THE HARDEST THING
The zest had gone from camp life with Ewing's departure, and the cabin
was again occupied. Mrs. Laithe filled the days with a sort of blind
waiting. It could not end so, she felt, despite the eyes of Kitty
Teevan, so watchful of her, and so certain that it had ended. Something
must happen. That was the burden of her hope--as vague as a child's
hope. She would set no time, nor would she name the thing. But come it
must, and she could wait.
When Beulah Pierce rode by on his way from Pagosa and left their mail
one afternoon, she felt no eagerness about it. There could be nothing so
soon, she was sure. Virginia brought her some letters and read aloud one
from the aunt at Kensington. Then Mrs. Laithe looked through her own
letters and found one from Ewing. She did not open it, but rose after a
few moments, and walked swiftly over to the lake camp. Only there,
alone, could she trust herself.
She read the thing staringly, haltingly, testing each phrase as if it
were worded in some strange tongue.
"I can tell you now what I came for," the letter ran, "because the thing
will be done before this letter can reach you. It's a thing you want
done, but if you had known I meant to do it you would have tried to
prevent me, and that would only have distressed us both. But now, when
it is all over, you will see that I was the one person in the world to
do it for you. Think if you had killed him yourself that night, the pain
you would have brought to yourself and to others. It wasn't a woman's
work. I would have done it for you then, but I owed him money. I
couldn't kill him till I had paid that.
"I used to dream of doing things for you always, many things, big and
little, but it has turned out that I can do only this. So won't you try
to believe that I am putting all my heart into it for you, all that
thing I would have tried to show you if it had been scattered over the
rest of our lives? I must put it all into this one act.
"Ben seemed to suspect that such affairs could be managed here with the
informality that often marks them in the San Juan, but you and I know
better. I cannot expect to return, nor to see you again. Yet I shall see
you always; see no one else--while they let me see at all. We must take
life as it falls, do the next thing without complaining, even if it is
the hardest thing. And be sure of this--I shall do it so quickly that he
will have no chance to tell me anything. He will not even speak your
name. Afterwards you can have this to remember, that I did it gladly,
knowing what the consequences would be. I hope that will be, in time,
the happiness to you that it is to me. It is enough for me."
Over and over she read it, and at last she mastered it--all the horror
of it. A long time she gazed dumbly at the sheets, then once more she
laughed the old, low laugh, with a sinister note in it now. Ben Crider
found her there an hour later, staring blankly out over the flawed
surface of the lake. The breeze was swirling many finely torn bits of
paper about her feet.
As they walked back to the cabin she reflected that the letter had lain
four days in the postoffice at Pagosa. It had been written nine days
before. Then Ewing had done the thing. She no more believed that Randall
Teevan still lived than she believed that the mountains about her were
phantoms. A sentence from the letter ran in her mind. "We must take life
as it falls--do the next thing without complaining, even if it is the
hardest thing."
"The hardest thing!"
She pleaded fatigue and lack of appetite to Virginia and sought her bed
to lie and think in the dark. She saw her own hardest thing, the thing
she must do.
She had caused a man to be put to death; a vicious, mischievous fool, it
was true, but still a man. That was sad and horrible. But of another
man, one she had thought to guard and cherish and care for in all of
woman's ways--she had made a murderer, and she had murdered him. For she
knew that Ewing must die. It was as if he were already dead. Perhaps out
there in the agonized void of the world he had already killed himself,
his work being done. Or, if not, they would kill him. She felt a blind,
hollow sickness, as if her heart had broken and was bleeding away inside
her. She had made her beloved a slayer and had slain him. She could not
live with it. She hungered for her own death with intolerable desire.
She arose with a despair-cleared mind the next morning, her resolve
made. Only the smaller details were to be worked out. She walked by the
lake, resolving these. Once she wept, from the very abundance and color
of life about her. Life was so full, and she had taken it from him in
his splendid youth. But she would not shirk the penalty of her
blood-guiltiness. She looked out to the hills beyond the valley that
fell away from the lake, studying headland and wooded slope and canyon
opening, choked with green. Some spot far out there would be secret and
gracious to her--welcome her with a finger on its lips--take her and
keep. Death, to her, was no longer terrible. There had been a long
intimacy with it. She rushed to the idea of it as to a home--a benignant
succor from the unendurable thought.
Back in the cabin she lay counting the minutes as they rushed--thinking
and counting. She must not let herself be prisoned by a mere body that
exulted blindly, basely, in its vigor. She could make everything right.
She could conform to the law of a life for a life.
"The hardest thing," she murmured. "I must do the hardest thing." That
would be her expiation, though not a sufficing one; she recognized that.
She longed for it too avidly, for the relief from thought, from
torturing visions. Yet it was formally perfect as a punishment,
according to the world's standards. She would be her own executioner,
and it would satisfy the world if the world knew. And despite her
longing for release, it was still, she thought, the hardest thing,
although it saved--saved her from that old man and that young man slain:
that young beloved one, lying dead with blood upon his hands. Poor
sacrificed, poor betrayed, poor ruined one! Again, the hollow sickness,
as if her heart were bleeding away inside her. To expiate--to do the
hardest thing. She came back to that always. It was the hardest thing,
although it saved.
When her brother rode up in the afternoon, she instantly saw her plan
completed. There came an hour in which she walked and talked and laughed
in a waking dream, without sensation, except as she could imagine it
felt by a creature she seemed to watch from afar, a creature who had
looked strangely like herself. She saw this woman greet the others and
sit at table with them to laugh and talk with acceptable ease. Their
voices were soundless as voices in a dream, their shapes and flittings
as illogical. So benumbed was her spirit that she suffered little even
at the moment of hurried parting from Virginia. Her role was played with
flawless detachment. She studied herself coolly and guarded against
wrong speeches.
"I shall go home with Clarence; I haven't seen that magnificent ranch
yet," she remarked carelessly, and Virginia and her brother had
applauded this.
"I'll show you a ranch that is a ranch," Bartell had answered.
Ben led Cooney around, saddled. She kissed Virginia lightly and was on
the little horse. She turned to wave gayly as she fell in ahead of
Bartell on the trail to the lake.
The moon had sailed up over the eastern hills with the going down of the
sun, and the shadows were sharply cut in its light. They reined in at
the lake, lingering there a moment in its charm. Under the slanting moon
rays it shone like another moon, radiantly silver in its setting of
cloudlike leafage. She drew a long breath as her brother started on, and
called to him.
"Clarence!" He pulled up his horse, looking back at her.
"You'll think me absurd, but I've decided not to go with you, after all.
I believe I'd rather stay with Virginia. She'll be lonesome."
He came back to her, scolding whimsically.
"I know I'm foolish," she persisted, "but you're so dreadfully busy and
noisy over there."
"Nonsense! And Virgie will be all right. She doesn't need you for a few
days."
"I'm sure she'll need me. No--go on alone, there's a dear. I can ride
over myself and bring you back for a few days, after your rush is over."
"Well, if you're really set." He submitted, grumbling.
"And kiss me, dear!"
He did so, still grumbling. "And you skip back, if you're going back.
You're cold as ice. So long, weathervane! And come over when you feel
like it."
"I'll be warm, dear--and good-by."
She watched him down the slope and across the meadow until he vanished
into the black of the forest wall. Then she rode on to the camp. Without
dismounting she took from the end of a broken branch a revolver in its
holster that she had hung there earlier in the day. She made sure again
that it was loaded and buckled the holster about her waist.
Turning from the ranch trail, then, she found another that led off to
the north and away from the Pagosa road--off into a wooded wilderness of
hills where she would be safe from discovery. She halted again on the
first ridge above the camp, sitting motionless in the shadow, her eyes
on the little moon-flooded opening across the lake where the cabin trail
came down to the shore. That was a walk for lovers, but they could not
walk there now. After a little time she whirled Cooney about in a sudden
gust of fierceness and sent him along the winding ridge, keeping close
within the shadow.
When the trail fell away into the first of the unknown valleys she
breathed a sigh of relief and release. Her burden was falling from her.
She could not again be cheated back from her refuge.
She began to rejoice in the wide, wild sweetness of the night, its piny
fragrance, the soft-footed scurryings of its lesser people, the gloom of
its sharply defined shadows, and the silvering haze that enveloped the
peaks. She came on a deer feeding in the open, and was delighted when it
did not run. It only lifted its head to look at her.
She began to rejoice, also, in the cleverness of her plan. As well as
she might she had preserved the decencies. A week might ensue before
they missed her. Cooney, stripped of his trappings, would appear at the
lake cabin, to be laughed at and chided for his desertion of the Bar-B
ranch, a week before she was missed; and then she would never be found.
There was, indeed, small chance of their having the pain of that. She
would keep to the trail as long as the night hid her; then a climb up
some unpathed slope, over rocks that would show no trace of her passage;
then a tangled thicket, remote, secret, improbable--and the tale of a
lost woman, a woman who wandered confusingly far on a night of tempting
splendor. She thought of Virginia's pain with a feeble pity. It seemed
as if humanity was dead in her.
The narrow trail wound beckoningly before her, the land stretched off to
peaks of silver or barren gray slopes or shadowed promontories, glooming
above ravines where little rivers turned restlessly in their beds; and
over all hung the mystic shimmer of moon rays, softening all angles and
picking the fronds of trees with dancing lights as she passed.
An owl boomed from a dead pine, and a little off the trail she heard the
scream of a cougar, like the scream of a woman in some strange terror.
But all sounds were indifferently alike to her, the shrilling of the
beast, the sibilance of running water, the bellow of the owl, the
whistle of a deer, or the throaty mutterings of an awakened bird. She
heard them as receding echoes of a life already remote.
She kept Cooney moving as rapidly as the trail permitted, checking his
little snatches at the wayside herbage. He could fast with her for one
night, she told him. To-morrow he could feast his way home harassed by
no rider. He stopped at times to test some doubtful bit of trail with a
cautious forefoot; or slowed to feel a sure way down a gullyside of
loose stones; or lingered knee deep in a melody of swift water, to
drink, with swelling sides. She was glad to have this last night with
the little horse that had been Ewing's. Ewing--only not to think of
him--for one cannot ride with the heart all bled away.
The light faded from the lower ways after a while. The moon had
completed its short arc and fell below the mountain ahead of her;
defining sharp little notches in its rim.
The hills seemed to steal upon her in the darkness then, huddling close
about her, muffling her with their black plumage. But she was glad of
this--surmounting the mere physical oppression of it--for she felt that
it doubled the secrecy of her going; and Cooney's eyes, with his skilled
feet, sufficed for the trail.
At times she shrank as under the touch of a palpable hand reached out to
her from the darkness, a thing that frantically protested, pleaded,
expostulated--but she knew it for the hand of mere brute life, a
cowardly, blind, soulless thing, that would subvert all fitness. She
shook it off, knowing herself its superior by right of mind, with power
to inflict justice upon it. And _he_ was dead, he, the young and
strong--alas, poor slayer, poor slain! How her heart bled away. To
expiate----
She clung to that: it was an obligation that lay on her, a secret
obligation, but the more imperative for that. She could not hold a
forfeited life. She must redeem herself. The hardest thing was demanded
of her. And then, one could not go on with this bleeding heart.
"The hardest thing--the hardest thing!" she murmured, shutting her lips
tightly on the words, with a sudden inexplicable fear of some flaw in
her logic. Again and again she forced the words from her lips with
stubborn, deaf insistence, to still some mental voice of inquiry, a
passionless, cold thing that lifted itself in her brain, but which she
could beat down with this bludgeon of her phrase. She was even bold
enough to cross-examine herself presently. The hardest thing was
demanded of her, and she was doing the hardest thing. Her hand fell on
the laden holster at her side with a panic impulse to rush the thing
through. But the touch reassured her and she laughed in the
consciousness of her security. She could not be thwarted now, and she
need not hurry. She could afford to the very end that deliberate
thoroughness with which she had begun. Her will for the thing had lost
none of its iron.
An hour or so after the darkness had crowded the hills in upon her she
rode into a dense mist, chilling to the bone after the dryness of the
early night. The range of her vision was again shortened, and even the
little horse halted more frequently to feel his way. Once he seemed to
have wandered, and stood a moment in uncertainty. She let him rest, then
flicked his shoulder with the bridle rein, and he struggled stanchly on
over the ridge of loose gravel where he had halted, feeling for the
trail with expert hoofs. He found it a moment later, and was moving
forward again. She patted his neck and blessed him for being so "trail
wise." He, too, was doing the hardest thing, and doing it faithfully.
She fell again into the rhythm of her battle cry--"The hardest
thing--the hardest thing!"
And yet it was not hard. She was so near to it now that she could afford
the luxury of this admission. It required only a sense of justice, of
moral symmetry. She had taken a life--two, doubtless--and by the law she
must pay. But no debtor could have had a willinger spirit. And she would
not be paying too much. She recalled certain homely words of an old man
whose life she had watched out, a man whose worn, seamed face showed his
right to speak.
"Experience, lady, a dear thing sometimes--yes--but never too dear. It
is worth always just what we pay for it. It is had at slightest cost,
high or low. No other thing is like it thus. All else of the world may
cheat us in their price, but not experience. Our fee shall vary as we
are quick to learn, but the good God teaches us what we must know at
flat cost, as says the merchant, with never the penny of profit. This it
saves much to know--much sorrowing, much whining. It would make us
wise--so!"
"So!" She echoed his rich guttural imitatively and laughed as she drew
in a deep breath of the damp air. She was numb with the cold now, and
laughed at foolish life for registering so petty a discomfort at such a
moment. The humor of it came home to her--that she should sensually feel
the cold.
Another span of hours the little horse strode on at his quick step,
valiantly lifting her up steep ascents, or descending the sides of
ravines with devoted sureness of foot, treading narrow ways where she
could feel that he hugged the bush-lined bank, and knew that a fall lay
the other side.
"The hardest thing--the hardest thing!" Again she muttered it, beating
at her purpose. And again, that mental, passionless query lifted its
head. Strike it down as she would, its cool, curious eyes were always on
her, not denying, not disputing, only questioning, calmly but
implacably, until her soul seemed to writhe in loyalty to her motives,
holding them sacred even from questioning.
"The hardest thing"--but her brain rang with the relentless
question--"are you doing it because it is the hardest thing or because
you want to do it?"
"I am doing it because I want to do the hardest thing."
"A quibble!"
She set her lips, shut her eyes, even to the darkness, and tried to
deafen her ears to the sounding thing. A long time she rode so. And then
she wept because she was alone and cold and dying and unsuccored by the
only one who could have comforted her.
"I would never, never have left _you_!" she called back toward Ewing,
with the first reproach she had ever given him. Her voice had a broken
sweetness like that of a child speaking through tears. "I'd never have
let you be so cold! I'd have stayed--stayed by you--warmed
you--comforted you!"
But after a little her tears ceased, as an unpitied child wears out its
crying, and her eyes closed again as she laughed at her own sad lack of
reason.
When she opened her eyes again she gave a little gasping cry of relief.
The black of the night had faded to gray. A dull, dark, opaque gray it
was, but ghosts of the land already bulked massively through it;
shrouded, vague shapes without line. And the spirit of her purpose
quickened as she looked.
Slowly the mist lightened, still opaque but silver now, and presently
she saw the murky face of a nearby rock and could trace the cedar that
twisted outward from its summit. They were amazing shapes to her, so
long had she seemed to live in the dark, and she named them over,
wonderingly--"A tree, a rock--a rock, a tree!"
Again the question struck at her: "You want to do the hardest thing?"
"I _must_ do the hardest thing--it only happens that I also wish to."
"Is there nothing harder than what you are doing?"
Again she shut her eyes and set her lips, but the voice came with
merciless insistence.
"_What_ would be harder than dying?"
Then she threw back her head and challenged the voice.
"_Living!_ To live would be harder." She made the confession without
flinching, even with a laugh, and a weight dropped from her.
"Then you are not doing the hardest thing--not doing it--not doing the
hardest thing!"
She coolly scanned the descending bed of a creek that the trail now
crossed. The ravine widened below, and she saw that an ascent would be
practicable farther down. It was time, then, to leave the trail. If the
impossible should happen, if by some chance or trick of woodcraft they
tracked her all the miles of her night-long ride, they must lose her
here.
She turned Cooney down the shallow stream with a furtive smile of pride
in her own craft. He splashed through the water, stumbling over the
submerged bowlders, but always recovering himself, and picking a sure
way over the creek bed.
The cool gray of the mist-steaming water reminded her that she was
thirsty, but she would stop for nothing now. She knew herself for a
coward at last, guilty of a cowardice hideously selfish. She had planned
her act to be remote, secret, undiscoverable. But now she faced squarely
the grief her loss would be to others.
But the sting would pass. And she had her own right--her own obligation
to meet. She had killed--she had killed her love--and she could not
live. There was service she might have performed through the years, but
others would perform it now, quite as acceptably. A gnat dropping from
the ephemeral human swarm could be nothing but a gnat the less. She no
longer pretended to call it the hardest thing. "But it's the next
hardest," she pleaded to herself. Her lips quivered, but she stilled the
spasm with a gust of fierce resolving to be done with the thing quickly.
The shelving bank along which the stream had wound now fell away, and
she could dimly make out a draw between two hills where she might
ascend. She chose a place of broken stone and loose gravel for Cooney to
clamber out, so that he might leave no sign even to a searcher who had
come this far. Then, ascending the draw a little distance, she turned
and sent him up the side of the lesser hill. The mist still shut her in,
but she could make out that the woods were denser on this hill.
Cooney made his way through a growth of the thick, wet buck brush, then
between white files of the quaking aspen, and at last into the heavier
wooded forest where his feet slipped and slid on the yielding pine
needles as he climbed. The hill lengthened before her in gradual
ascents, broken by terraces, and the way was rough with bowlders and
fallen trees and the clutching tangle of undergrowth. But the mist,
receding before her, revealed aisles of the wood farther on that allured
her. She would be thorough. Ahead of her were ruddy, yellow hints of the
sun, striking down through the green arches of the forest.
At last she saw that she had reached the summit of the hill. "It is the
place," she said, then reined in and dismounted by a clump of bushes.
She found herself stiffened by the cold, and a sudden fear of failing
force seized her. She stamped on the ground until she felt warmth in her
feet again, and the stirred blood mounting through her. She drew a great
breath and straightened her body with a consciousness of its strength
and wealth of life. "It is the place," she repeated.