"Of nothing, perhaps. Listen!"
For the great quiet of the valley was falling on her, and the distances
over which her eyes reached filled her with the delightful sense of
silence. There were deep blue mountains piled against the paler sky;
down the slope and through the trees the river was untarnished, solid,
silver; in the boughs behind her the wind whispered and then stopped to
listen likewise. There was a faint ache in her heart at the thought that
she had not known such things all her life. She knew then what gave the
face of David of Eden its solemnity. She leaned a little toward him.
"Now tell me about yourself. What you have done."
"Of anything but that."
"Why not?"
"No more than I want you to tell me about yourself and what you have
done. What you feel, what you think from time to time, I wish to know; I
am very happy to know. I fit in those bits of you to the picture I have
made."
Once more the egoist was talking!
"But to have you tell me of what you have done--that is not pleasant. I
do not wish to know that you have talked to other men and smiled on
them. I do not wish to know of a single happy day you spent before you
came to the Garden of Eden. But I shall tell you of the four men who are
my masters if you wish."
"Tell me of them if you will."
"Very well. John was the beginning. He died before I came. Of the others
Matthew was my chief friend. He was very old and thin. His wrist was
smaller than yours, almost. His hair was a white mist. In the evening
there seemed to be a pale moonshine around his face.
"He was very small and old--so old that sometimes I thought he would dry
up or dissolve and disappear. Toward the last, before God called him,
Matthew grew weak, and his voice was faint, yet it was never sharp or
shaken. Also, until the very end his eyes were young, for his heart was
young.
"That was Matthew. He was like you. He liked the silence. 'Listen,' he
would say. 'The great stillness is the voice; God is speaking.' Then he
would raise one thin finger and we caught our breath and listened.
"Do you see him?"
"I see him, and I wish that I had known him."
"Of the others, Luke was taller than I. He had yellow hair as long and
as coarse as the mane of a yellow horse. When he rode around the lake we
could hear him coming for a great distance by his singing, for his voice
was as strong as the neigh of Glani. I have only to close my eyes, and I
can hear that singing of Luke from beside the lake. Ah, he was a huge
man! The horses sweated under him.
"His beard was long; it came to the middle of his belly; it had a great
blunt square end. Once I angered him. I crept to him when he slept--I
was a small boy then--and I trimmed the beard down to a point.
"When Luke wakened he felt the beard and sat for a long time looking at
me. I was so afraid that I grew numb, I remember. Then he went to the
Room of Silence. When he came out his anger was gone, but he punished
me. He took me to the lake and caught me by the heels and swung me
around his head. When he loosened his fingers I shot into the air like a
light stone. The water flashed under me, and when I struck the surface
seemed solid. I thought it was death, for my senses went out, but Luke
waded in and dragged me back to the shore. However, his beard remained
pointed till he died."
He chuckled at the memory.
"Paul reproved Luke for what he had done. Paul was a big man, also, but
he was short, and his bigness lay in his breadth. He had no hair, and he
stood under Luke nodding so that the sun flashed back and forth on his
bald head. He told Luke that I might have been killed.
"'Better teach him sober manners now,' said Luke, 'than be a jester to
knock at the gate of God.'
"This Paul was wonderfully silent. He was born unhappy and nothing could
make him smile. He used to wander through the valley alone in the middle
of winter, half dead with cold and eating nothing. In those times, even
Luke was not strong enough to make him come home to us.
"I know that for ten days at one time he had gone without speech. For
that reason he loved to have Joseph with him, because Joseph understood
signs.
"But when silence left him, Paul was great in speech. Luke spoke in a
loud voice and Matthew beautifully, but Paul was terrible. He would fall
on his knees in an agony and pray to God for salvation for us and for
himself. While he kneeled he seemed to grow in size. He filled the room.
And his words were like whips. They made me think of all my sins. That
is how I remember Paul, kneeling, with his long arms thrown over his
head.
"Matthew died in the evening just as the moon rose. He was sitting
beside me. He put his hand in mine. After a while I felt that the hand
was cold, and when I looked at Matthew his head had fallen.
"Paul died in a drift of snow. We always knew that he had been on his
knees praying when the storms struck him and he would not rise until he
had finished the prayer.
"Luke bowed his head one day at the table and died without a sound--in
spite of all his strength.
"All these men have not really died out of the valley. They are here,
like mists; they are faces of thin air. Sometimes when I sit alone at my
table, I can almost see a spirit-hand like that of Matthew rise with a
shadow-glass of wine.
"But shall I tell you a strange thing? Since you came into the valley,
these mist-images of my dead masters grow faint and thinner than ever."
"You will remember me, also, when I have gone?"
"Do not speak of it! But yes, if you should go, every spring, when these
yellow flowers blossom, you would return to me and sit as you are
sitting now. However you are young, yet there are ways. After Matthew
died, for a long time I kept fresh flowers in his room and kept his
memory fresh with them. But," he repeated, "you are young. Do not talk
of death!"
"Not of death, but of leaving the Garden."
He stared gravely at her, and flushed.
"You are tormenting me as I used to torment my masters when I was a boy.
But it is wrong to anger me. Besides I shall not let you go."
"Not _let_ me go?"
"Am I a fool?" he asked hotly. "Why should I let you go?"
"You could not keep me."
It brought him to his feet with a start.
"What will free you?"
"Your own honor, David."
His head fell.
"It is true. Yes, it is true. But let us ride on. I no longer am pleased
with this place. It is tarnished; there are unhappy thoughts here!"
"What a child he is!" thought the girl, as she climbed into the saddle
again. "A selfish, terrible, wonderful child!"
It seemed, after that, that the purpose of David was to show the
beauties of the Garden to her until she could not brook the thought of
leaving. He told her what grew in each meadow and what could be reaped
from it.
He told her what fish were caught in the river and the lake. He talked
of the trees. He swung down from Glani, holding with hand and heel, and
picked strange flowers and showed them to her.
"What a place for a house!" she said, when, near the north wall, they
passed a hill that overlooked the entire length of the valley.
"I shall build you a house there," said David eagerly. "I shall build it
of strong rock. Would that make you happy? Very tall, with great rooms."
An impish desire to mock him came to her.
"Do you know what I'm used to? It's a boarding house where I live in a
little back bedroom, and they call us to meals with a bell."
The humor of this situation entirely failed to appeal to him.
"I also," he said, "have a bell. And it shall be used to call you to
dinner, if you wish."
He was so grave that she did not dare to laugh. But for some reason that
moment of bantering brought the big fellow much closer to her than he
had been before. And when she saw him so docile to her wishes, for all
his strength and his mastery, the only thing that kept her from opening
her heart to him, and despising the game which she and Connor were
playing with him, was the warning of the gambler.
"I've heard a young buck talk to a young squaw--before he married her.
The same line of junk!"
Connor must be right. He came from the great city.
But before that ride was over she was repeating that warning very much
as Odysseus used the flower of Hermes against the arts of Circe. For the
Garden of Eden, as they came back to the house after the circuit, seemed
to her very much like a little kingdom, and the monarch thereof was
inviting her in dumb-show to be the queen of the realm.
_CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE_
At the house they were met by one of the servants who had been waiting
for David to receive from the master definite orders concerning some
woodchopping. For the trees of the garden were like children to David of
Eden, and he allowed only the ones he himself designated to be cut for
timber or fuel. He left the girl with manifest reluctance.
"For when I leave you of what do you think, and what do you do? I am
like the blind."
She felt this speech was peculiar in character. Who but David of Eden
could have been jealous of the very thoughts of another? And smiling at
this, she went into the patio where Ben Connor was still lounging. Few
things had ever been more gratifying to the gambler than the sight of
the girl's complacent smile, for he knew that she was judging David.
"What happened?" he asked.
"Nothing worth repeating. But I think you're wrong, Ben. He isn't a
barbarian. He's just a child."
"That's another word for the same thing. Ever see anything more brutal
than a child? The wildest savage that ever stepped is a saint compared
with a ten-year-old boy."
"Perhaps. He acts like ten years. When I mention leaving the valley he
flies into a tantrum; he has taken me so much for granted that he has
even picked out the site for my house."
"As if you'd ever stay in a place like this!"
He covered his touch of anxiety with loud laughter.
"I don't know," she was saying thoughtfully a moment later. "I like
it--a lot."
"Anything seems pretty good after Lukin. But when your auto is buzzing
down Broadway--"
She interrupted him with a quick little laugh of excitement.
"But do you really think I can make him leave the valley?"
"Of course I'm sure."
"He says there's a law against it."
"I tell you, Ruth, you're his law now; not whatever piffle is in that
Room of Silence."
She looked earnestly at the closed door. Her silence had always bothered
the gambler, and this one particularly annoyed him.
"Let's hear your thoughts?" he asked uneasily.
"It's just an idea of mine that inside that room we can find out
everything we want to know about David Eden."
"What do we want to know?" growled Connor. "I know everything that's
necessary. He's a nut with a gang of the best horses that ever stepped.
I'm talking horse, not David Eden. If I have to make the fool rich, it
isn't because I want to."