AN INTERLUDE THAT CAME UNANNOUNCED
Wayland stopped storming. His cynical laugh came back an echo hard to
his own hearing. Was It speaking the same mute language to her It had
spoken to him since first he came to the Holy Cross? The violet
shadows of twilight slowly filled with a primrose mist, with a rapt
hush as of the day's vespers. The great quiet of the mountain world
wrapped them round as in an invisible robe of worship.
Always, as the red flush ran the spectrum gamut of the yellows and
oranges and greens and blues and purples to the solitary star above the
opaline peak, he had wanted to wait and see--what? He did not know.
It had always seemed, if he watched, the primrose veil would lift and
release some phantom with noiseless tread on a ripple of night wind.
In his lonely vigils he used to listen for all the little bells of the
nodding purple heather to begin ringing some sort of pixie music, or
for the flaming tongues of the painter's flower to take voice in some
chorus that would beat time to the rhythm of woodland life fluting the
age-old melodies of Pan.
You would look and look at the winged flames of light swimming and
shimmering and melting outlines in the opal clouds there, till almost
it became a sort of Mount of Transfiguration, of free uncabined
roofless night-dreams camped beneath the sheen of a million stars.
You would listen and listen to the mountain silence--rare, hushed,
silver silence--till almost you could hear; but until to-night it had
always been like the fall of the snow flake. You could never be quite
sure you heard, though there was no mistaking a mass of several million
years of snow flakes when they thundered down in avalanche or broke a
ledge with the boom of artillery.
Now, at last--was it the end of a million years of pre-existence
waiting for this thing? Now, at last, Wayland realized that the quiet
fellowship, the common interests, the satisfaction of her presence, the
aptitude their minds had of always rushing to meet halfway on the same
subject, had somehow massed to a something within himself that set his
blood coursing with jubilant swiftness.
He looked at the rancher's daughter. What had happened? She was the
same, yet not the same. Her eyes were awaiting his. They did not
flinch. They were wells of light; a strange new light; depth of light.
Had the veil lifted at last? The welter of sullen anger subsided
within him. The wrapped mystery of the mountain twilight hushed
speech. What folly it all was--that far off clamor of greed in the
Outer World, that wolfish war of self-interest down in the Valley, that
clack of the wordsters darkening wisdom without knowledge! As if one
man, as if one generation of men, could stay the workings of the laws
of eternal righteousness by refusing to heed, any more than one man's
will could stop an avalanche by refusing to heed the law of the
snowflake!
Calamity, the little withered half-breed woman, slipped in and out of
the Forester's cabin tidying up bachelor confusion. The wind suffed
through the evergreens in dream voices, pansy-soft to the touch. The
slow-swaying evergreens rocked to a rhythm old as Eternity, Druid
priests standing guard over the sacrament of love and night. From the
purpling Valley came the sibilant hush of the River. Somewhere, from
the branches below the Ridge, a water thrush gurgled a last joyous note
that rippled liquid gold through the twilight.
Life might have become the tent of a night in an Eternity--a tent of
sky hung with stars; the after-glow a topaz gate ajar into some
infinite life. Then Love and Silence and Eternity had wrapped them
round as in a robe of prayer. He was standing above the dead
camp-fire. She was leaning forward from the slab seat, her face
between her hands. With a catch of breath, she withdrew her eyes from
his and watched the long shadows creep like ghosts across the Valley.
What he said aloud in the nonchalant voice of twentieth century youth
keeping hold of himself was--
"Not bad, is it?" nodding at the opal flame-winged peak. "Pretty good
show turned on free every night?"
A meadow lark went lifting above the Ridge dropping silver arrows of
song; and a little flutter of phantom wind came rustling through the
pine needles.
"I don't suppose," she was saying--he had never heard those notes in
her voice before: they were gold, gold flute notes to melt rock-hard
self-control and touch the timbre of unknown chords within--"I don't
suppose anything ever was accomplished without somebody being willing
to fight a losing battle. Do you?" Wayland stretched out on the
ground at her feet.
"Eleanor, do you know, do you realize--?"
"Yes I know," she whispered.
And somehow, unpremeditated and half way, their hands met.
"Something wonderful has happened to us both to-night."
The sheen of the stars had come to her eyes. She could not trust her
glance to meet his. A compulsion was sweeping over her in waves,
drawing her to him--her free hand lay on his hair; her averted face
flushed to the warmth of his nearness.
"I don't suppose, Dick, that right ever did triumph till somebody was
willing to be crucified. Men die of vices every day; women snuff out
like candles. What's so heroic about a man more or less going down in
a good game fight--?"
He felt the tremor in her voice and her hands, in her deep breathing;
and his manhood came to rescue their balance in words that sounded
foolish enough:
"So my old mountain talks to you, too? I'll think of that when I'm up
here in my hammock alone. Oh, you bet, I'll think of that hard! What
does the old mountain lady say to you, anyway? Look--when the light's
on that long precipice, you can sometimes see a snow slide come over
the edge in a puff of spray. They are worst at mid-day when the heat
sends 'em down; and they're bigger on the back of the mountain where
she shelves straight up and down--"
And her thought met his poise half way.
"What does the old mountain say? Don't you know what science says--how
the snow flakes fall to the same music of law as the snow slide, and
it's the snow flake makes the snow slide that sets the mountain free,
the gentle, quiet, beautiful snow flake that sculptures the granite--"
"The gentle, quiet--beautiful thing," slowly repeated the Ranger in a
dream. "That sounds pretty good to me."
He said no more; for he knew that the veil had lifted, and the
voiceless voices of the night were shouting riotously. The wind came
suffing through the swaying arms of the bearded waving hemlocks--Druid
priests officiating at some age-old sacrament. Then a night-hawk
swerved past with a hum of wings like the twang of a harp string.
"Look," she said, poking at the sod with her foot. "All the little
clover leaves have folded their wings to sleep."
Old Calamity passed in and out of the Range cabin. Wayland couldn't
remember how from the first they had slipped into the habit of calling
each other by Christian names. It was the old half-breed woman, who
had first told him that the Canadian, Donald MacDonald, the rich sheep
man, had a daughter travelling in Europe. One day when he had been
signing grazing permits in the MacDonald ranch house, he had caught a
glimpse of a piano, that had been packed up the mountains on mules,
standing in an inner sitting room; and the walls were decorated with
long-necked swan-necked Gibson girls and Watts' photogravures and
Turner color prints and naked Sorolla boys bathing in Spanish seas.
That was the beginning. She had come in suddenly, introduced herself
and shaken hands.
And now Wayland felt a dazed wonder how in the world they two in the
course of half an hour--the first half hour they had ever been alone in
their lives--had come to deciding "straddle or fight"; but that was the
unusual thing about her. She got under surfaces; but, until to-night
on the Holy Cross Mountain, he had been able to laugh at his own new
sensations, to laugh even at an occasional sense of his tongue turning
to dough in the roof of his mouth.
"Look, what is that behind your shoulder, Dick?"
"Oh, that," said the Forest Ranger, "that is a well known, game old
elderly spinster lady commonly called the Moon; and that other on the
branch chittering swear words is nothing in the world but a Douglas
squirrel hunting--I think he is really hunting--a flea to mix in his
spruce tips as salad."
"Do you know what he is saying?"
"Of course! Cheer up! Cheer up! Chirrup! He's our Master
Forester--caches the best seed cones for us to steal."
But when he turned back, she had freed her hands, and slipped to the
other side of the slab seat; and Wayland--inconsistent fellow--went all
abash when they had both got hold of themselves and were once more back
to life with feet on solid earth.
"And is it straddle or--fight?"
She had put on her panama sunshade and was looking straight and
steadily in his eyes. The Ranger met the look, the eager look slowly
and deliberately giving place to determined masterdom.
"If that is a challenge, I'll take it!" Then he added; and his face
went hot as her own: "As to the freebooters of the Western Wilderness
ripping the bowels out of public property out here, I'll accept that
challenge, too! We'll put up a bluff of a fight, anyway!"
"I didn't mean that, Dick." She was looking over the edge of the
Ridge. "I couldn't give a precious gift conditionally if I wanted to,
Dick. It would surely give itself before I could stop it. Isn't that
always the way? I wanted you to feel I would be with you in the fight
if I could. They are late. Father and the missionary, Mr. Williams,
and his boy were to have been here an hour ago. I heard them talking
of your struggle against the big steals, and came up here before them
to wait. They are coming to see about changing the sheep from the Holy
Cross Range to the Rim Rocks."
"I can hear 'em coming," Wayland leaned over the precipice. "They are
coming up the switch back now. They have a turn or two to take--we
have a few minutes yet--Eleanor, best gifts come unasked: perhaps,
also, they go unsent. Listen, I couldn't Hope to keep the gift unless
I jumped in this fight for right; but it's a man's job! I mustn't
desert because of the gift! I mustn't take the prize before I finish
the job! I want you to see that--always that I mind my p's and q's and
don't swerve from that resolution. If I deserted and went down from
the Ridge to the Valley, from hard to easy, I wouldn't be worthy of--do
you understand what I am trying to say to you?"
"Not in the least. You wouldn't be worthy of what?"
"Of you," said Wayland.
"Gifts?" It was the falsetto of a boy's voice from the trail below the
Ridge. "Who's talkin' of gifts and things?"
They heard the others ascending. Her woman instinct caught at the
first straw to hand. "Photogravures, Fordie, three more to-day. They
are Watts--"
"He has to round the next turn! Never mind! He didn't hear,"
interjected Wayland irritably.
"All the same," she said, "I'm going to send one of those pictures up
to you for the cabin. There is Hope sitting on top of the World, eyes
bandaged, harp strings broken--"
"Don't send that one! Jim-jams enough of my own up here! I want my
Hope clear-eyed even if she has to go it blind for a bit as to you--"
"Then there's Faith sheathing her sword--"
"Not putting away the Big-Stick," interrupted Wayland.
"Then you'll have to take the Happy Warrior--"
"I forget that one: I've been up here four years, you know?"
"It's the Soldier asleep on the Battle-Field--"
"You mean the picture of the girl kissing the man in his sleep--Yes,
that will do all right for me. You can send that one--"
And the Missionary's boy came over the edge of the Ridge trail in a
hand spring.