“I know. Maybe he couldn’t resist the offer of an even bigger territory. He’ll be in charge of an additional quarter-million acres over there. And it has more lakes, probably fishing violations everywhere.”
“Then he must be in heaven. He’ll have more responsibility than ever.”
“He does seem to like to take on superhuman tasks,” Joel agreed. “But he’d like out of the deal we settled on—he needs the money for his new house. He didn’t get any arguments from me. That place—when I agreed to let it go—it felt like I had let go not only my home, but my past and my future—my whole heritage.”
“Your destiny,” Sevana said quietly.
“Yes, exactly. It was intolerable—the feeling that I had opened up my hand and it had flown away, like a bird returning to the wilds I would never see again.”
Sevana was overjoyed at this news, but she spent no more time talking. She would wait until the top to broach the one subject that truly mattered. She speculated on his situation as they climbed. Once back in the spell of the girl he had never been able to resist, had he maintained his determination to break their engagement—or returned with the wedding date intact? The more she thought about it, the more she was sure Chantal had managed to talk him into it. She would almost prefer not to ask, than hear it was so.
But when they were standing at the pass, her fears were temporarily superseded by the sight of the meadows ornamented with shiny-faced buttercups, pastel phlox, and squat mats of evergreen heather garnished by tight crimson buds amid patches of melting snow. Icy drifts glittered on the ledges of the bare cliffs, darkening the rocks where melting ice trickled down, and alpine firs stabbed the azure sky with their needle-sharp spires.
Sevana stood still and listened to the wind rasping across the ridgetops and the snowmelt streams babbling over the ground, smelled the sweet resins swelling in the trees and heather. Any energy she had expended to get there was worth it. No matter what else she lost or possessed, this place would always be hers.
They walked up toward open sky. A red-tailed hawk soared in a playful arc above them, a pika pronounced his decided satisfaction from a scree slope. The mountain heights rose mysterious—rock-solid and mythical all in one.
“What are you thinking, Sevana?” Joel asked.
She realized she was smiling. “I was thinking I’ve come full circle to find myself back here.”
They wandered like two contented children, letting the untainted air blow from their minds everything that had collected while they were away. Up there life looked so different: so very few things had importance. The tangle and clutter of life was laughable, irrelevant, and wholly dispensable.
Later, the meadows traversed, the plunging chasms and stony uplifts admired, they gathered wood for a campfire. Sevana said they would have candy bars for dinner, the only compact and readily portable food she had gleaned from Fenn’s cupboards. But Joel said the young lady would eat her vegetables, and brought back a handful of spring-beauty bulbs he’d cleaned at the brook. They also dined on miners’ lettuce—a much too glamorous name for the leathery rock-lichens—and neither cared they were still hungry. The sunset and each other’s company as they sat before the smoky, spark-spitting fire were enough. “I’m too early for the daisies and asters and white heather,” she made note.
“Yes, they don’t bloom until July.”
“I’ll just have to come back,” she said contentedly, because she could.
“Did you really get a house in Cragmont, Sevana?” Joel asked.
“Yes.” She sat bareheaded now, the shorter strands of hair escaping her braid to play in the sunset wind. “Just yesterday. Up the hill at the top of town.”
“You gave up your job and your art training and that—painter—to come here alone?”
“Yes,” she said again, serenely. “I was boarding the bus to Calgary, and I couldn’t make myself get on it. I just couldn’t, Joel. So I came here to live, because this is the one place on earth that has ever seemed like—home.”
Joel was doing his best to assimilate this astonishing information. “What does Willy think of all this?”
“He—wasn’t thrilled, of course. But I rather think he saw it coming.”
“Sevana—are you and Willy—?”
“Friends only,” she said, thinking she was doomed forever to repeat that phrase.
Your turn, she told herself, steeling herself for the dreaded interview. Her heart began to pound so uncontrollably that she got up and stepped to the fire so he couldn’t detect her agitation. “How was your trip to Vancouver?” she got out from that safer distance.
Joel had been in a deep turn of thought ever since her last reply, but bestirred himself to answer. “It wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done.” He came to stand at fireside with her, his eyes on the flames as he spoke. “Chantal didn’t exactly welcome my news. But on the other hand, the Mountie has been coming around almost every week asking her to reconcile, and it’s been tearing her up. I really believe if I was out of the picture for good, she could be happy with him.”
“So the wedding is off?”
“Yes. Turns out she did send out the invitations with the idea that once it was official, I wouldn’t get second thoughts and back out. But I did.”
“What reason did you give her?” As impolite as it was to ask, she had to know.
There was a lengthy pause. “I told her—” he turned to face her with a queer, inscrutable look in the salmon afterlight of the darkening sky, “I told her I couldn’t marry her because I had fallen in love with someone in the Yukon.”
Sevana felt her blood run cold. Her life ran out ahead of her, empty without him. So that was how it was going to be, then—living alone in her cottage, the lake and mountains her only companions…
His eyes on hers, so certain to detect the slightest reaction, were her enemy. She didn’t want him to know how badly she was wounded by his words. She longed to tear herself away from his gaze, but she couldn’t break out of the spell it held her in. “Did you, Joel?” Her voice had a hoarse, unnatural sound.
“Yes, it was the truth. I once thought myself in love with her—but that was only because I hadn’t yet found the person who meant everything to me. And when I did meet her, I saw what a far gulf it was between loving someone you find attractive and desirable, and someone who is your perfect match—the other half of your soul.”
She was willing everything in her not to cry. She promised herself she could cry all she wanted later, if she could just be strong right now when she had to be. She freed herself from the power of his compelling stare and looked back to the fire as she recounted dutifully, “So, you are marrying this other girl—your perfect match—instead?”
“I fervently hope so.”
“Is she still in the Yukon?”
“She never was in the Yukon,” Joel said, “except in my heart.”
Sevana didn’t know how long he would have continued his riddles, if she hadn’t found the courage to look into his face just then. But as her eyes locked with his, she saw written there all the things she knew so well—the ordeal of their long separation, all the days of uncertainty, and the wonder just to be together again. And then she was in his arms, her head against the steady beating of his heart—having braced herself for the worst, and caving in when there was no worst—and she was crying, “Oh Joel, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I thought you were happy, your life full of painting, and sharing it with someone who had the same love for it as you,” he answered huskily, holding her for all the times he’d wished for her and she had not been there.
“No, I never was in love with Willy, even though I tried to convince myself I should be.” She drew back to look at him. “Joel, you’re the one who’s in all my dreams. I couldn’t forget you even when I thought I had to. But I thought I would have to love you forever from a distance.”
“I know I gave you every reason to believe that,” he said, his eyes clinging to h
er face. “But if you still love me, you don’t have to do it from a distance anymore. Sevana, you are so entwined in my thoughts, I don’t know where reality stops and the dream begins, and I think somehow I’ve always loved you—back in eternity in some essence of our souls.”
The words took her up to a paradise where what you most long for is handed to you freely; and she found herself in the middle of the very thing she hadn’t thought possible. But at the same time, just as Joel said, it seemed it had been decreed all along, and they were just now tapping into that infinite strand.
“I began to discover it when you came up here to the Pass last summer,” Joel was saying, taking hold of both of her hands. “I left the wilderness early hoping to see you, with some half-formed notion of telling you what I was feeling. But I was still resolving things in my own mind; and when you came up to my cabin to say goodbye, I couldn’t for the life of me decide if I should speak or keep silent. And there was an east wind blowing,” he added with apparent irrelevance.
“East wind!” Her voice hinted of laughter. “I thought you weren’t superstitious.”
He flashed his old grin. “It’s not superstition. There’s plenty of evidence the east wind can cause people to behave in ways they normally wouldn’t. But that was only one small consideration adding to my doubt. Mostly it just did not seem good timing, when you had come to tell me you were off to your dreams. I couldn’t be so selfish as to ask you to stay.”
“I found out I had more dreams in my life than one,” she said quietly.
“Yes, I knew that was a possibility,” he replied. “But finding who you are and how you fit into the scheme of things is something only life can teach. I tried to tell myself it was for the best—that you were young and had so many possibilities to explore, and I should not hold you back. And then Chantal came back into my life, and I thought that was how it was going to be. But seeing you that night at your apartment turned all my theories on end.
“The whole trip to Mammoth Creek I could think of nothing but you. Those fierce dark nights, sitting by the stove listening to the wind howl, I felt a profound sense of someone missing from my life—but it was not Chantal I wanted with me, it was you…to a nearly unendurable degree. I admitted that I was in love with you, absolutely and unalterably. I didn’t think you loved me. I kept remembering how you looked at Vandalier’s in that fancy black dress, with that high-society artist friend of yours, and how perfectly matched you seemed to that life. It was at that moment, Sevana, that I thought I had lost you forever. But even so, I knew I had no right to marry someone for whom my love was not even a good imitation of what I felt for you. I figured it was my most bitter misfortune to know my mind too late.”
“Not too late,” said Sevana, as she reached up to touch his face as she had always longed to do. “You had a lifetime, because you will always own my heart.”
“A lifetime will not be long enough.” And smoothing back the blowing strands of her hair with his poor, winter-burned hands, he kissed her in the way he’d been thinking about for a long time.
All night they sat by the fire as Sevana had planned to do, but she was not afraid of wild animals now. After being apart for so long, there was not enough time for all the things they had to talk about. Joel told her he’d followed up on his appeal while in Vancouver and it was good news: the province had granted him permanent grazing rights to the area, because he had held it so many consecutive years prior to the new regulations. “They call it a grandfather clause,” he said. “Makes me feel kind of old—but I’m not complaining.”
“You look anything but old,” she declared, in open appreciation of his rugged strength. “I’m so glad they’re giving you your due. Will you buy back any of your sheep?”
“You bet I will,” he said. “If there are any left unsold. I’m going to start over. We can come up here later this summer, even if we have only a small flock. Would you like that?”
“Yes!” she cried, and then laughed because she saw he was teasing her by asking—knowing the answer as well as she. “And Joel, if by chance Mr. Ownbey tells you that five of your favorite sheep have already been sold to some strange girl who came walking out to his ranch one winter’s day—I wouldn’t be too disappointed, if I were you.”
“Just how strange was this girl?” he asked suspiciously, seeking specifics.
“Very strange,” she said gaily. “As strange as they come.”
Then they both laughed, and she assured him that what she had inferred was so. She hadn’t known when she had bought those sheep in so much doubt and self-berating, that they would be her wedding present to him. She thought how relieved Gyrfalcon would be when he found out he was coming home.
All at once she sobered in humility at how much she had unexpectedly gained. “Oh, Joel,” she said in awe, “all that I thought was lost has come back to me. We can have another summer like the one I thought was gone forever.”
“Many summers,” he said, gathering her close once more.
And head against his hard shoulder, savoring the smoky, pine-clean scent that always clung to him, Sevana thought of David saying that God had given him his best dreams and more—and knew it was true.
At that, she realized Joel didn’t know about her winter in Lethbridge, and she set to tell him what had transpired to bring her to the point she was now. When she got to the part David had played in helping her, Joel’s arm tightened around her.
“Yes, it was a long, dark winter without you, Joel,” she affirmed. “And yet good came even from that, for it was then I learned to hope that my dreams existed for a reason. And here’s the proof of it, for here I am with you—and Someone Else who walks up here.”
“And now our winters will be neither long, nor dark.” In the firelight, Joel had the look of a man whose every wish is granted.
But he surprised her by continuing seriously, “But you know, Sevana, as good as our life will be, I can’t give you the kind of life Willy can. There won’t be much profit from our small flock any time soon, I still have my father’s doctor bills to pay, and my fiddles—while keeping me well-occupied, perhaps—have never yet succeeded in making me rich.”
Sevana didn’t answer directly. “Joel, why didn’t you tell me you were famous? I talked to a craftsman in Calgary who knew all about you and your reputation.”
“Who—Dimitri? I may be known in musicians’ circles, but that’s a very small circle. And having a name doesn’t mean so much, when you consider the sheer time it takes to build one violin precludes it from ever being a lucrative profession.”
“Money or not, true art speaks for itself,” Sevana asserted. “You’ve succeeded in your craft, which is the highest goal any artist can reach. And anyway, I’m not looking for an easy life. I’ve admired your life from a distance, and now I welcome the chance to live it, too.”
“And if all we have to eat is bear meat and wild greens, will you eat them?” he asked, to test her.
“I will eat them, and even ask for seconds,” she promised with such vowlike solemnity that he had to laugh.
“I believe you,” he said, squeezing her hand. “But I will try to provide for you better than that, if I can.”
“We’ll do fine, Joel,” she declared fearlessly. “We have the land and our talent and the sheep, and we have each other.”
“And One to help us always,” Joel finished. “You’re right, Sevana. We could do no better.”
A pitchy log caught ablaze and flung up a shower of sparks, forcing them to duck the fiery embers drifting down. “I’ll finish the upstairs of my cabin so we have more room.” Joel was already busy with plans.
More sparks shot upward from the alpine firwood in a rustic fireworks display, but the shifting wind saved them that time. “Come to think of it, I have something to ask you, Sevana,” he said suddenly. “Will you consider becoming an official, permanent member of the Community of Two?”
“You mean I’ve been accepted?” she responded promptly. “I’m
in? I thought you’d never ask.”
CHAPTER 56
Joel’s father was the first one they told. He said ever since Sevana had stopped by with the flowers, he’d been thinking he’d like a daughter-in-law just like her. Then they went to look at Sevana’s rented house. Joel approved of it as much as she did—for though small, it was solid and had a well-planned design. He said it would do nicely for his father. The claim was to be sold, and the money could be used to help make the payments. He would talk it over with him.
On the way back from Stormy Pass, Sevana had stopped at the homestead and left Fenn a note explaining that Joel was taking her to Cragmont, so he didn’t need to make a special trip to help her. But after Joel had brought her luggage from the Lodge and gone back to take his father out by the lake for some sun, Fenn appeared at the door. “Came to see the house anyway,” he explained as he stepped inside. “Hey—not a bad set-up. Everything working okay?”
She loved the new, almost shy friendliness about him, his true personality revived after a long dormancy buried underneath hardness and anger. “I think so.” She was arranging a bouquet of buttercups and heather buds she had lovingly hand-carried the whole distance from Stormy Pass. “Go ahead and look around. But my plans have changed. I’ll be here only a short time before Joel’s dad takes it over.”
“Calgary won out after all?” he asked—looking confused, as well he might.
“No, I’m sticking around this neck of the woods. But it just so happens that Joel has offered me a position as a shepherdess.”
“Don’t try to fool me,” Fenn warned gruffly, although a smile lurked in his eyes—the irrepressible happiness on her face telling him more plainly than words what was going on. “I happen to know he doesn’t have any sheep.”
“Not for long,” she caroled. “He’s going to buy some right away. And I already bought back five for him last winter. He was so surprised!” Her face lit even more, if possible, at the thought.
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