XIX
LOOKING OVER PRECIPICES
To Mary Ewold the pass was a dividing line between two appeals. TheLittle Rivers side, with the green patch of oasis in the distance, had amessage of peaceful enjoyment of what fortune had provided for her. Underits spell she saw herself content to live within garden walls forever inthe land that had given her life, grateful for the trickles ofintelligence that came by mail from the outside world.
The other side aroused a mighty restlessness. Therefore, she rarely madethat short journey which spread another panorama of space before her. Butthis was one of the afternoons when she welcomed a tumult of any kind asa relief from her depression; and she went on through the V as soon asshe reached the summit.
Seated on a flat-topped rock, oblivious of the passage of time, of thedream cities of the Eternal Painter, she was staring far away where thenarrowing gray line between the mountain rims met the sky. She was seeingbeyond the horizon. She was seeing cities of memory and reality. A greatyearning was in her heart. All the monotonous level lap of the heightswhich seemed without end was a symbol that separated her from her desire.
She imagined herself in a Pullman, flashing by farms and villages; in ashop selecting gowns; viewing from a high window the human stream ofFifth Avenue; taking passage on a steamer; hearing again foreign tongueslong ago familiar to her ears; sensing the rustle of great audiencesbefore a curtain rose; glimpsing the Mediterranean from a car window;feeling herself a unit in the throbbing promenade of the life of manystreets while her hunger took its fill of a busy world.
"It is hard to do it all in imagination!" she said to herself. "Evenimagination needs an occasional nest-egg of reality by way ofencouragement."
An hour on the far side of the pass played the emotional part for her ofa storm of tears for many another woman. She rejoiced in being utterlyalone; rejoiced in the grandeur of the very wastes around her as mountingguard over the freedom of her thoughts. There was no living speck on thetrail, which she knew lay across the expanse of parched earth to the edgeof the blue dome; there was not even a bird in the air. Undisturbed, shemight think anything, pray for anything; she might feed the flame ofrevolt till the fuel of many weeks' accumulation had burned itself outand left her calm in the wisdom and understanding that reconciled her toher portion and freshened to return through Galeria to the quiet routineof her daily existence.
Her mind paused in its travels from capital to capital and she wasconscious solely of the stark majesty of her surroundings. She listened.There was no sound. The spacious stillness was soothing to her nerves; aspecific when all the Eternal Painter's art failed. She closed her eyes,trying to realize that great silence as one would try to realize theInfinite. Then faintly she heard a man's voice singing. It seemed atfirst a trick of the imagination. But nearer and nearer it came, in thefellowship of life joyfully invading the solitude; and with areadjustment of her faculties to the expected event, she watched thepoint where the trail dipped on a sharp turn of grade.
Above it rose a cowpuncher hat, then a silk shirt with a string tie, andafter that a sage baggage burro with clipped ears, a solemn-faced pony,and an Indian. Jack was watching his steps in the uneven path, and notuntil the full length of him had appeared and he was flush on the levelwith her did he look up.
She was leaning back, her weight partly poised on the flat of her handon the rock, revealing the full curve of throat and the soft sweep ofthe lines of her slim figure, erect, her head thrown back, her face inshadow with the sun behind playing in her hair, in half-defiantreadiness. She saw him as the spirit of travel--its ease, mystery,unattachedness--which had spanned the distances between her and thehorizon, in the freedom of his wandering choice. His low-pitchedexclamation of surprise was vibrant with appreciation of the picture shemade, and he stood quite still in a second's wistful silence, waiting onher first word after the lapse of the many days since he had brought alook of horror into her eyes.
"Hello, Jack!" she said in the old tone of comradeship. It struck a sparkelectrifying him with all his old, happy manner.
He swept off his hat with a grand bow, blinking in the blaze of the sunwhich turned his tan to a bronze and touched the smile, which was born asan inspiration from her greeting, with radiance.
"Hello to you, Mary, guarding the pass to Little Rivers!" he saidexultantly. "You are just the person I wanted to see. I have been ina hurry to tell you about a certain thing ever since it came to methis morning."
She guessed that he was about to make up a new story. He must have hadtime for many inventions in the ten days of his absence. But she welcomedany tangent of nonsense that set the right key for the coincidence oftheir meeting. She had refused to ride to the pass with him and here theywere alone together on the pass. Three or four steps, so light that theyseemed to be irresistibly winning permission from her, and he had satdown on another flat-topped rock close by. Firio and the baggage trainmoved on up the trail methodically and stopped well in the background.
"You know how when you meet a person you are sometimes haunted by aconviction that you have met him before!" he began. "How exasperated youare not to be able to recall the time and place!"
"Had you forgotten where you met the dinosaur?" she asked. "He must havethought you very impolite after all the trouble he had taken to make youremember him the last time you went through the pass."
"Oh, the dinosaur and I have patched up a truce, because it seems, afterall, that I had mistaken his identity and he was a pleosaur. But"--he didnot take the pains to parry her interruption with more foolery, andproceeded as if she had not spoken--"it has never been out of my mindthat your father gave me a glance at our first meeting which asked thequestion that has kept recurring to me: Where had he and I seen eachother before?"
"Well?" she said curiously, recalling her father's repeated allusions to"this Wingfield," his strange depression after Jack had left the nightbefore the duel, his reticence and animadversions.
"I said nothing about it, nor did he. I wonder if it has not been a kindof contest between us as to which should be the first to say 'Tag!'"
She smiled at this and leaned farther back, but with the curtain of hereyelashes widening in tremulous intensity.
"I knew it would come!" he went on, with dramatic fervor. "Such things docome unexpectedly in a flash when there is a sudden electric connectionwith some dusty pigeonhole in the mind. It was in Florence that he and Imet! In Florence, on the road to Fiesole!"
"Florence! The road to Fiesole!" Mary repeated; and the names seemed torouse in her a rapturous recollection. She leaned forward now, her lipsapart, her eyes glowing. In place of wastes she was seeing brown roofsand the sweep of the Tuscan Valley.
"And _we_ met--_you_ and _I_!"
"We?" Her glance came sharply back from the distances in the astonishmentof dilating pupils that drew together in inquiry as she saw that he wasin earnest.
"Yes. I was at the extremely mature age of six and you must have beenabout a year younger. Do you remember it at all?"
"No!" She was silent, concentrated, groping. "No, no!" she repeated."Five is very immature compared to six!"
"Your father had a beard then, a great blond beard that excited myemulation. When I grew up I was going to have one like it and just suchbushy eyebrows. You came up the Fiesole road at his side, holding fastto his thumb. I was playing at our villa gate. You went up the path withhim to see my mother--I can see just how you looked holding so fast tothat thumb! After a while you came straying out alone. Now don't youremember? Don't you? Something quite sensational happened."
"No!"
"Well, I showed off what a great boy I was. I walked on the parapet ofthe villa wall. I bowed to my audience aged five with the grandeur of atight-rope performer who has just done his best thriller as a climax tohis turn."
"Yes--yes!" she breathed, with quick-running emphasis. Out of the mistsof fifteen years had come a signal. She bent nearer to him in the wonderof a thing found in the darkness of memory, which al
ways has thefascination of a communication from another world. "You wanted me to comeup on the wall," she said, taking up the thread of the story. "You saidit was so easy, and you helped me up, and when I looked down at the roadI was overcome and fell down all in a heap on the parapet."
"And heavens!" he gasped, living the scene over again, "wasn't Ifrightened for fear you would tumble off!"
"But I remember that you helped me down very nicely--and--and that is allI do remember. What then?"
She had come to a blind alley and perplexity was in her face, though shetried to put the question nonchalantly. What then? How deep ran thecurrent of this past association?
"Why, there wasn't much else. Your father came down the path and his bigthumb took you in tow. I did not see you again. A week later mother and Ihad gone to Switzerland--we were always on the move."
The candor of his glance told her that this was all. As boy and girl theyhad met under an Italian sky. As man and woman they had met under anArizona sky.
Now the charm of the Florence of their affections held them with a magictouch. They were not in a savage setting, looking out over savagedistances, but on the Piazzale Michelangelo, looking out over the city ofRenaissance genius which slumbers on the refulgent bosom of its past;they were oblivious of the Eternal Painter's canvasses and enjoyingRaphael's, Botticelli's, and Andrea del Sarto's. Possibly the EternalPainter, in the leniency of philosophic appreciation of their oblivion tohis art, hazarded a guess about the destiny of this pair. He could notreally have known their destiny. No, it is impossible to grant him thepower of divination; for if he had it he might not be so young of heart.
Their talk flitted here and there in exclamations, each bringing anentail of recollection of some familiar, enjoyed thing; and when at lastit returned to their immediate surroundings the shadow of the range wascreeping out onto the plain, cut by the brilliance of the sun through theV. Mary rose with a quick, self-accusing cry about the lateness of thehour. To him it was a call on his resources to delay their departure.
"Do you see where that shelf breaks abruptly?" he asked. "It must be theside of a canyon. Have you ever looked down?"
"I started to once."
"I should not like to go over the pass again without seeing if thisis really a canyon of any account. I feel myself quite an authorityon canyons."
"It will be dark before we reach Little Rivers!" she protested.
"Ten minutes--only a step!" and he was appealing in his boyish fashion tohave his way.
"Nonsense! Besides, I do not care for canyons."
"You still fear, then, to look down from walls? You--"
And this decided her. On another occasion she had gone to the precipiceedge and faltered. She would master her dizziness for once and all; heshould not know from her any confession of a weakness which was purely ofthe imagination.
The point to which he had alluded was an immense overhanging slab ofgranite stratum deep set in the mountain side. As they approached, athrill of lightness and uncertainty was setting her limbs a-quiver. Herelbow was touching his, her will driving her feet forward desperately.Suddenly she was gazing down, down, down, into black depths whichseemed calling irresistibly and melting her power of muscular volition,while he with another step was on the very edge, leaning over andsmiling. She dropped back convulsively. He was all happy absorption inthe face of that abyss. How easy for him to topple over and go hurtlinginto the chasm!
"Don't!" she gasped, and blindly tugged at his arm to draw him back.
As he looked around in surprise and inquiry, she withdrew her hand in areaction against her familiarity, yet did not lower it, holding it outwith fingers spread in expression of her horror. Serenely he regardedher for a moment in her confusion and distress, and then, smiling, whilethe still light of confidence was in his eyes, he locked his arm in hers.Before she could protest or resist he had drawn her to his side.
"It is just as safe as looking off the roof of a porch on to a flowergarden," he said.
And why she knew not, but the fact had come as something definite andsettled: she was no longer dizzy or uncertain. Calmly, in the triumph ofmind over fear, in the glory of a new sensation of power, she looked downinto that gulf of shadows--looked down for a thousand feet, where thenarrowing, sheer walls merged into darkness.
From this pit to the blue above there was only infinite silence, with nomovement but his pulse-beat which she could feel in his wristdistinctly. He had her fast, a pawn of one of his impulses. A shiver ofrevolt ran through her. He had taken this liberty because she had shownweakness. And she was not weak. She had come to the precipice to provethat she was not.
"Thank you. My little tremor of horror has passed," she told him. "I canstand without help, now."
He released his hold and she stood quite free of him, a glance flashingher independence. Smilingly she looked down and smilingly andtriumphantly back at him.
"You need not keep your arm up in that fashion ready to assist me. Itis tiring," she said, with a touch of her old fire of banter over thebarrier. "I am all right, now. I don't know what gave me that giddyturn--probably sitting still so long and looking out at the blaze ofthe desert."
He swept her with a look of admiration; and their eyes meeting, shelooked back into the abyss.
"I wish I had such courage," he said with sudden, tense earnestness;"courage to master my revulsion against shadows."
"Perhaps it will come like an inspiration," she answereduncomprehendingly.
Then both were silent until she spoke of a stunted little pine three orfour hundred feet down, in the crotch of an outcropping. Its sinkingroots had split a rock, over which the other roots sprawled in gnarlypersistence. Some passing bird had dropped the seed which had found a bedin a pocket of dust from the erosions of time. So it had grown and set uphousekeeping in its isolation, even as the community of Little Rivers hadin a desert basin beside a water-course.
"The little pine has courage--the courage of the dwarf," she said. "It isworth more than a whole forest of its majestic cousins in Maine. Howgreen it is--greener than they!"
"But they rise straight to heaven in their majesty!" he returned, to makecontroversy.
"Yes, out of the ease of their rich beds!"
"In a crowd and waiting for the axe!"
"And this one, in its isolation, creating something where there wasnothing! Every one of its needles is counted in its cost of birth out ofthe stubborn soil! And waiting all its life down there for the reward ofa look and a word of praise!"
"But," he went on, in the delight of hearing her voice in rebuttal, "thebig pines give us the masts of ships and they build houses and furnishthe kindling for the hardwood logs of the hearth!"
"The little pine makes no pretensions. It has done more. It has given ussomething without which houses are empty: It has given us a thought!"
"True!" he exclaimed soberly, yielding. And now all the lively signals ofthe impulse of action played on his face. "For your glance and your wordof praise it shall pay you tribute!" he cried. "I am going down to bringyou one of its clusters of spines."
"But, Jack, it is a dangerous climb--it is late! No! no!"
"No climb at all. It is easy if I work my way around by that ledgeyonder. I see stepping-places all the way."
How like him! While she thought only of the pine, he had been thinkinghow to make a descent; how to conquer some physical difficulty. Alreadyhe had started despite her protest.
"I don't want to rob the little pine!" she called, testily.
"I'll bring a needle, then!"
"Even every needle is precious!"
"I'll bring a dead one, then!"
There was no combatting him, she knew, when he was headstrong; and whenhe was particularly headstrong he would laugh in his soft way. He waslaughing now as he took off his spurs and tossed them aside.
"No climbing in these cart-wheels, and I shall have to roll up my chaps!"
She went back to the precipice edge to prove to him, to prove to he
rself,that she could stand there alone, without the moral support of anyone ather side, and found that she could. She had mastered her weakness. It wasas if a new force had been born in her. She felt its stiffening in everyfibre as she saw him pass around the ledge and start down toward thelittle pine; felt it as something which could build barriers and mountthem with an invulnerable guard.
How would he get past that steep shoulder? The worst obstacle confrontedhim at the very beginning of the descent. He was hugging a rock face,feeling his way, with nothing but a few inches of a projecting seambetween him and the darkness far below. His foot slipped, his body turnedhalf around, and she had a second of the horror that she had felt whenwaiting for the sound of Leddy's shot in Bill Lang's store. She saw hisoutspread hands clutching the seam above; watched for them to let go. Butthey held; the foot groped and got its footing again, and he worked hisway out on a shelf.
He was safe and she dropped on her knees weakly, still looking down athim. It was the old story of their relations. Was this man ever to besubjecting her to spasms of fear on his account? And there he was beamingup at her reassuringly, while she felt the blood which had gone from herface return in a hot flood. It brought with it anger in place of fear.
"I don't want it! I don't want it!" she cried down.
"And I want to get it for you! I want to get it for you--for you!" Hisvoice was a tumult of emotion in the abandon of passionate declaration.So long had she held him back that now when the flood came it had thepower of conserved strength bursting a dam in wild havoc. "There isnothing I would not like to do for you, Mary!" he cried. "I'd like topull that pine up for you, even if it bled and suffered! I'd like to goon doing things for you forever!"
There was not even a movement of her lips in answer. It seemed to hernow that there on the precipice edge, while he held her arm in his,the iridescent house of glass had fallen about them in a confused,dazzling shower of wreckage. He had found an opening. He had brokenthrough the barrier.
Half unconscious of his progress, of the chasm itself, she waited in adaze and came out of it to see him sweeping his hat upward from besidethe pine before he reached as far as he could among the branches and,with what seemed to her the refinement of effrontery and disregard of herwishes, broke off a tawny young branch. He waved it to her--this garlandof conquest won out of the jaws of danger, which he was ready to throw ather feet from the lists.
"No, no, no!" she said, half aloud.
She saw him start back with his sure steps, his shoulders swinging withthe lithe, adaptable movement of his body; and every step was drawing himnearer to a meeting which would be like no other between them. Soon hewould be crunching the glass of the house under that confident tread; inthe ecstasy of a new part he would be before the opening he had broken inthe barrier with the jauntiness of one who expected admission. Hispulse-beat under the touch of her fingers at the precipice edge, hisartery-beat in the _arroyo_, was hammering in her temples, hammering outa decision which, when it came, brought her to her feet.
Now the shadows were deep; all the glory of the sunset in the EternalPainter's chaotic last moments of his day's work overspread the westernsky, and from the furnace in which he dipped his brush came a blade ofrich, blazing gold through the pass and lay across the trail. Itenveloped her as, half running, mindless of her footing, slipping as shewent, she hurried toward the other side of Galeria.
When Jack Wingfield came up over the ledge, a pine tassel in his hand,his languor of other days transformed into high-strung, triumphantintensity, the sparkle of a splendid hope in his eyes, only Firio wasthere to welcome him.
"Senorita Ewold said she no could wait," Firio explained. "It was verylate, she said."
Jack stopped as if struck and his features became a lifeless mask, aslifeless as the walls of the canyon. He looked down at the trophy of hisclimb and ran his fingers over the needles slowly, again and again, inabstraction.
"I understand!" he said, half to himself; and then aloud: "Firio, we willnot go into town to-night. We will camp on the other side by the river."
"_Si_! I shot enough quail this afternoon for dinner."
But Jack did not have much appetite, and after dinner he did not amuseFirio with inventions of his fancy. He lay long awake, his head on hisclasped hands, looking at the stars.