she surrendered to it; turned and bathed writhingly in the sun flood, feeling herself transparent to it. And the pleasure had its reverse side. Autumn came presently in these upper reaches; a less splendid autumn thanwould set the Eastern woods ablaze with flaunts of gold and scarlet, but an autumn more eloquent of death, the faded yellow of the aspen groves, broken but rarely by some flaming shrub that only emphasized the monotone. This, the unending, lifeless yellow, and the dead green of spruce and hemlock—a false green, she felt, with its tale of ever-living—made a coloring of nice symbolism for her state.
Had she felt the need of a death's head at her sun feast, this neutral, denying flatness would have sufficed. The end had come home to her. It was her unseen familiar, voiceless, but ever present, with a look unhurrying but constant.
And there were the mountains themselves, things that had once leaped alive and tortured themselves into frenzied furies of striving only to be stricken and left at last in all the broken tossing of their folly. They had tried the fighting death, and it had availed only to fix their last agonies. Their scarred hulks testified to the wisdom of submission.
Yet her mind was normal in these sun-warmed hours of musing. She knew that those dead hills with their dying leafage told another tale to the pair of young lives housed with her. To them they were but inspirations to life vital and triumphant; eminences to be scaled in joyous effort, offering to youth's dreaming, half-true clairvoyance, unending reaches to provoke; near enough to seem attainable; far enough to be plausible with promise of delights.
Nor did she fail to rejoice in the fervor of this fresh view so unlike her own. She was conscious of its truth to untouched souls like theirs, and she sought to throw them together, urging them to excursions through thehills. She thought of them at first as her pair whom she had set in a garden where the fruit of no tree was forbidden.
She coolly studied Ewing on the days when he worked indoors, detaching herself from his life as one about to go on a long journey. From her shadowed couch she scanned his face as he bent over the drawing board. It had filled in the year since she first saw it, and was an older face, the strength of it more conscious, the promise of it almost kept in its well-controlled, level-eyed maturity. Much of the boy remained to flash out, but she saw that this would never go; that it would kindle his eyes when the brown hair had gone white. It was this eternal boyishness, she saw, that made him quick of response to another's interest; this that had made him seem too ductile under Teevan's manipulation, when in truth he had merely been loath to hurt, fearing nothing so much as another's pain. The forward line of the nose and the smoldering fierceness of eye should have been more informing. That was the face, vital, fearless, patently self-willed for all its kindly immaturities of concession, that Teevan had thought to prevail over by his stings of waspish contempt. She smiled pityingly for Teevan, until she recalled that she also had misread its lines. There were moments when her beaten spirit fluttered up at thought of Teevan's being blasted by what he had thought to blast. But a look at the mother's restraining face, or, still more, a look at Ewing as he would glance from his work up to the portrait, stilled this craving for battle. It was well, she thought, as it had fallen.
Ewing had set to work doubtingly at first, but with laughing energy when he found that the lines came againat his call. He felt, indeed, that his facility had been increased, and he confided this to Mrs. Laithe one day as she lay watching him.
"I don't have to 'squeeze' the way I did," he said. "Perhaps I really learned something there in spite of myself, in all that messing with colors. I didn't learn to paint, but I seem to have a new line on bucking bronchos and bucked cowboys." He stopped in sudden thought.
"There, I've forgotten that old painting of mine. I'll treat us both to a look at it."
He went off to Ben's room beyond the kitchen and came back with the dusty canvas. He wiped it with a cloth and placed it on the easel.
She did not look at this. She knew it too well. Her look was for his face as he studied it. She saw surprise there, bewilderment, incredulity, and then, slowly dawning, a consternation of dropped jaw and squinting scowl. Yet this broke at length, and, to her great relief, he laughed, heartily, honestly. She smiled, not at the poor painting, but in sympathy with him. Then he remembered that she had looked at this same canvas once before, and that neither of them had laughed. His face sobered, and he went over to her.
"You had nerve, didn't you—after seeing that thing?"
"You remember I didn't praise it."
"But you saw I didn't know any better, and you never let me see thatyoudid. You must have thought highly of me, I can see that." He stooped and laid one of his hands on hers with a friendly, thanking pressure.
"I saw plainly enough what you could do," she protested.
He went to stand again before the despised canvas, playing upon it with humorous disparagement.
"But if you see now," she said, "that it's so—if it seems so——"
"Say the word—do!"
"If it seems bad to you now, that's a good sign. It means that you've learned something about color. Suppose it had still seemed good."
He took the thing off the easel.
"If I've learned as much about color as I think this is bad—well there's only a little left for me to learn."
"Now you will paint others that will seem faultless at the time and bad a year later. That's the penalty of growth, but it's the proof. Make your prayer to the god of painting: 'May everything I do seem bad when it's a year old!'"
"I'll try to," he returned gravely. Then, "Let's put this out of sight quick, before Virginia sees it."
"You didn't burn it," she asked, when he returned.
"I should think not. I'd have to fight Ben if I burned that. Of course I didn't know any better when I gave it to him, any more than I knew about his songs. That's another thing you must have laughed at me for."
He laughed himself as she looked up at him with puzzled inquiry, and went on to confess how he had sung Ben's choicest ballad at the Monastery.
"Of course it's a funny song," he continued, as he returned to the drawing board, "but it isn't so very much funnier than a lot that aren't supposed to be funny at all. Come, now," he rallied her, "don't they all rub in the sadness, even the ones you might think serious? There must be a million songs about 'Dreaming,''I Dreamed that You Were with Me, Love!' and 'It was All a Dream!' and 'Could I but Recall that Day!' and 'Alas, It was not so to be!' and 'Must We, then, Part Forever!' Always crying about something! Always moaning 'if only' something or other. They're about as teary a lot as Ben's songs. I told Virginia last night I never wanted to hear another 'Could I but—' song; they're as bad as 'The Fatal Wedding.'"
Though he had rushed at the drawings with a powerful incentive—to make himself free so that he could perform one great service for his lady—he yielded often to the persuasions of Mrs. Laithe and took Virginia out for adventures. They explored box cañons that she believed to be impenetrable until he nonchalantly opened a way to their secret recesses. They whipped trout streams and he complacently caught fish from holes she would angle in without result. He tried to persuade her that certain brown patches he professed to detect off through the forest from time to time were deer; but vainly each time, until there would be a sudden terrific shattering amid the underbrush, and perhaps a fleeting glimpse of the brown patch with its white center, flying in swift rebuke to her unbelief. They climbed hills together, and he irritated her by his continued ease of breath under the strain, while her own "wind" that she had thought so well of in Kensington was exhausted by the first moments of effort. She believed him guilty of a polite fiction when he explained that the altitude made all the difference. She disbelieved his tale of the lake water's coldness—it was annoying to be told that even he wanted no more than a single plunge in it—and bathed there one day to her undoing. She refused to believe that he could shootaccurately with a rifle that made so much noise, or with a revolver that wobbled when one tried to hold it still, until he had demonstrated these matters. And she refused to concede that she could not ride a certain half-broken little mare—which Ewing rode without apparent difficulty—until the mare proved it to the satisfaction of all concerned.
These little disbeliefs were not unpleasant to Ewing. He revenged himself for having been proved a "duffer" at her own games.
It was on their return from an afternoon's fishing one day that they found Bartell bestowing Cooney on his sister.
"I bought him for you from Pierce," he was explaining. "Of course Virgie can ride him until you're fit again."
The sick woman greeted her old friend formally in the presence of the others. But when they had gone inside she led the little roan around to the corral, and there, sheltered by its wall, she put an arm tightly over his lowered neck and laid her face to his with fond little words of greeting and remembrance. He had carried her so well on a day when nothing had happened; when she was a girl herself, it almost seemed, more curious of the world than knowing.
That had been an age—a year—ago. The little horse had been bravely doing his work, carrying his inconsequent burdens as they listed, while she had been losing herself in protests. She had begun doing that, it seemed, the first day he brought her there. She wondered if he could remember it. She doubted that; but at least he remembered Ewing and loved him. She clasped the arm more tightly about his neck, and the little horsewhinnied, pawing the earth with a small forefoot, and moving his head up and down in a knowing way. To the woman he had the effect of seeking to return her caress, so that in a moment she was sobbing in a sudden weakness of love for him.
THE days went, shortening. She kept to her couch through all but those hours when the sun was high. Then she lay to be warmed in the open while the year died before her. She could not see another year. She must read all her meanings into this one. September went and October waned. The sky was often overcast. They had ceased to talk of her going back. Her brother reminded her cheerfully that he had half expected a long stay for her. She must be patient. She spoke in his own vein of hopefulness, promising patience, and smiled as ever on her pair, who still wandered in that garden, bantering comrades, tasting the fruit of every tree but one.
And one day she knew that all her imaginings about this pair had been vain, caught it in the deepened look of Ewing as he turned from Virginia to herself. It was a thing to bask in—that look—like the fervid sun itself. But it hurt her, too; made it harder to let go of life. Yet always before her was the face of Kitty Teevan with its beseeching eyes: "You have so little time to live, and I must live in his memory always!" And so she put the thing away, letting him think as he must, wincing under his look of pity, and that devouring thing that lurked always back of his pity, and striving for lightness when she talked with him.
"I understand why our land seemed unreal to you,"she said to him while they loitered in the blue dusk of the pine woods near the cabin one day. The peaks beyond were misty behind gray clouds that lay sullenly along the horizon. "I understand why you called our land a stage land, for this is unreal to me, painted, theatrical, impossible. I keep hearing the person who's seen the play telling his neighbor what's to come next."
"It's real enough," he answered, looking away from her. "I have a way of telling when a land is real."
"You have?"
"Any land is real where you are. New England or Colorado or Siberia or——"
"There, there!" she soothed him mockingly—"or India's coral strand. That's quite enough. You have learned your geography lesson. What a busy traveler you must have been!"
"And no land can be real where you are not," he went on gravely. "I go where you go, follow you around the world and out into the stars beyond the moon, up and down and on forever, and it all seems real to me—all except you."
"Oh, I—I'm real, real enough, but this land is a sad, fearful, threatening land, so heartless." She shivered. "Let us go in!"
"That's only because it's closing up now for the winter; that's why the sky is sorry. The leaves are nearly gone, and the fat old bears are slouching down from the high places to curl up in the holes, and the deer are moving down into the valleys, and pretty soon the hills will crawl under white blankets and go to sleep. And we shall have to do the same. We shall be shut in before you know it, snowed in, frozen in, like the bears. But the winter—it can't take you from me."
"There, there!" But she could not finish. She flashed a helpless smile at him and fled indoors. He went after her, crying that winter was upon them.
And then, all in a day and a night, winter came. The wind fell to an ominous hush one midday, and a leaden quiet lay over the hills. Blurred masses of cloud rose slowly above the peaks, shaping themselves with ponderous sloth. Below these a white mist formed. Then one tiny snow crystal fell. It was followed presently by another, and then by more, floating down with unhurried ease. Meaningless wisps they seemed, fugitive bits of wool, perhaps, from a sheep losing its fleece in some nearby shearing pen. More of them came with the same slow, loitering grace, as if they would lull suspicion of the fury they heralded.
By night the storm had shut off the hills so that the cabin might have been set in a plain, for all the eye could see. The flakes no longer came saunteringly, but swiftly now, in a slant of honest fervor, frankly threatening.
By morning the land was muffled in white. The sun shone pale and cold through the mist, and the wind began a game with its new plaything, still light and dry, and quick to dance to any piping. Spruce and hemlock seemed to have darkened their green, and their arms drooped wearily under the white burdens they bore. The second day's fall buried their lowest branches so that not even the circle of bare earth was left about them.
Inside the cabin they sought the peace of the earth under its cover, the trustful repose of the live things sleeping there. The days sped by almost unmarked. Scarcely ever were they certain of the day of week or month, especially after Ben forgot to mark his calendaron the days he and Ewing devoted to getting deer for their winter's meat. There were but opinions as to the date after that.
Ben, after his work with the stock each morning, hibernated gracefully in a chair by the kitchen stove, sleeping with excited groans, like a dreaming dog. Or, awake, he stared at the wall with dulled eyes. At times he would touch his guitar to life and sing very softly, or hold it affectionately in his lap, a hand muting its strings, while he pondered dreamily of far-off matters, of cities and men, and the folly of expecting ever to receive treasure such as the advertisements promise.
Ewing and Virginia, after the snow packed, went forth on snowshoes far into the white silence; over open spaces so glaring that the eyes closed in defense; through ravines where once-noisy streams were stilled; and under forest arches of green where the snow was darkened to hints of blue—they agreed that Sydenham would paint it blue without condescending to hints—and where the hush was so intense that they instinctively lowered their voices. They passed long times without speech, as they would have done in a church, worshiping the still beauty about them, beauty of buttressed peak, of snow-choked cañon, of green-roofed cathedral, of pink light at sunset on endless snow-quilted slopes.
Mrs. Laithe, too, sought the open when the sun was high, and one day in midwinter she walked as far as the lake in the path beaten by the stock. It did not occur to her then that this was no feat for a dying woman nor even on the succeeding days when this walk became her habit. It was a change for her eyes from the cabin prospect; the sun warmed her genially, despite the intense cold, and she liked the stillness, all the movementsof life going on in a strange, muffled silence. This helped her to remember her own plight. Life still abounded with all its warmth and glad clashing, but she must have only eyes for it—no heart of desire. She had been so sure of this from the first that she gave but heedless smiles to the others when they told her she was better. They had always said such things.
She slept the long nights through now, seeking bed like a tired child, and waking in strange refreshment. And milk no longer appeased her hunger as it had wholly done when she arrived. The savor of baked meats was now sweet to her. She was presently walking to the lake both morning and afternoon, breathing deep of the dry air that ran fire in her veins as she absorbed it. And the flush on her face when she returned was not that of fever.
But more eloquent than these physical symptoms was a sullen current of rebellion rising slowly within her, the old fighting instinct, a lust for sheer living, a thing she had believed was long since extinct.
She did not lose her certainty of death all in a day. For weeks she was haunted merely by an unquiet suspicion. The cough still racked her night and morning, and the fever came each evening, but the old potency seemed to have gone from both. She tried to believe at first that this was one of those false rallies so common before the end.
The full, maddening realization came to her on a day when Ewing walked with her to the lake. He turned on her suddenly when they had mounted a slope, seized both her hands, and looked long into her eyes with a certain grave wonder.
"You are made new," he said at last. She trembledin a sudden panic, divining the truth of it, feeling, as he spoke, a great rush of life overwhelming her.
"You are living again, you are going to live. I knew you would live." He still gripped her hands. It was as if he had drawn her, warm and pulsing, out of all the wintry death about them. She could not face him, but released her hands and turned away. He had seen truly. She had relaxed utterly when she came, to waver unresistingly down into the cool abyss of her despair. But some indomitable brute thing had risen in her while she slept, to fight for life, and to fire her whole being with its triumph. While she had rested and waited in that luxury of self-abandonment she had been cheated of her victory—betrayed back to life.
Trying now to think what life would mean to her, she was overwhelmed with shame and dismay. With death so near things had been simple. But how could she live on and face Ewing, shaming herself and shaming him in the darkness of his belief about her?
They walked back to the cabin in silence. Ewing, too, she felt, saw the future to be less simple now.
"I shall know what to do," he said, as they reached the door; and there was again in his eyes that puzzling look of some fixed purpose. For the first time this vaguely alarmed her now, and she questioned him swiftly with her eyes. But he only pointed to his mother's portrait—they had entered the studio—and said, "Do you think I'd do less for you than I would for her?"
She could endure neither his own look nor the mother's, and fled to her room. There she studied her face in the glass. It was all true. She was going to live, and she sickened at the thought. Again it was a time for tears and laughter.