Over the Pass Part 30

Apprehensively he watched the end of the ribbon running under P.D.'s hoofs for the sight of a horsewoman breaking free of the foothills. The momentary fear which rode with him was that Mary might be returning earlier than usual. If they met on the road--why, the road was without imagination and, in keeping with her new att.i.tude toward him, she might pa.s.s him by with a nod. But at the top of the pa.s.s imagination would be supreme. There they had first met; there they had found their first thought in common in the ozone which had meant life to them both.

He did not look up at the sky changes. As he climbed the winding path worn by moccasined feet before the Persians marched to Thermopylae, his mind was too occupied making pictures of its own in glowing antic.i.p.ation to have any interest in outside pictures. This path was narrow. Here, at least, she must pause; and she must listen. Every turn which showed another empty stretch ahead sent his spirits soaring. Then he saw a pony with an empty side-saddle on the shelf. A few steps more and he saw Mary.

She was seated with the defile at her back, her hands clasped over her knee. In this position, as in every position which she naturally took, she had a pliant and personal grace. The welter of light of the low sun was ablaze in her face. Her profile had a luminous wistfulness. Her lashes were half closed, at once retaining the vision of the panorama at her feet as a thing of atmospheric enjoyment and shutting it out from the intimacy of her thoughts. And more enveloping than the light was the silence which held her in a spell as still as the rocks themselves, waiting on time's dispensation where time was nothing. Yet the soft movement of her bosom with her even breaths triumphed in a life supreme and palpitant over all that dead world.

Thus he drank her in before the crunch of a stone under his heel warned her of his presence and set her breaths going and coming in quick gusts as she wheeled around, half rising and then dropping back to a position as still as before, with a trace of new dignity in her grace, while her starkness of inquiry gradually changed to stoicism.

"Mary, I came upon you very suddenly," he said.

"Yes"--a bare, echoing monosyllable.

He stepped to one side to let Firio and his little cavalcade pa.s.s. All the while she continued to look at him through the screen of her half-closed lashes in a way that set her repose and charm apart as something precious and cold and baffling. Now he realized that he had made a breach in the barrier of their old relations only to find himself in a garden whose flowers fell to ashes at his touch. He saw the light that enveloped her as an armor far less vulnerable than any wall, and the splendor of her was growing in his eyes.

Jag Ear's bells with their warm and merry notes became a faint tinkle that was lost in the depths of the defile. The two were alone on the spot where the Eternal Painter had introduced them so simply as Jack and Mary, and where he, as the easy traveller, had listened to her plead for his own life. It was his turn to plead. She was not to be won by fighting Leddys or tearing up pine-trees by their roots. That armor was without a joint; a lance would bend like so much tin against its plates, and yet there must be some alchemy that would make it melt as a mist before the sun. It was tenanted by a being all sentiency, which saw him through her visor as a pa.s.ser-by in a gallery. But one in armor does not fly from pa.s.sers-by as she had flown while he was climbing up the canyon wall with his pine-tree branch.

"I have learned now to look over any kind of a precipice without getting dizzy," she announced, quietly.

He was not the Jack who had come over the ledge in the energy of his pa.s.sion yesterday to find her gone. He had turned gentle and was smiling with craved permission for a respite from her evident severity as he dropped to a half-lying posture near her. Overhead, the Eternal Painter was throwing in the smoky purple of a false thunderhead, sweeping it away with the promise of a downpour, rolling in piles of silver clouds and drawing them out into filmy fingers melting into a luminous blue.

"One can never tire of this," he said, tentatively.

"To me it is all!" she answered, in an absorption with the scene that made him as inconsequential as the rocks around her.

"And you never long for cities, with their swift currents and busy eddies?" he asked.

"Cities are life, the life of humanity, and I am human. I--" The unfinished sentence sank into the silence of things inexpressible or which it was purposeless to express.

Her voice suggested the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells floating away into s.p.a.ce. If a precipitate were taken from her forehead, in keeping with Jack's suggestion to Dr. Bennington, it would have been mercury, which is so tangible to the eye and intangible to the touch. Press it and it breaks into little globules, only to be shaken together in a coherent whole. If there is joy or pain in the breaking, either one must be glittering and immeasurable.

"But Little Rivers is best," she added after a time, speaking not to him, but devoutly to the oasis of green.

In the crystal air Little Rivers seemed so near that one could touch the roofs of the houses with the fingertips of an extended arm, and yet so diminutive in the s.p.a.cious bosom of the plateau that it might be set in the palm of the hand.

Jack was as one afraid of his own power of speech. A misplaced word might send her away as oblivious of him as a globule of mercury rolling free from the grasp. Here was a Mary unfathomed of all his hazards of study, undreamed of in all his flights of fancy.

"It is my last view," he began. "I have said all my good-bys in town. I am going."

Covertly, fearfully, he watched the effect of the news. At least now she would look around at him. He would no longer have to talk to a profile and to the golden mist of the horizon about the greatest thing of his life. But there was no sign of surprise; not even an inclination of her head.

"Yes," she told the horizon; and after a little silence added: "The time has come to play another part?"

She asked the question of the horizon, without any trace of the old banter over the wall. She asked it in confirmation of a commonplace.

"I know that you have always thought of me as playing a part. But I am not my own master. I must go. I--"

"Back to your millions!" She finished the sentence for him.

"Then you--you knew! You knew!" But his exclamation of astonishment did not move her to a glance in his direction or even a tremor.

"Yes," she went on. "Father told me about your millions last night. He has known from the first who you were."

"And he told no one else in Little Rivers? He never mentioned it to me or even to you before!"

"Why should he when you did not mention it yourself? His omission was natural delicacy, in keeping with your own att.i.tude. Isn't it part of the custom of Little Rivers that pasts melt into the desert? There is no standard except the conduct of the present!"

And all this speech was in a monotone of quiet explanation.

"He did not even tell you until last night! Until after our meeting on the other side of the pa.s.s! It is strange! strange!" he repeated in the insistence of wonder.

He saw the lashes part a little, then quiver and close as she lifted her gaze from the horizon rim to the vortex of the sun. Then she smiled wearily.

"He likes a joke," she said. "Probably he enjoyed his knowledge of your secret and wanted to see if I would guess the truth before you were through playing your part."

"But the part was not a part!" he said, with the emphasis of fire creeping along a fuse. "It was real. I do not want to leave Little Rivers!"

"Not in your present enthusiasm," she returned with a warning inflection of literalness, when he would have welcomed satire, anger, or any reprisal of words as something live and warm; something on which his mind could lay definite hold.

In her impersonal calm she was subjecting him to an exquisite torture. He was a man flayed past all endurance, flayed by a love that fed on the revelation of a mystery in her being superbly in control. The riot of all the colors of the sky spoke from his eyes as he sprang to his feet. He became as intense as in the supreme moment in the _arroyo_; as reckless as when he walked across the store toward a gun-muzzle. Only hers were this time the set, still features. His were lighted with all the strength of him and all the faith of him.

"A part!" he cried. "Yes, a part--a sovereign and true part which I shall ever play! I was going that day we first met, going before the legate of the millions came to me. Why did I stay? Because I could not go when I saw that you wanted to turn me out of the garden!"

His quivering words were spoken to a profile of bronze, over which flickered a smile as she answered with a prompting and disinterested a.n.a.lysis.

"You said it was to make callouses on your hands. But that must have been persiflage. The truth is that you imagined a challenger. You wanted to win a victory!" she answered.

"It was for you that I calloused my hands!"

"Time will make them soft!"

She was half teasing now, but teasing through the visor, not over the wall.

"And if I sought victory I saw that I was being beaten while I made a profession of you, not of gardening! Yes, of you! I could confess it to all the world and its ridicule!"

"Jack, you are dramatic!"

If she would only once look at him! If he could only speak into her eyes!

If her breaths did not come and go so regularly!

"Why did I take to the trail after Pedro Nogales struck at me with his knife? Because I saw the look on your face when you saw that I had broken his arm. I had not meant to break his arm--yet I know that I might have done worse but for you! I did not mean to kill Leddy--yet there was something in me which might have killed him but for you!"

"I am glad to have prevented murder!" she answered almost harshly.

A shadow of horror, as if in recollection of the scene in the _arroyo_ and beside the hedge, pa.s.sed over her face.

"Yes, I understand! I understand!" he said. "And you must hear why this terrible impulse rose in me."

"I know."