by Grey, Zane
It was broken by a different note, louder, harsher—the rattle and bang of a stone displaced and falling from a momentum other than its own. It did not settle. Heavy and large, it cracked down to thud into the sand and bump out through the brush. Scarcely had it quieted when another was set in motion, and it brought a low, sliding crash of many small rocks. Adam sat up, turning his ear toward the slope. An- other large stone banged down to the sands. Adam heard the whiz of it, evidently hurtling through the air between his camp and the Vireys’. If that stone had struck their shack!
Adam got up, and pulling on his boots, walked out a little way from the camp. What an opaque orange gloom! Nevertheless, it had radiance. He could see almost as well as when the full moon soared in silver effulgence. More cracking and rolling of little rocks, and then the dislodgment of a heavy one, convinced Adam that a burro was climbing the slope or a panther had come down to prowl around camp. At any rate the displacement of stones jarred unnaturally on Adam’s sensitive ear.
Hurrying across to the Virey shack, he approached the side farther from the slope and called through the brush wall, “Mrs. Virey!”
“Yes. What do you want, Wansfell?” she replied, instantly. She had been wide awake.
“Have you heard the sliding rocks?”
“Indeed I have! All through that strange roar of wind— and later.”
“You and Virey better get up and take your blankets out a ways, where you will not be in danger. I think there’s a burro or a panther up on the slope. You know how loose the stones are—how at the slightest touch they come sliding and rolling. I’ll go up and scare the beast away.”
“Wansfell, you’re wrong,” came the reply, with that old mockery which always hurt Adam. “You should not insult a burro—not to speak of a panther.”
“What?” queried Adam, blankly.
“It is another kind of an animal.”
But for that subtle mockery of voice Adam would have been persuaded the woman was out of her head, or at least answering him in her sleep.
“Mrs. Virey, please—”
“Wansfell, it’s a sneaking coyote,” she called, piercingly, and then she actually uttered a low laugh.
Adam was absolutely dumbfounded. “Coyote!” he ejaculated.
“Yes. It’s my husband. It’s Virey. He found out the rolling rocks frightened me at night. So he climbs up there and rolls them … Sees how close he can come to hitting the shack! … Oh, he’s done that often!”
An instant Adam leaned there with his head bent to the brush wall, as if turned to stone. Then like a man stung he leaped up and bounded round the shack toward the slope.
In the orange radiance on that strange, moon-blanched slope he dimly saw a moving object. It stood upright. Indeed, no burro or panther! Adam drew a deep and mighty breath for the yell that must jar the very stones from their sockets.
“HYAR!” he yelled in stentorian roar. Like thunder the great sound pealed up the slope. “COME DOWN OR I’LL WRING YOUR NECK!”
Only the clapping, rolling, immeasurable echoes answered him. The last hollow clap and roll died away leaving the silence deader than before.
Adam spent the remainder of that night pacing to and fro in the orange-hued shadows, fighting the fierce, grim violence that at last had burst its barrier. Adam could have wrung the life out of this Virey with less compunction than he would have in stamping on the head of a venomous reptile. Yet it was as if a spirit kept in the shadow of his form, as he strode the bare shingle gazing up at the solemn black mountains and at the wan stars.
Adam went down to the gateway between the huge walls. A light was kindling over the faraway Funeral range, and soon a glorious star swept up, as if by magic, above the dark rim of the world. The morning star shining down into Death Valley! No dream—no illusion—no desert mirage! Like the Star of Bethlehem beckoning the Wise Men to the East, it seemed to blaze a radiant path for Adam down across the valley of dim, mystic shadows. What could be the meaning of such a wonderful light? Was that blue-white lilac-haloed star only another earth upon which the sun was shining? Adam lifted his drawn face to its light and wrestled with the baser side of his nature. He seemed to be dominated by the spirit that kept close to his side. Magdalene Virey kept vigil with him on that lonely beat. It was her agony which swayed and wore down his elemental passion. Would not he fail her if he killed this man? Virey’s brutality seemed not the great question at issue for him.
“I’ll not kill him—yet!”
Thus Adam eased the terrible contention within him.
When he returned to camp the sun had risen red and hot, with a thin, leaden haze dulling its brightness. No wind stirred. Not a sound broke the stillness. Magdalene Virey sat on the stone bench under the brush shelter, waiting for him. She rose as he drew near. Never had he seen her like this, smiling a welcome that was as true as her presence, yet facing him with darkened eyes and tremulous lips and fear. Adam read her. Not fear of him, but of what he might do!
“Is Virey back yet?” he asked.
“Yes. He just returned. He’s inside—going to sleep.”
“I want to see him—to get something off my mind,” said Adam.
“Wait—Adam!” she cried, and reached for him as he wheeled to go toward the shack.
One glance at her brought Adam to a standstill, and then to a slow settling down upon the stone seat, where he bowed his head. Life had held few more poignant moments than this, in his pity for others. Yet he thrilled with admiration for this woman. She came close to him, leaned against him, and the quiver of her body showed she needed the support. She put a shaking hand on his shoulder.
“My friend—brother,” she whispered, “if you kill him—it will undo—all the good you’ve done—for me.”
“You told me once that the grandest act of a man was to fight for the happiness—the life of a woman,” he replied.
“True! And haven’t you fought for my happiness, and my life, too? I would have died long ago. As for happiness—it has come out of my fight, my work, my effort to meet you on your heights—more happiness than I deserve—than I ever hoped to attain … But if you kill Virey—all will have been in vain.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because it is I who ruined him,” she replied, in low, deep voice, significant of the force behind it. “As men go in the world he was a gentleman, a man of affairs, happy and carefree. When he met me his life changed. He worshipped me. It was not his fault that I could not love him. I hated him because they forced me to marry him. For years he idolized me … Then—then came the shock—his despair, his agony. It made him mad. There is a very thin line between great love and great hate.”
“What—what ruined him?” demanded Adam.
“Adam, it will be harder to confess than any other ordeal of my whole life. Because—because you are the one man I should have met years ago … Do you understand? And I— who yearn for your respect—for your—Oh, spare me! … I who need your faith—your strange incomprehensible faith in me—I, who hug to my hungry bosom the beautiful hopes you have in me—I must confess my shame to save my husband’s worthless life.”
“No. I’ll not have you—you humiliating yourself to save him anything. I give my word. I’ll never kill Virey unless he harms you.”
“Ah! But he has harmed me. He has struck me … Wans-fell! don’t leap like that. Listen. Virey will harm me, sooner or later. He is obsessed with his one idea—to see me suffer. That is why he has let you and me wander around together so much. He hoped in his narrow soul to see you come to love me, and me to love you—so through that I should fall again—to suffer more anguish—to offer more meat for his hellish revenge … But, lo! I am uplifted—forever beyond his reach—never to be rent by his fiendish glee … unless you kill him—which would stain my hands with his blood— bring back the doom of soul from which you rescued me!”
“Magdalene, I swear I’ll never kill Virey unless he kills you,” declared Adam, as if forced beyond endurance.
/>
“Ah, I ask no more!” she whispered, in passionate gratitude. “My God! how I feared you—yet somehow gloried in your look! … And now listen, friend, brother—man who should have been my lover—I hurry to my abasement. I kill the she-thing in me and go on to my atonement. I fight the instincts of a woman. I sacrifice a possible paradise, for I am young and life is sweet.”
She circled his head with her arm and drew it against her heaving breast. The throbs of that tortured heart beat, beat, beat all through Adam’s blood, to the core of his body.
“My daughter Ruth was not Virey’s child,” she went on, her voice low, yet clear as a bell. “I was only nineteen—a fool—mad—driven. I thought I was in love, but it was only one of those insane spells that so often ruin women. For years I kept the secret. Then I could not keep it any longer. At the height of Virey’s goodness to me, and his adoration, and his wonderful love for Ruth, I told him the truth. I had to tell it … That killed his soul. He lived only to make me suffer. The sword he held over my head was the threat to tell my secret to Ruth. I could not bear that. A thousand deaths would have been preferable to that … So in the frenzy of our trouble we started west for the desert. My father and Ruth followed us—caught up with us at Sacramento. Virey hated Ruth as passionately as he had loved her. I dared not risk him near her in one of his terrible moods. So I sent Ruth away with my father, somewhere to southern California. She did not know it was parting forever. But, O God in heaven— how I knew it! … Then, in my desperation, I dared Virey to his worst. I had ruined him and I would pay to the last drop of blood in my bitter heart. We came to Death Valley, as I told you, because the terror and desolation seemed to Virey to be as close to a hell on earth as he could find to hide me. Here he began indeed to make me suffer—dirt and vermin and thirst and hunger and pain! Oh! the horror of it all comes back to me! … But even Death Valley cheated him. You came, Wansfell, and now—at last—I believe in God!”
Adam wrapped a long arm around her trembling body and held her close. At last she had confessed her secret. It called to the unplumbed depths of him. And the cry in his heart was for the endless agony of woman. And it was a bitter cry of doubt. If Magdalene Virey had at last found faith in God, it was more than Adam had found, though she called him the instrument of her salvation. A fierce and terrible rage flamed in him for the ruin of her. Like a lion he longed to rise up to slay. Blood and death were the elements that equalized wrong. Yet through his helpless fury whispered a still voice into his consciousness—she had been miserable and now she was at peace; she had been lost and now she was saved. He could not get around that. His desert passion halted there. He must go on alone into the waste places and ponder over the wonder of this woman and what had transformed her. He must remember her soul-moving words and, away somewhere in the solitude and silence, learn if the love she intimated was a terrible truth. It could not be true now, yet the shaking of her slender form communicated itself to his, and there was inward tumult, strange, new, a convulsive birth of a sensation dead these many years—dead since that dusky-eyed Margarita Arallanes had tilted her black head to say, “Ah so long ago and far away!”
Memory surged up in Adam, moving him to speak aloud his own deeply hidden secret, by the revelation of which he might share the shame and remorse and agony of Magdalene Virey.
“I will tell you my story,” he said, and the words were as cruel blades at the closed portals of his heart. Huskily he began, halting often, breathing hard, while the clammy sweat beaded upon his brow. What was this life—these years that deceived with forgetfulness? His trouble was there as keen as on the day it culminated. He told Magdalene of his boyhood, of his love for his brother Guerd, and of their life in the old home where all, even friendships of the girls, was for Guerd and nothing for him. As he progressed Magdalene Virey’s own agony was forgotten. The quiver of her body changed to strung intensity, the heaving of her bosom was no longer the long-drawn breath to relieve oppression. Remorselessly as she had bared her great secret, Adam confessed his little, tawdry, miserable romance—his wild response to the lure of a vain Mexican girl, and his fall, and the words that had disillusioned him.
“Ah, so long ago and far away!” echoed Magdalene Virey, all the richness of her wonderful voice gathering in a might of woman’s fury. “Oh, such a thing for a girl to say! … And Adam—she, this Margarita, was the only woman you ever loved—ever knew that way?”
“Yes.”
“And she was the cause of your ruin?”
“Indeed she was, poor child!”
“The damned hussy!” cried Magdalene, passionately. “And you—only eighteen years old? How I hate her! And what of the man who won her fickle heart?”
Adam bowed as a tree in a storm. “He—he was my brother.”
“Oh no!” she burst out. “The boy you loved—the brother! Oh, it can’t be true!”
“It was true … And, Magdalene—I killed him.”
Then with a gasp she enveloped him, in a fierce, protective frenzy of tenderness, arms around him, pressing his face to her breast, hanging over him as a mother over her child.
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! How terrible! … Your brother! … And I thought my secret, my sin, my burden so terrible! Oh, my heart bleeds for you … Wansfell, poor unhappy wanderer!”
Chapter
XVIII
July! At last the endlessly long, increasingly hot June days brought the leaden-hazed month of July, when no sane man ever attempted to cross Death Valley while the sun was high.
In all hours, even in the darkness, the bold, rugged slopes of the Panamints reflected sinister shades of red. And the valley was one of grey swirling shadows and waving veils of heat like transparent smoke. Beyond that vast, strange, dim valley rose the drab and ochre slopes of the Funeral Mountains, sweeping up to the bronze battlements and on to the lilac and purple peaks blurred in the leaden-hued haze that obscured the sky. The sun was sky-broad, an illimitable flare, with a lurid white heart into which no man could look.
Adam was compelled to curtail his activities. He did not suffer greatly from the heat, but he felt its weakening power. Ever his blood seemed at fever heat. Early in the mornings and late in the evenings he prepared simple meals, which, as the days dragged on, were less and ever less partaken of by his companions and himself. During the midday hours, through the terrible heat, he lay in the shade, sweltering and oppressed, in a stupor of sleep. The nights were the only re- lief from the immense and merciless glare, the bearing down of invisible bars of red-hot iron. Most of these long hours of darkness Adam lay awake or walked in the gloom or sat in the awful stillness, waiting for he knew not what. But that he waited for something he knew with augmenting dread.
When the full blast of this summer heat came, Virey changed physically and mentally. He grew thin. He walked with bowed shoulders. His tongue protruded slightly and he always panted. Every day he ate less and slept less than on the day before. He obeyed no demands from Adam and took no precautions. His sufferings would have been less and his strength would have been greater had he refrained from exposing himself to the sun. But he revelled in proofs of the nature of Death Valley.
And if Virey had ever worn a mask in front of Adam he now dropped it. Indeed he ignored Adam, no longer with scorn or indifference, but as if unaware of his presence. Whenever Adam wanted to be heard by Virey, which desire diminished daily, he had to block his path, confront him forcefully. Virey was given over wholly to his obsession. His hate possessed him body and soul. And if it had ever been a primitive hate to destroy, it had been restrained, and therefore rendered infinitely cruel, by the slow, measured process of thought, of premeditation.
Often when Adam absented himself from camp, Virey had a trick of climbing the weathered slope to roll down rocks. He seemed mad to do this. Yet when Adam returned he would come clambering down, wet and spent, a haggard sweating wretch not yet quite beyond fear. In vain had Adam argued, pleaded, talked with him; in vain had been the strident scorn of
a man and the curses of rage. Virey, however, had a dread of Adam’s huge hands. Something about them fascinated him. When one of these, clenched in an enormous fist, was shoved under his nose with a last threat, then Virey would retire sullenly to the shack. In every way that was possible he kept before Magdalene Virey the spectacle of his ruin and the consciousness that it was her doing. These midsummer days soon made him a gaunt, unshaven, hollow-eyed wretch. Miserable and unkempt he presented himself at meals, and sat there, a haggard ghost, to mouth a little food and to stare at his wife with accusing eyes. He reminded her of cool, shaded rooms, of exquisite linen and china, of dainty morsels, of carved-glass pitchers full of refreshing drink and clinking ice. Always he kept before her the heat, the squalor, the dirt, the horror of Death Valley. When he could present himself before her with his thin, torn garments clinging wet to his emaciated body, his nerves gone from useless exertions, his hands bloody and shaking as if with palsy, his tongue hanging out—when he could surprise her thus and see her shrink, then he experienced rapture. He seemed to cry out: Woman! behold the wreck of Virey!
But if that was rapture for him, to gloat over the doom of her seemed his glory. Day by day Death Valley wrought by invisible lines and shades a havoc in Magdalene Virey’s beauty. To look at her was to have striking proof that Death Valley had never been intended for a woman, no matter how magnificent her spirit. The only spirit that could prevail here was the one which had lost its earthly habiliments. Like a cat playing with a mouse, Virey watched his wife. Like Me-phistopheles gloating over the soul of a lost woman, Virey attended to the slow manifestations of his wife’s failing strength. He meant to squeeze every drop of blood out of her heart and still keep, if possible, life lingering in her. His most terrible bitterness seemed to consist of his failure to hide her utterly and forever from the gaze of any man save himself. Here he had hidden her in the most desolate place in the world, yet another man had come, and, like all the others, had been ready to lay down his life for her. Virey writhed under this circumstance over which he had no control. It was really the only truth about the whole situation that he was able to grasp. The terrible tragedy of his hate was that it was not hate, but love. Like a cannibal, he would have eaten his wife raw, not from hunger, but from his passion to consume her, incorporate her heart and blood and flesh into his, make her body his forever. Thought of her soul, her mind, her spirit, never occurred to Virey. So he never realized how she escaped him, never understood her mocking scorn.