by Grey, Zane
"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 behoves 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 travellers 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 4 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 grey 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."
Chapter XVII
The hour came when Magdalene Virey stirred Adam to his depths.
"Wansfell," she said, with a rare and wonderful tremor in her voice, "I love the silence, the loneliness, the serenity--even the tragedy of this valley of shadows. Ah! It is one place that will never be popular with men--where few women will ever come. Nature has set it apart for wanderers of the wastelands, men like you, unquenchable souls who endure, as you said, to fight, to strive, to seek, to find...And surely for lost souls like me! Most men and all women must find death here, if they stay. But there is death in life. I've faced my soul here, in the black, lonely watches of the desert nights. And I would endure any agony to change that soul, to make it as high and clear and noble as the white cone of the mountain yonder."
Mysterious and inscrutable, the desert influence had worked upon Magdalene Virey. On the other hand, forces destructive to her physical being had attacked her. It was as if an invisible withering wind had blown upon a flower in the night. Adam saw this with distress. But she laughed at the truth of it--laughed without mockery. Something triumphant rang like a bell in her laugh. Always, in the subtlety of character she had brought with her and the mystery she had absorbed from the desert, she stayed beyond Adam's understanding. It seemed that she liked to listen to his ceaseless importunities; but merciless to herself and aloof from Virey, she refused to leave Death Valley.
"Suppose I pack the burros and tuck you under my arm and take you, anyway?" he queried, stubbornly.
"I fancy I'd like you to tuck me under your arm," she replied, with the low laugh that came readily now, "but if you did--it would be as far as you'd get."
"How go?" he demanded, curiously.
"Why, I'd exercise the prerogative of the eternal feminine and command that time should stand still right there."
A sweetness and charm, perhaps of other days, a memory of power, haunted face and voice then.
"Time--stand still?" echoed Adam, ponderingly.
"Magdalene, you are beyond me."
"So it seems. I'm a little beyond myself sometimes. You will never see in me the woman who has been courted, loved, spoiled by men."
"Well, I grasp that, I guess. But I don't care to see you as such a woman. I might not----"
"Ah! you might not respect me," she interrupted. "Alas!...But, Wansfell, if I had met you when I was eighteen I would never have been courted and loved and ruined by men...You don't grasp that, either."
Adam had long ceased to curse his density. The simplicity of him antagonised her complexity. His had been the blessed victory over her bitterness, her mockery, her consciousness of despair. His had been the gladness of seeing her grow brown and strong and well, until these early June days had begun to weaken her. That fact had augmented his earnestness to get her to leave the valley. But she was adamant. And all his importunities and arguments and threats she parried with some subtle femininity of action or look or speech that left him bewildered.
The time came when only early in the mornings or late in the afternoons could they walk to their accustomed seat near the gateway of the valley and climb to the promontories. Nature moved on remorselessly with her seasons, and the sun had begun to assume its fiery authority during most of the daylight hours.
One morning before sunrise they climbed, much against Adam's advice, to a high point where Mrs. Virey loved to face east at that hour. It was a hard climb, too hard for her to attempt in the heat and oppression that had come of late. Nevertheless, she prevailed upon Adam to take her, and she had just about strength enough to get there.
They saw the east luminous and rosy, ethereal and beautiful, momentarily brightening with a rayed effulgence that spread from a golden centre behind the dark bold domes of the Funeral Mountains. They saw the sun rise and change the luminous dawn to lurid day. One moment, and the beauty the glory, the promise were as if they had never been. The' light over Death Valley at that height was too fierce for the gaze of man.
On the way down, at a narrow ledge, where loose stones made precarious footing, Adam cautioned his companion and offered to help her. Waving him on, she followed him with her lithe free step. Then she slipped off the more solid trail to a little declivity of loose rocks that began to slide with her toward a slope, where, if she went over it, she must meet serious injury. She did not scream. Adam plunged after her and, reaching her with a long arm just as she was about to fall, he swung her up as if she had only the weight of a child. Then, holding her in his arms, he essayed to wade out of the little stream of sliding rocks. It was difficult only because he feared he might slip and fall with her. Presently he reached the solid ledge and was about to set her upon her feet.
"Time--stand still here!" she exclaimed, her voice full of the old mockery of herself, with an added regret for what might have been, but could never be, with pathos, with the eternal charm of woman who could never separate her personality, her consciousness of her sex, from their old relation to man.
Adam halted his action as if suddenly chained, and he gazed down upon her, where she rested with her head on the bend of his left elbow. There was a smile on the brown face that had once been so pale. Her large eyes, wide open, exposed to the sky, seemed to reflect its dark blue colour and something of its mystery of light. Adam saw wonder there, and reverence that must have been for him, but seemed incredible, and the shading of unutterable thoughts.
"Put me down," she said.
"Why did you say, Time--stand still here'?" he asked as he placed her upon her feet.
"Do you remember the time when I told you how words and lines and verses of the poets I used to love come to mind so vividly out here? Sometimes I speak them, that is all."
"I understand. All I ever read has come back to me here on the desert, as clear as the print on the page seen so many years ago. I used to hate Sunday School when I was a boy. But now, often, words of the Bible come before my mind...But are you telling me the whole truth? Why did you say, 'Time--stand still here,' when I held you in my arms?
"What a boy you are!" she murmured, and her eyes held a gladness for the sight of him. "Confess, now, wouldn't that moment have been a beautiful one for time to stop--for life to stand still--for the world to be naught--for thought and memory to cease?"
"Yes, it would," he replied, "but no more beautiful than this moment while you stand there so. When you look like that you make me hope."
"For what?" she queried, softly.
"For you."
"Wansfell, you are the only man I've ever known who could have held me in his arms and have been blind and dead to the nature of a woman...Listen. You've done me the honour to say I have splendid thoughts and noble emotions. I hope I have. I know you have inspired many. I know this valley of death has changed my soul. But, Wansfell, I am a woman, and a woman is more than her high and lofty thoughts--her wandering inspirations. A woman is a creature of feeling, somehow doomed...When I said, 'Time--stand still here,' I was false to the woman in me that you idealise. A thousand thoughts, emotions, memories, desires, sorrows, vanities prompted the words of which you have made me ashamed. But to spare myself a little, let me say that it would indeed be beautiful for me to have you take me up into your arms--and then for time to stand still forever."
"Do you mean that--so--you'd feel safe, protected, at rest?" he asked, with emotion.
"Yes, and infinitely more. Wansfell, it is a woman's fate that the only safe and happy and desired place for her this side of the grave is in the arms of the man she loves. A real man--with strength and gentleness--for her and her alone!...It is a terrible thing in women, the need to be loved. As a baby I had that need--as a girl--and as a woman it became a passion. Looking back now, through the revelation that has come to me here in this valley of silence--when thought is clairvoyant and all-pervading--I can see how the need of love, the passion to be loved, is the strongest instinct in any woman. It is an instinct. She can no more change it than she can change the shape of her hand. Poor fated women! Education, freedom, career may blind them to their real nature. But it is a man, the right man, that means life to a woman. Otherwise the best in her dies...That instinct in me--for which I confess shame--has been unsatisfied despite all the men who have loved me. When you have saved me--perhaps from injury--and took me into your arms, the instinct over which I have no control flashed up. While it lasted, until you looked at me, I wanted that moment to last forever. I wanted to be held that way--in your great, strong arms--until the last trumpet sounded. I wanted you to see only me, feel only me, hold only me, live for only me, love me beyond all else on earth and in heaven!"
As she paused, her slender brown hands at her heaving breast, her eyes strained as if peering through obscurity at a distant light. Adam could only stare at her in helpless fascination. In such moods as this she taught him as much of the mystery of life as he had taught her of the nature of the desert.
"Now the instinct is gone," she continued. "Chilled by your aloofness! I am looking at it with intelligence. And, Wansfell, I'm filled with pity for women. I pity myself, despite the fact that my mind is free. I can control my acts, if not my instincts and emotions. I am bound. I am a woman. I am a she-creature. I am little different from the fierce she-cats, the she-lions--any of the she-animals that you've told me fight to survive down on your wild Colorado Desert...That seems to me the sex, the fate, the doom of women. Ah! no wonder they fight for men--spit and hiss and squall and scratch and rend! It's a sad thing, seen from a woman's mind. That great mass of women who cannot reason about their instincts, or understand the springs of their emotions--they are the happier. Too much knowledge is bad for my sex. Perhaps we are wrongly educated. I am the happier for what you have taught me. I can see myself now with pity instead of loathing. I am not to blame for what life has made me. There are no wicked women. They must be loved or they are lost... My friend, the divinity in human life is seen best in some lost woman like me."
"Magdalene Virey," protested Adam, "I can't follow you...But to say you are a lost woman--that I won't listen to."
"I was a lost woman," interrupted Mrs. Virey, her voice rising out of the strong, sweet melody. "I had my pride and
I defied the husband whose heart I broke and whose life I ruined. I scorned the punishment, the exile he meted out to me. That was because I was thoroughbred. But all the same I was lost. Lost to happiness, to hope, to effort, to repentance, to spiritual uplift. Death Valley will be my tomb, but there will be resurrection for me...It is you, Wansfell, you have been my salvation...You have the power. It has come from your strife and agony on the desert. It is beyond riches, beyond honour. It is the divine in you that seeks and finds the divine in unfortunates who cross your wandering trail."
Adam, rendered mute, could only offer his hand; and in silence he led her down the slope.
That afternoon, near the close of the hot hours, Adam lay in the shade of the brush shelter he had erected near the Virey shack. He was absorbed in watching a tribe of red ants, and his posture was so unusual that it gave pause to Virey, who had come down from the slope. The man approached and curiously gazed at Adam, to see what he was doing.
"Looking for grains of gold?" inquired Virey, with sarcasm. "I'll lend you my magnifying glass."
"I'm watching these red ants," replied Adam, without looking up.
Virey bent over and, having seen, he slowly straightened up.
"Go to the ant, thou sluggard!" he ejaculated, and this time without sarcasm.
"Virey, I'm no sluggard," returned Adam. "It's you who are that. I'm a worker."
"Wansfell, I was not meaning you," said Virey. "There are things I hate you for, but laziness is certainly not included in them...I never worked in my life. I had money left me. It was a curse. I thought I could buy everything. I bought a wife--the big-eyed woman to whom you devote your services--and your attentions...And I bought for myself the sweetness of the deadly nightshade flower--a statue of marble, chiselled in the beautiful curves of mocking love--a woman of chain lightning and hate...If I had lived by industry, as live those red ants you're watching, I might not now have one foot in my grave in Death Valley."
Thus there were rare instances when Virey appeared a man with the human virtues of regret, of comprehension, of intolerance, but never a word issued from his lips that was not tinged with bitterness. Had the divinity in him been blasted forever? Or was it a submerged spark that could quicken only to a touch of the woman lost to him? Adam wondered. Sometimes a feeling of pity for Virey stole over him, but it never lasted long. Adam had more respect for these red ants than for some men, despite the alleged divinity. He abhorred the drones of life. The desert taught how useless were the idlers--how nature ruthlessly cut them off.