At sunset Adam cooked supper for the Vireys, satisfying his own needs
after they had finished. Virey talked lightly, even joked about the
first good meal he had sat down to on the desert. His wife, too, talked
serenely, sometimes with the faintly subtle mockery, as if she had
never intimated that a dividing spear threatened her heart. That was
their way to hide the truth and emotion when they willed. But Adam was
silent.
Alone, out under the shadow of the towering gate to the valley, he
strode to and fro, absorbed in a maze of thoughts that gradually
cleared, as if by the light of the solemn stars and virtue of the
speaking silence. He had chanced upon the strangest and most fatal
situation in all his desert years. Yes, but was it by chance? Straight
as an arrow he had come across the barrens to meet a wonderful woman
who was going to love him, and a despicable man whom he was going to
kill. That seemed the fatality which rang in his ears, shone in the
accusing stars, hid in the heavy shadows. It was a matter of feeling.
His intelligence could not grasp it. Had he been in Death Valley
four days or four months? Was he walking in his sleep, victim of a
nightmare? The desert, faithful always, answered him. This was nothing
but the flux and reflux of human passion, contending tides between man
and woman, the littleness, the curse, the terror, and yet the joy of
life. Death Valley yawned at his feet, changeless and shadowy, awful
in its locked solemnity of solitude, its voicelessness, its desolation
that had been desolation in past ages. He could doubt nothing there.
His thoughts seemed almost above human error. A spirit spoke for him.
Virey had dragged his wife to this lonely and dismal hell hole on earth
to share his misery, to isolate her from men, to hide her glory of
charm, to gloat over her loneliness, to revenge himself for a wrong, to
feed his need of possession, his terrible love that had become hate, to
watch the slow torture of her fading, wilting, drooping in this ghastly
valley, to curse her living, to burn endlessly in torment because her
soul would elude him forever, to drive her to death and die with her.
Death Valley seemed a harmonious setting for this tragedy and a fitting
grave for its actors. The worst in nature calling to the darkest in
mankind! What a pity Virey could not divine his littleness--that he had
been a crawling maggot in the peopled ulcer of the world--that in the
great spaces where the sun beat down was a fiery cleansing!
But Magdalene Virey was a riddle beyond solving. Nevertheless, Adam
pondered every thought that would stay before his consciousness. Any
woman was a riddle. Did not the image of Margarita Arrallanes flash up
before him--that dusky-eyed, mindless, soulless little animal, victim
of nature born in her? Adam’s thought halted with the seeming sacrilege
of associating Magdalene Virey with memory of the Mexican girl. This
Virey woman had complexity--she had mind, passion, nobility, soul. What
had she done to earn her husband’s hate? She had never loved him--that
was as fixed in Adam’s sight as the North Star. Nor had she loved
another man, at least not with the passion and spirit of her wonderful
womanhood. Adam divined that with the intensity of feeling which the
desert loneliness and solitude had taught him. He could have felt the
current of any woman’s great passion, whether it was in torrent, full
charged and devastating, or at its lowering ebb. But, as inevitable
as was life itself, there was the mysterious certainty that Magdalene
Virey had terribly wronged her husband. How? Adam had repudiated any
interest in what had driven them here; not until this moment had he
permitted his doubt to insult the woman. Yet how helpless he was! His
heart was full of unutterable pity. He could never have loved Magdalene
Virey as a man, but as a brother he was yearning to change her, save
her. What else in life was worth living for, except only the dreams on
the heights, the walks along the lonely trails? By his own agony he had
a strange affinity for anyone in trouble, especially a woman, and how
terribly he saw the tragedy of Magdalene Virey! And it was not only her
death that he saw. Death in a land where death reigned was nothing.
For her he hated the certainty of physical pain, the turgid pulse, the
red-hot iron band at the temples, the bearing down of weighted air, the
drying up of flesh and blood. More than all he hated the thought of
death of her spirit while her body lived. There would be a bloodless
murder long before her blood stained Virey’s hands.
But this thought gave Adam pause. Was he not dealing with a personality
beyond his power to divine? What did he know of this strange woman? He
knew naught, but felt all. She was beautiful, compelling, secretive,
aloof, and proud, magnificent as a living flame. She was mocking
because knowledge of the world, of the frailty of women and falsity of
men, had been as an open page. She had lived in sight of the crowded
mart, the show places where men and women passed, knowing no more of
earth than that it was a place for graves. She was bitter because she
had drunk bitterness to the dregs. But the sudden up-flashing warmth
of her, forced out of her reserve, came from a heart of golden fire.
Adam constituted himself an omniscient judge, answerable only to his
conscience. By all the gods he would be true to the truth of this woman!
Never had she been forced into this desert of desolation. That thought
of Adam’s seemed far back in the past. She had dared to come. Had Death
Valley and the death it was famed for any terrors for her? By the side
of her husband she had willingly come, unutterably despising him,
infinitely brave where he was cowardly, scornfully and magnificently
prepared to meet any punishment that might satisfy him. Adam saw how,
in this, Magdalene Virey was answering to some strange need in itself.
Let the blind, weak, egoist Virey demand the tortures of the damned!
She would pay. But she was paying also a debt to herself. Adam’s final
conception of Magdalene Virey was that she had been hideously wronged
by life, by men; that in younger days of passionate revolt she had
transgressed the selfish law of husbands; that in maturer years, with
the storm and defeat and disillusion of womanhood, she had risen to
the heights, she had been true to herself; and with mockery of the man
who could so underestimate her, who dared believe he could make her a
craven, whimpering, guilty wretch, she had faced the desert with him.
She had seen the great love that was not love change to terrible hate.
She had divined the hidden motive. She let him revel in his hellish
secret joy. She welcomed Death Valley.
Adam marveled at this unquenchable spirit, this sublime effrontery of
a woman. And he hesitated to dare to turn that spirit from its superb
indifference. But this vacillation in him was weak. What a wonderful
experience it would be to embody in Magdalene Virey the instinct, the
strife, the nature of the desert! With her mind, if he had the power to
teach, she would grasp the lesson in a single day.
And lastly, her unforgettable implication, “the crowning agony,” of
what he might bring upon her. There could be only one interpretation of
that--love. The idea thrilled him, but only with wonder and pity. It
took possession of Adam’s imagination. Well, such love might come to
pass! The desert storms bridged canyons with sand in one day. It was a
place of violence. The elements waited not upon time or circumstance.
The few women Adam had come in contact with on the desert had loved
him. Even the one-eyed Mohave Jo, that hideous, unsexed, monstrous
deformity of a woman, whom he had met and left groveling in the sand
at his feet, shamed at last before a crowd of idle, gaping, vile
men--even she had awakened to this strange madness of love. But Adam
had not wanted that of any woman, since the poignant moment of his
youth on the desert, when the dusky-eyed Margarita had murmured of love
so fresh and sweet to him, “Ah, so long ago and far away!”
Least of all did Adam want the love of Magdalene Virey. “If she
were young and I were young! Or if she had never...!” Ah! even
possibilities, like might-have-beens, were useless dreams. But the die
was cast. Serve Magdalene Virey he would, and teach her the secret of
the strength of the sand wastes and the lonely hills, and that the
victory of life was not to yield. Fight for her, too, he would. In all
the multiplicity of ways he had learned, he would fight the solitude
and loneliness of Death Valley, the ghastliness so inimical to the
creative life of a woman, the heat, the thirst, the starvation, the
poison air, the furnace wind, storm and flood and avalanche. Just as
naturally, if need be, if it fatefully fell out so, he would lay his
slaying hands in all their ruthless might upon the man who had made her
dare her doom.
* * * * *
When, next morning at sunrise hour, Adam presented himself at the Virey
camp, he was greeted by Mrs. Virey, seemingly a transformed woman.
She wore a riding suit, the worn condition of which attested to the
rough ride across the mountain. What remarkable difference it made in
her appearance! It detracted from her height. And the slenderness of
her, revealed rather than suggested by her gowns, showed much of grace
and symmetry. She had braided her hair and let it hang. When the sun
had tanned her white face and hands Magdalene Virey would really be
transformed.
Adam tried not to stare, but his effort was futile.
“Good morning,” she said, with a bright smile.
“Why, Mrs. Virey, I--I hardly knew you!” he stammered.
“Thanks. I feel complimented. It is the first time you’ve looked at
_me_. Shorn of my dignity--no, my worldliness, do I begin well, desert
man?... No more stuffy dresses clogging my feet! No more veils to
protect my face! Let the sun burn! I want to work. I want to help. I
want to learn. If madness must be mine, let it be a madness to learn
what in this God-forsaken land ever made you the man you are. There,
Sir Wansfell, I have flung down the gage.”
“Very well,” replied Adam, soberly.
“And now,” she continued, “I am eager to work. If I blunder, be
patient. If I am stupid, make me see. And if I faint in the sun or fall
beside the trail, remember it is my poor body that fails, and not my
will.”
So, in the light of her keen interest, Adam found the humdrum mixing of
dough and the baking of bread a pleasure and a lesson to him, rather
than a task.
“Ah! how important are the homely things of life!” she said. “A poet
said ‘we live too much in the world.’... I wonder did he mean just
this. We grow away from or never learn the simple things. I remember
my grandfather’s farm--the plowed fields, the green corn, the yellow
wheat, the chickens in the garden, the mice in the barn, the smell of
hay, the smell of burning leaves, the smell of the rich brown earth....
Wansfell, not for years have I remembered them. Something about you,
the way you worked over that bread, like a nice old country lady, made
me remember.... Oh, I wonder what I have missed!”
“We all miss something. It can’t be helped. But there are
compensations, and it’s never too late.”
“You are a child, with all your bigness. You have the mind of a child.”
“That’s one of my few blessings.... Now you try your hand at mixing the
second batch of dough.”
She made a picture on her knees, with her sleeves rolled up, her
beautiful hands white with flour, her face beginning to flush. Adam
wanted to laugh at her absolute failure to mix dough, and at the same
moment he had it in him to weep over the earnestness, the sadness, the
pathetic meaning of her.
Eventually they prepared the meal, and she carried Virey’s breakfast in
to him. Then she returned to eat with Adam.
“I shall wash the dishes,” she announced.
“No,” he protested.
Then came a clash. It ended with a compromise. And from that clash
Adam realized he might dominate her in little things, but in a great
conflict of wills she would be the stronger. It was a step in his own
slow education. There was a constitutional difference between men and
women.
Upon Adam’s resumption of the work around the shack Mrs. Virey helped
him as much as he would permit, which by midday was somewhat beyond her
strength. Her face sunburned rosily and her hands showed the contact
with dirt and her boots were dusty.
“You mustn’t overdo it,” he advised. “Rest and sleep during the noon
hours.”
She retired within the shack and did not reappear till the middle of
the afternoon. Meanwhile, Adam had worked at his tasks, trying at the
same time to keep an eye on Virey, who wandered around aimlessly over
the rock-strewn field, idling here and plodding there. Adam saw how
Virey watched the shack; and when Magdalene came out again he saw her
and grew as motionless as the stone where he leaned. Every thought of
Virey’s must have been dominated by this woman’s presence, the meaning
of her, the possibilities of her, the tragedy of her.
“Oh, how I slept!” she exclaimed. “Is it work that makes you sleep?”
“Indeed yes.”
“Ah! I see my noble husband standing like Mephistopheles, smiling at
grief.... What’s he doing over there?”
“I don’t know, unless it’s watching for you. He’s been around like that
for hours.”
“Poor man!” she said, with both compassion and mockery. “Watching me?
What loss of precious time--and so futile! It is a habit he contracted
some years ago.... Wansfell, take me down to the opening in the
mountain there, so that I can look into Death Valley.”
“Shall I ask Virey?” queried Adam, in slight uncertainty.
“No. Let him watch or follow or do as he likes. I am here in Death
Valley. It was his cherished plan to bury me here. I shall not leave
until he takes me--which will be never. For the rest, he is nothing to
me. We are as far apart as the poles.”
On the way down the gentle slope Adam halted amid sun-blasted shrubs,
scarcely recognizable as greasewood. Here he knelt in the gravel to
pluck some flowers so tiny that only a trained eye could ever have
espied them. One was a little pink flower with sage color and sage
odor; another a white daisy, very frail, and without any visible
leaves; and a third was a purple-red flower, half the size of the
tiniest buttercup, and this had small dark-green leaves.
“Flowers in Death Valley!” exclaimed Mrs. Virey, in utter amaze.
“Yes. Flowers of a day! They sprang up yesterday; to-day they bloom,
to-morrow they will die. I don’t know their names. To me their
blossoming is one of the wonders of the desert. I think sometimes that
it is a promise. A whole year the tiny seeds lie in the hot sands. Then
comes a mysterious call and the green plant shoots its inch-long stalk
to the sun. Another day beauty unfolds and there is fragrance on the
desert air. Another day sees them whither and die.”
“Beauty and fragrance indeed they have,” mused the woman. “Such tiny
flowers to look and smell so sweet! I never saw their like. Flowers of
a day!... They indeed give rise to thoughts too deep for tears!”
Adam led his companion to the base of the mountain wall, and around the
corner of the opening, so that they came suddenly and unexpectedly
into full view of Death Valley. He did not look at her. He wanted to
wait a little before doing that. The soft gasp which escaped her lips
and the quick grasping of his hand were significant of the shock she
sustained.
Their position faced mostly down the valley. It seemed a vast level,
gently sloping up to the borders where specks of mesquites dotted the
sand. Dull gray and flat, these league-wide wastes of speckled sand
bordered a dazzling-white sunlit belt, the winding bottom of the long
bowl, the salty dead stream of Death Valley. Miles and miles below, two
mountain ranges blended in a purple blaze, and endless slanting lines
of slopes ran down to merge in the valley floor. The ranges sent down
offshoots of mountains that slanted and lengthened into the valley. One
bright-green oasis, that, lost in the vastness, was comparable to one
of the tiny flowers Adam had plucked out of the sand, shone wonderfully
and illusively out of the glare of gray and white. A dim, mystic scene!
“O God!... It is my grave!” cried Magdalene Virey.
“We all are destined for graves,” replied Adam, solemnly. “Could any
grave elsewhere be so grand--so lonely--so peaceful?... Now let us walk
out a little way, to the edge of that ridge, and sit there while the
sun sets.”
On this vantage point they were out some distance in the valley,
so that they could see even the western end of the Panamint range,
where a glaring sun had begun to change its color over the bold black
peaks. A broad shadow lengthened across the valley and crept up the
yellow foothills to the red Funeral Mountains. This shadow marvelously
changed to purple, and as the radiance of light continued to shade,
the purple deepened. Over all the valley at the western end appeared
a haze the color of which was nameless. Adam felt the lessening heat
of the sinking sun. Half that blaze was gone. It had been gold and
was now silver. He swept his gaze around jealously, not to miss the
transformations; and his companion, silent and absorbed, instinctively
turned with him. Across the valley the Funerals towered, ragged and
sharp, with rosy crowns; and one, the only dome-shaped peak, showed its
strata of gray and drab through the rose. Another peak, farther back,
lifted a pink shaft into the blue sky. What a contrast to the lower
hills and slopes, so beautifully pearl gray in tint! And now, almost
the instant Adam had marked the exquisite colors, they began to fade.
On that illimitable horizon line there were soon no bright tones left.
Far to the south, peaks that had been dim now stood out clear and sharp
against the sky. One, gold capped and radiant, shadowed as if a cloud
had come between it and the sun. Adam turned again to the west, in time
to see the last vestige of silver fire vanish. Sunset!
A somber smoky sunset it was now, as if this Death Valley was the
gateway of hell and its sinister shades were upflung from fire. Adam
saw a vulture sail across the clear space of sky, breasting the wind.
It lent life to the desolation.
The desert day was done and the desert shades began to descend. The
moment was tranquil and sad. It had little to do with the destiny
of man--nothing except that by some inscrutable design of God or an
accident of evolution man happened to be imprisoned where nature never
intended man to be. Death Valley was only a ragged rent of the old
earth, where men wandered wild, brooding, lost, or where others sought
with folly and passion to dig forth golden treasure. The mysterious
lights changed. A long pale radiance appeared over the western range
and lengthened along its bold horizon. The only red color left was way
to the south, and that shone dim. The air held a solemn stillness.
“Magdalene Virey,” said Adam, “what you see there resembles death--it
may be death--but it is peace. Does it not rest your troubled soul? A
woman must be herself here.”
She, whose words could pour out in such torrent of eloquence, was
silent now. Adam looked at her then, into the shadowed eyes. What he
saw there awed him. The abyss seen through those beautiful, unguarded
windows of her soul was like the gray scored valley beneath, but
lighting, quickening with thought, with hope, with life. Death Valley
was a part of the earth dying, and it would become like a canyon on the
burned-out moon; but this woman’s spirit seemed everlasting. If her
soul had been a whited sepulcher, it was in the way of transfiguration.
Adam experienced a singular exaltation in the moment, a gladness beyond
his comprehension, a sense that the present strange communion there
between this woman’s awakening and the terrible lessons of his life was
creating for him a far-distant interest, baffling, but great in its
inspiration.
In the gathering twilight he led her back to camp, content that it
seemed still impossible for her to speak. But the touch of her hand at
parting was more eloquent than any words.
Then alone, in his blankets, with gaze up at the inscrutable, promising
stars, Adam gave himself over to insistent and crowding thoughts, back
of which throbbed a dominating, divine hope in his power to save this
woman’s life and soul, and perhaps even her happiness.
* * * * *
Next day Adam’s natural aggressiveness asserted itself, controlled now
by an imperturbable spirit that nothing could daunt. He approached
Virey relentlessly, though with kindness, even good nature, and he
began to talk about Death Valley, the perilous nature of the camping
spot, the blasting heat of midsummer and the horror of the midnight
furnace winds, the possibility of the water drying up. Virey was cold,
then impatient, then intolerant, and finally furious. First he was deaf
to Adam’s persuasion, then he tried to get out of listening, then he
repudiated all Adam had said, and finally he raved and cursed. Adam
persisted in his arguments until Virey strode off.
Mrs. Virey heard some of this clash. Apparently Adam’s idea of
changing her husband amused her. But when Virey returned for supper he
was glad enough to eat, and when Adam again launched his argument it
appeared that Mrs. Virey lost the last little trace of mockery. She
listened intently while Adam told her husband why he would have to
take his wife away from Death Valley, before midsummer. Virey might as
well have been stone deaf. It was not Virey, however, who interested
the woman, but something about Adam that made her look and listen
thoughtfully.
Thus began a singular time for Adam, unmatched in all his desert
experience. He gave his whole heart to the task of teaching Magdalene
Virey and to the wearing down of Virey’s will. All the lighter tasks
that his hands had learned he taught her. Then to climb to the heights,
to pick the ledges for signs of gold or pan the sandy washes, to know
the rocks and the few species of vegetation, to recognize the illusion
of distance and color, to watch the sunsets and the stars became daily
experiences. Hard as work was for her delicate hands and muscles, he
urged her to their limit. During the first days she suffered sunburn,
scalds, skinned fingers, bruised knees, and extreme fatigue. When
she grew tanned and stronger he led her out on walks and climbs so
hard that he had to help her back to camp. She learned the meaning of
physical pain, and to endure it. She learned the blessing it was to eat
when she was famished, to rest when she was utterly weary, to sleep
when sleep was peace.
Through these brief, full days Adam attacked Virey at every
opportunity, which time came to be, at length, only during meals.
Virey would leave camp, often to go up the slope of weathered rocks,
a dangerous climb that manifestly fascinated him. Reaching a large
rock that became his favorite place, he would perch there for long
hours, watching, gazing down like a vulture waiting for time to strike
its prey. All about him seemed to suggest a brooding wait. He slept
during the midday hours and through the long nights. At dusk, which was
usually bedtime for all, Adam often heard him talking to Mrs. Virey in
a low, hard, passionate voice. Sometimes her melodious tones, with the
mockery always present when she spoke to her husband, thrilled Adam,
while at the same moment it filled him with despair. But Adam never
despaired of driving Virey to leave the valley. The man was weak in all
ways except that side which pertained to revenge. Notwithstanding the
real and growing obstacle of this passion, Adam clung to his conviction
that in the end Virey would collapse. When, however, one day the
Indians came, and Virey sent them away with a large order for supplies,
Adam gave vent to a grim thought, “Well, I can always kill him.”
All the disgust and loathing Adam felt for this waster of life
vanished in the presence of Magdalene Virey. If that long-passed
sunset hour over Death Valley had awakened the woman, what had been
the transformation of the weeks? Adam had no thoughts that adequately
expressed his feeling for the change in her. It gave him further
reverence for desert sun and heat and thirst and violence and solitude.
It gave him strange new insight into the mystery of life. Was any
healing of disease or agony impossible--any change of spirit--any
renewal of life? Nothing in relation to human life was impossible.
Magnificently the desert magnified and multiplied time, thought,
effort, pain, health, hope--all that could be felt.
It seemed to Adam that through the physical relation to the desert
he was changing Magdalene Virey’s body and heart and soul. Brown her
face and hands had grown; and slowly the graceful, thin lines of her
slender body had begun to round out. She was gaining. If it had not
been for her shadowed eyes, and the permanent sadness and mockery in
the beautiful lips, she would have been like a girl of eighteen. Her
voice, too, with its contralto richness, its mellow depth, its subtle
shades of tone, proclaimed the woman. Adam at first had imagined her to
be about thirty years old, but as time passed by, and she grew younger
with renewed strength, he changed his mind. Looking at her to guess
her age was like looking at the desert illusions. Absolute certainty
he had, however, of the reward and result of her inflexible will, of
splendid spirit, of sincere gladness. She had endured physical toil and
pain to the limit of her frail strength, until she was no longer frail.
This spirit revived what had probably been early childish love of
natural things; and action and knowledge developed it until her heart
was wholly absorbed in all that it was possible to do there in that
lonesome fastness. With the genius and intuition of a woman she had
grasped at the one solace left her--the possibility of learning Adam’s
lesson of the desert. What had taken him years to acquire she learned
from him or divined in days. She had a wonderful mind.
Once, while they were resting upon a promontory that overhung the
valley, Adam spoke to her. She did not hear him. Her eyes reflected
the wonder and immensity of the waste beneath her. Indeed, she did not
appear to be brooding or thinking. And when he spoke again, breaking in
upon her abstraction, she was startled. He forgot what he had intended
to say, substituting a query as to her thoughts.
“How strange!” she murmured. “I didn’t have a thought. I forgot where I
was. Your voice seemed to come from far off.”
“I spoke to you before, but you didn’t hear,” said Adam. “You looked
sort of, well--watchful, I’d call it.”
“Watchful? Yes, I was. I feel I was, but I don’t remember. This
is indeed a strange state for Magdalene Virey. It behooves her to
cultivate it. But what kind of a state was it?... Wansfell, could it
have been happiness?”
She asked that in a whisper, serious, and with pathos, yet with a smile.
“It’s always happiness for me to watch from the heights. Surely you are
finding happy moments?”
“Yes, many, thanks to you, my friend. But they are conscious happy
moments, just sheer joy of movement, or sight of beauty, or a thrill
of hope, or perhaps a vague dream of old, far-off, unhappy things. And
it _is_ happiness to remember them.... But this was different. It was
unconscious. I tell you, Wansfell, I did not have a thought in my mind!
I saw--I watched. Oh, how illusive it is!”
“Try to recall it,” he suggested, much interested.
“I try--I try,” she said, presently, “but the spell is broken.”
“Well, then, let me put a thought into your mind,” went on Adam.
“Dismukes and I once had a long talk about the desert. Why does it
fascinate all men? What is the secret? Dismukes didn’t rate himself
high as a thinker. But he is a thinker. He knows the desert. To me
he’s great. And he and I agreed that the commonly accepted idea of
the desert’s lure is wrong. Men seek gold, solitude, forgetfulness.
Some wander for the love of wandering. Others seek to hide from the
world. Criminals are driven to the desert. Besides these, all travelers
crossing the desert talk of its enchantments. They all have different
reasons. Loneliness, peace, silence, beauty, wonder, sublimity--a
thousand reasons! Indeed, they are all proofs of the strange call of
the desert. But these men do not go deep enough.”
“Have you solved the secret?” she asked, wonderingly.
“No, not yet,” he replied, a little sadly. “It eludes me. It’s like
finding the water of the mirage.”
“It’s like the secret of a woman’s heart, Wansfell.”
“Then if that is so--tell me.”
“Ah! no woman ever tells that secret.”
“Have you come to love the desert?”
“You ask me that often,” she replied, in perplexity. “I don’t know.
I--I reverence--I fear--I thrill. But love--I can’t say that I love
the desert. Not yet. Love comes slowly and seldom to me. I loved my
mother.... Once I loved a horse.”
“Have you loved men?” he queried.
“No!” she flashed, in sudden passion, and her eyes burned dark on
his. “Do _you_ imagine that of me?... I was eighteen when I--when
they married me to Virey. I despised him. I learned to loathe him....
Wansfell, I never really loved any man. Once I was mad--driven!”
How easily could Adam strike the chords of her emotion and rouse her to
impassioned speech! His power to do this haunted him, and sometimes he
could not resist it until wistfulness or trouble in her eyes made him
ashamed.
“Some day I’ll tell you how _I_ was driven once--ruined,” he said.
“Ruined! You? Why, Wansfell, you are a man! Sometimes I think you’re a
god of the desert!... But tell me--what ruined you, as you mean it?”
“No, not now. I’m interested in your--what is it?--your lack of power
to love.”
“Lack! How little you know me! I am _all_ power to love. I am a
quivering mass of exquisitely delicate, sensitive nerves. I am a
seething torrent, of hot blood. I am an empty heart, deep and terrible
as this valley, hungry for love as it is hungry for precious rain or
dew. I am an illimitable emotion, heaving like the tides of the sea. I
am all love.”
“And I--only a stupid blunderer,” said Adam.
“You use a knife relentlessly, sometimes.... Wansfell, listen....
I have a child--a lovely girl. She is fourteen years old--the
sweetest.... Ah! Before she was born I did not love her--I did not
_want_ her. But afterward!... Wansfell, a mother’s love is divine. But
I had more than that. All--all my heart went out to Ruth.... _Love!_
Oh, my God! does any man know the torture of love?... Oh, _I_ know!
I had to leave her--I had to give her up ... and I’ll never--never
see--her--again!”
The woman bowed with hands to her face and all her slender body shook.
“Forgive me!” whispered Adam, huskily, in distress. It was all he could
say for a moment. She had stunned him. Never had he imagined her as a
mother. “Yet--yet I’m glad I know now. You should have told me. I am
your friend. I’ve tried to be a--a brother. Tell me, Magdalene. You’ll
be the--the less troubled. I will help you. I think I understand--just
a little. You seemed to me only a very young woman--and you’re a
mother! Always I say I’ll never be surprised again. Why, the future is
all surprise!... And your little girl’s name is Ruth? Ruth Virey. What
a pretty name!”
Adam had rambled on, full of contrition, hating himself, trying somehow
to convey sympathy. Perhaps his words, his touch on her bowed shoulder,
helped her somewhat, for presently she sat up, flung back her hair,
and turned a tear-stained face to him. How changed, how softened, how
beautiful! Slowly her eyes were veiling an emotion, a glimpse of which
uplifted him.
“Wansfell, I’m thirty-eight years old,” she said.
“No! I can’t believe that!” he ejaculated.
“It’s true.”
“Well, well! I guess I’ll go back to figuring the desert. But speaking
of age--you guess mine. I’ll bet you can’t come any nearer to mine.”
Gravely she studied him, and in the look and action once more grew
composed.
“You’re a masculine Sphinx. Those terrible lines from cheek to
jaw--they speak of agony, but not of age. But you’re gray at the
temples. Wansfell, you are thirty-seven--perhaps forty.”
“Magdalene Virey!” cried Adam, aghast. “Do I look so old? Alas for
vanished youth!... I am only twenty-six.”
It was her turn to be amazed. “We had better confine ourselves to other
riddles than love and age. They are treacherous.... Come, let us be
going.”