THE HILLS OF REST
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 canyon. 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 the trunk 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 the _Knickerbocker_, 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 than would 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
the hills. 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 again at 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 that
_you_ did. 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 canyons 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 shoot accurately
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 horse whinnied, 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.