The Garden of Eden Part 42

"What will free you?"

"Your own honor, David."

His head fell.

"It is true. Yes, it is true. But let us ride on. I no longer am pleased with this place. It is tarnished; there are unhappy thoughts here!"

"What a child he is!" thought the girl, as she climbed into the saddle again. "A selfish, terrible, wonderful child!"

It seemed, after that, that the purpose of David was to show the beauties of the Garden to her until she could not brook the thought of leaving. He told her what grew in each meadow and what could be reaped from it.

He told her what fish were caught in the river and the lake. He talked of the trees. He swung down from Glani, holding with hand and heel, and picked strange flowers and showed them to her.

"What a place for a house!" she said, when, near the north wall, they pa.s.sed a hill that overlooked the entire length of the valley.

"I shall build you a house there," said David eagerly. "I shall build it of strong rock. Would that make you happy? Very tall, with great rooms."

An impish desire to mock him came to her.

"Do you know what I'm used to? It's a boarding house where I live in a little back bedroom, and they call us to meals with a bell."

The humor of this situation entirely failed to appeal to him.

"I also," he said, "have a bell. And it shall be used to call you to dinner, if you wish."

He was so grave that she did not dare to laugh. But for some reason that moment of bantering brought the big fellow much closer to her than he had been before. And when she saw him so docile to her wishes, for all his strength and his mastery, the only thing that kept her from opening her heart to him, and despising the game which she and Connor were playing with him, was the warning of the gambler.

"I've heard a young buck talk to a young squaw--before he married her.

The same line of junk!"

Connor must be right. He came from the great city.

But before that ride was over she was repeating that warning very much as Odysseus used the flower of Hermes against the arts of Circe. For the Garden of Eden, as they came back to the house after the circuit, seemed to her very much like a little kingdom, and the monarch thereof was inviting her in dumb-show to be the queen of the realm.

_CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE_

At the house they were met by one of the servants who had been waiting for David to receive from the master definite orders concerning some woodchopping. For the trees of the garden were like children to David of Eden, and he allowed only the ones he himself designated to be cut for timber or fuel. He left the girl with manifest reluctance.

"For when I leave you of what do you think, and what do you do? I am like the blind."

She felt this speech was peculiar in character. Who but David of Eden could have been jealous of the very thoughts of another? And smiling at this, she went into the patio where Ben Connor was still lounging. Few things had ever been more gratifying to the gambler than the sight of the girl's complacent smile, for he knew that she was judging David.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Nothing worth repeating. But I think you're wrong, Ben. He isn't a barbarian. He's just a child."

"That's another word for the same thing. Ever see anything more brutal than a child? The wildest savage that ever stepped is a saint compared with a ten-year-old boy."

"Perhaps. He acts like ten years. When I mention leaving the valley he flies into a tantrum; he has taken me so much for granted that he has even picked out the site for my house."

"As if you'd ever stay in a place like this!"

He covered his touch of anxiety with loud laughter.

"I don't know," she was saying thoughtfully a moment later. "I like it--a lot."

"Anything seems pretty good after Lukin. But when your auto is buzzing down Broadway--"

She interrupted him with a quick little laugh of excitement.

"But do you really think I can make him leave the valley?"

"Of course I'm sure."

"He says there's a law against it."

"I tell you, Ruth, you're his law now; not whatever piffle is in that Room of Silence."

She looked earnestly at the closed door. Her silence had always bothered the gambler, and this one particularly annoyed him.

"Let's hear your thoughts?" he asked uneasily.

"It's just an idea of mine that inside that room we can find out everything we want to know about David Eden."

"What do we want to know?" growled Connor. "I know everything that's necessary. He's a nut with a gang of the best horses that ever stepped.

I'm talking horse, not David Eden. If I have to make the fool rich, it isn't because I want to."

She returned no direct answer, but after a moment: "I wish I knew."

"What?"

She became profoundly serious.

"The point is this: he _may_ be something more than a boy or a savage.

And if he _is_ something more, he's the finest man I've ever laid eyes on. That's why I want to get inside that room. That's why I want to learn the secret--if there is a secret--the things he believes in, how he happens to be what he is and how--"

Connor had endured her rising warmth of expression as long as he could.

Now he exploded.

"You do me one favor," he cried excitedly, more moved than she had ever seen him before. "Let me do your thinking for you when it comes to other men. You take my word about this David Eden. Bah! When I have you fixed up in little old Manhattan you'll forget about him and his mystery inside a week. Will you lay off on the thinking?"

She nodded absently. In reality she was struck by the first similarity she had ever noticed between David of Eden and Connor the gambler: within ten minutes they had both expressed remarkable concern as to what might be her innermost thoughts. She began to feel that Connor himself might have elements of the boy in his make up--the cruel boy which he protested was in David Eden.

She had many reasons for liking Connor. For one thing he had offered her an escape from her old imprisoned life. Again he had flattered her in the most insinuating manner by his complete trust. She knew that there was not one woman in ten thousand to whom he would have confided his great plan, and not one in a million whose ability to execute his scheme he would have trusted.