If events had been moving rapidly with Lewis, they had by no means been
at a standstill at Nadir since that troubled day on which he had
rebelled, quarreled, and fled, leaving behind him wrath and tears and
awakened hearts where all had been apathy and somnolence.
Many happenings at Nadir were dated from the day that Lewis went away.
Late that night mammy and Mrs. Leighton, aided by trembling Natalie, had
had to carry the Reverend Orme from his chair in the school-room to his
bed. The left side of his face was drawn grotesquely out of line, but
despite the disfigurement, there was a look of peace in his ravaged
countenance, as of one who welcomes night joyfully and calmly after a
long battle.
Perhaps it was this look of peace that made Ann Leighton regard this
latest as the lightest of all the calamities that had fallen upon her
frail shoulders. She felt that in a measure the catastrophe had brought
the Reverend Orme back--nearer to her heart. Her heart, which had seemed
to atrophy and shrivel from disuse since the poignant fullness of the
last days of Shenton, was suddenly revivified. Love, pity, tender
care,--all the discarded emotions,--returned to light up her withered
face and give it beauty. Night and day she stayed beside the Reverend
Orme, reading aright his slightest movement.
To Natalie one need stood out above all others--the need for Lewis. At
first she waited for news of him, but none came; then she sought out Dom
Francisco. Word was passed to the cattlemen. They said Lewis had been
bound for Oeiras. A messenger was sent to Oeiras. He came back with the
news that Lewis had never arrived there. He had been traced half-way.
After that no one on the long straight trail had seen the boy. The
wilderness had swallowed him.
Dom Francisco came almost daily to see the Reverend Orme. "Behold him!"
he cried at his first visit, aghast at the havoc the stroke had played
with the tall frame. "He is but a boy, he has fathered but two
children--and yet--behold him! He is broken!" The sight of the Reverend
Orme, suddenly grown pitifully old, seemed to work on the white-haired,
but sturdy, cattle-king by reflection. He, too, grew old suddenly.
Natalie was the first to notice it. She began to nurse the old man as
she nursed her father,--to treat him as she would a child. When one day
he spoke almost tremulously of the marriage that was to be, she did not
even answer him, contenting herself with the smile with which one humors
extreme youth clamoring for the moon. Gradually, without any discussion
or open refusal on the part of Natalie, it became understood not only to
Dom Francisco, but to all the circle at Nadir, that she would never
marry the old cattle-king.
The sudden departure of Lewis, the Reverend Orme's breakdown, with its
intimate worry displacing all lesser cares, the absorption of Ann
Leighton as her husband's constant attendant--these things made of
Natalie a woman in a night. She assumed direction of the house, and
calmly ordered mammy around in a way that warmed that old soul, born to
cheerful servitude. She hired a goatherd and rigidly oversaw his
handiwork. Then she approached Dom Francisco one evening as he sat at
her father's bedside and told him that he must find a purchaser for the
goats--all of them.
The Reverend Orme, although he heard, took no interest in any temporal
affair. Mrs. Leighton looked up and asked mildly:
"Why, dear?"
"Because we need money," said Natalie. "No doctor would come here. We
must take father away."
No one recoiled from the idea; but it was new to them all except
Natalie. It took days and days for it to sink in. It was on Dom
Francisco that Natalie most exerted herself. He had aged, and age had
made him weak. He fell a slow, but easy, prey to her youth, grown
sweetly dominant. He himself would arrange to buy the enormous herd of
goats, the greatest in the country-side. And, finally, with a great
shrinking from the definite implication, he agreed to buy back Nadir as
well.
No mere argument could have led the old man to such a concession. It was
love--love for these strangers that he had cherished within his gates,
love for the gloomy man whom he had seen young and then old, love for
Ann and Natalie and mammy, with their quiet ways, love for the very way
of life of all of them--a way distantly above anything he had ever
dreamed before their coming, that drove him, almost against his will, to
speed their parting. He sent for money. He himself spent long, wistful
hours preparing the ox-wagon, the litter, and the horses that were to
bear them away.
Then one night the Reverend Orme slept and awoke no more. In the morning
Natalie went into the room and found her mother sitting very still
beside the bed, one of the Reverend Orme's hands in both of hers. Tears
followed each other slowly down her cheeks. She did not brush them away.
"Mother!" cried Natalie, in the first grip of premonition.
"Hush, dear!" said Mrs. Leighton. "He is gone."
They buried him at the very top of the valley, where the eye, guided by
the parallel hills, sought ever and again the great mountain thirty
miles away. In that clear air the distant mountain seemed very near.
There were those who said they could see the holy cross upon its brow.
That night Mrs. Leighton and mammy sat idle and staring in the house.
Suddenly they had realized that for them the years of tears had passed.
They looked at each other and wondered by what long road calm had come
to them. Not so Natalie. Natalie was out in the night, out upon the
hills.
She climbed the highest of them all. As she stumbled up the rise, she
lifted her eyes to the stars. The stars were very high, very far, very
cold. They struck at her sight like needles.
Natalie covered her eyes. She stood on the crest of the hill. Her
glorious hair had fallen and wrapped her with its still mantle. Her
slight breast was heaving. She could hear her struggling heart pounding
at its cage. She drew a long breath. With all the strength: of her young
lungs she called: "Lew, where are you? O, Lew, you _must_ come! O, Lew,
I _need_ you!"
The low hills gave back no echo. It was not silence that swallowed her
desperate cry, but distance, overwhelming distance. She stared wide-eyed
across the plain. Suddenly faith left her. She knew that Lewis, could
not hear. She knew that she was alone. She crumpled into a little heap
on the top of the highest hill, buried her face in her soft hair, and
sobbed.
The conviction that their wilderness held Lewis no longer brought a
certain strength to Natalie's sudden womanhood. It was as though Fate
had cried to her, "The burden is all thine; take it up," and with the
same breath had given her the sure courage that comes with renunciation.
She answered Dom Francisco's wistful questioning before it could take
shape in words.
"We cannot stay," she said. "We must go. You will still help us to go."
Nature's long silences breed silence in man. Dom Francisco ceased to
question even with his eyes. He made all ready, delivered them into the
hands of trusted henchmen, and bade them God's speed. They struck out
for the sea, but not by the long road that Lewis and the stranger had
followed. There was a nearer Northern port. Toward it they set their
faces, Consolation Cottage their goal.