To Mary Ewold the pass was a dividing line between two appeals. The Little Rivers side, with the green patch of oasis in the distance, had a message of peaceful enjoyment of what fortune had provided for her. Under its spell she saw herself content to live within garden walls forever in the land that had given her life, grateful for the trickles of intelligence that came by mail from the outside world.
The other side aroused a mighty restlessness. Therefore, she rarely made that short journey which spread another panorama of space before her. But this was one of the afternoons when she welcomed a tumult of any kind as a relief from her depression; and she went on through the V as soon as she reached the summit.
Seated on a flat-topped rock, oblivious of the passage of time, of the dream cities of the Eternal Painter, she was staring far away where the narrowing gray line between the mountain rims met the sky. She was seeing beyond the horizon. She was seeing cities of memory and reality. A great yearning was in her heart. All the monotonous level lap of the heights which seemed without end was a symbol that separated her from her desire.
She imagined herself in a Pullman, flashing by farms and villages; in a shop selecting gowns; viewing from a high window the human stream of Fifth Avenue; taking passage on a steamer; hearing again foreign tongues long ago familiar to her ears; sensing the rustle of great audiences before a curtain rose; glimpsing the Mediterranean from a car window; feeling herself a unit in the throbbing promenade of the life of many streets while her hunger took its fill of a busy world.
"It is hard to do it all in imagination!" she said to herself. "Even imagination needs an occasional nest-egg of reality by way of encouragement."
An hour on the far side of the pass played the emotional part for her of a storm of tears for many another woman. She rejoiced in being utterly alone; rejoiced in the grandeur of the very wastes around her as mounting guard over the freedom of her thoughts. There was no living speck on the trail, which she knew lay across the expanse of parched earth to the edge of the blue dome; there was not even a bird in the air. Undisturbed, she might think anything, pray for anything; she might feed the flame of revolt till the fuel of many weeks' accumulation had burned itself out and left her calm in the wisdom and understanding that reconciled her to her portion and freshened to return through Galeria to the quiet routine of her daily existence.
Her mind paused in its travels from capital to capital and she was conscious solely of the stark majesty of her surroundings. She listened. There was no sound. The spacious stillness was soothing to her nerves; a specific when all the Eternal Painter's art failed. She closed her eyes, trying to realize that great silence as one would try to realize the Infinite. Then faintly she heard a man's voice singing. It seemed at first a trick of the imagination. But nearer and nearer it came, in the fellowship of life joyfully invading the solitude; and with a readjustment of her faculties to the expected event, she watched the point where the trail dipped on a sharp turn of grade.
Above it rose a cowpuncher hat, then a silk shirt with a string tie, and after 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 not until the full length of him had appeared and he was flush on the level with her did he look up.
She was leaning back, her weight partly poised on the flat of her hand on the rock, revealing the full curve of throat and the soft sweep of the lines of her slim figure, erect, her head thrown back, her face in shadow with the sun behind playing in her hair, in half-defiant readiness. She saw him as the spirit of travel—its ease, mystery, unattachedness—which had spanned the distances between her and the horizon, in the freedom of his wandering choice. His low-pitched exclamation of surprise was vibrant with appreciation of the picture she made, and he stood quite still in a second's wistful silence, waiting on her first word after the lapse of the many days since he had brought a look of horror into her eyes.
"Hello, Jack!" she said in the old tone of comradeship. It struck a spark electrifying him with all his old, happy manner.
He swept off his hat with a grand bow, blinking in the blaze of the sun which turned his tan to a bronze and touched the smile, which was born as an inspiration from her greeting, with radiance.
"Hello to you, Mary, guarding the pass to Little Rivers!" he said exultantly. "You are just the person I wanted to see. I have been in a hurry to tell you about a certain thing ever since it came to me this morning."
She guessed that he was about to make up a new story. He must have had time for many inventions in the ten days of his absence. But she welcomed any tangent of nonsense that set the right key for the coincidence of their meeting. She had refused to ride to the pass with him and here they were alone together on the pass. Three or four steps, so light that they seemed to be irresistibly winning permission from her, and he had sat down on another flat-topped rock close by. Firio and the baggage train moved on up the trail methodically and stopped well in the background.
"You know how when you meet a person you are sometimes haunted by a conviction that you have met him before!" he began. "How exasperated you are not to be able to recall the time and place!"
"Had you forgotten where you met the dinosaur?" she asked. "He must have thought you very impolite after all the trouble he had taken to make you remember him the last time you went through the pass."
"Oh, the dinosaur and I have patched up a truce, because it seems, after all, that I had mistaken his identity and he was a pleosaur. But"—he did not take the pains to parry her interruption with more foolery, and proceeded as if she had not spoken—"it has never been out of my mind that your father gave me a glance at our first meeting which asked the question that has kept recurring to me: Where had he and I seen each other before?"
"Well?" she said curiously, recalling her father's repeated allusions to "this Wingfield," his strange depression after Jack had left the night before the duel, his reticence and animadversions.
"I said nothing about it, nor did he. I wonder if it has not been a kind of 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 her eyelashes widening in tremulous intensity.
"I knew it would come!" he went on, with dramatic fervor. "Such things do come unexpectedly in a flash when there is a sudden electric connection with some dusty pigeonhole in the mind. It was in Florence that he and I met! In Florence, on the road to Fiesole!"
"Florence! The road to Fiesole!" Mary repeated; and the names seemed to rouse in her a rapturous recollection. She leaned forward now, her lips apart, her eyes glowing. In place of wastes she was seeing brown roofs and the sweep of the Tuscan Valley.
"And we met—you and I!"
"We?" Her glance came sharply back from the distances in the astonishment of dilating pupils that drew together in inquiry as she saw that he was in earnest.
"Yes. I was at the extremely mature age of six and you must have been about 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 my emulation. When I grew up I was going to have one like it and just such bushy eyebrows. You came up the Fiesole road at his side, holding fast to his thumb. I was playing at our villa gate. You went up the path with him to see my mother—I can see just how you looked holding so fast to that thumb! After a while you came straying out alone. Now don't you remember? Don't you? Something quite sensational happened."
"No!"
"Well, I showed off what a great boy I was. I walked on the parapet of the villa wall. I bowed to my audience aged five with the grandeur of a tight-rope performer who has just done his best thriller as a climax to his turn."
"Yes—yes!" she breathed, with quick-running emphasis. Out of the mists of fifteen years had come a signal. She bent nearer to him in the wonder of a thing found in the darkness of memory, which always has the fascination of a communication from another world. "You wanted me to come up on the wall," she said, taking up the thread of the story. "You said it was so easy, and you helped me up, and when I looked down at the road I was overcome and fell down all in a heap on the parapet."
"And heavens!" he gasped, living the scene over again, "wasn't I frightened for fear you would tumble off!"
"But I remember that you helped me down very nicely—and—and that is all I do remember. What then?"
She had come to a blind alley and perplexity was in her face, though she tried to put the question nonchalantly. What then? How deep ran the current of this past association?
"Why, there wasn't much else. Your father came down the path and his big thumb took you in tow. I did not see you again. A week later mother and I had gone to Switzerland—we were always on the move."
The candor of his glance told her that this was all. As boy and girl they had met under an Italian sky. As man and woman they had met under an Arizona sky.
Now the charm of the Florence of their affections held them with a magic touch. They were not in a savage setting, looking out over savage distances, but on the Piazzale Michelangelo, looking out over the city of Renaissance genius which slumbers on the refulgent bosom of its past; they were oblivious of the Eternal Painter's canvasses and enjoying Raphael's, Botticelli's, and Andrea del Sarto's. Possibly the Eternal Painter, in the leniency of philosophic appreciation of their oblivion to his art, hazarded a guess about the destiny of this pair. He could not really have known their destiny. No, it is impossible to grant him the power 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 an entail of recollection of some familiar, enjoyed thing; and when at last it returned to their immediate surroundings the shadow of the range was creeping out onto the plain, cut by the brilliance of the sun through the V. Mary rose with a quick, self-accusing cry about the lateness of the hour. 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 the side 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 this is really a canyon of any account. I feel myself quite an authority on 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 to have 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 precipice edge and faltered. She would master her dizziness for once and all; he should not know from her any confession of a weakness which was purely of the imagination.
The point to which he had alluded was an immense overhanging slab of granite stratum deep set in the mountain side. As they approached, a thrill of lightness and uncertainty was setting her limbs a-quiver. Her elbow was touching his, her will driving her feet forward desperately. Suddenly she was gazing down, down, down, into black depths which seemed calling irresistibly and melting her power of muscular volition, while he with another step was on the very edge, leaning over and smiling. She dropped back convulsively. He was all happy absorption in the face of that abyss. How easy for him to topple over and go hurtling into 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 a reaction against her familiarity, yet did not lower it, holding it out with fingers spread in expression of her horror. Serenely he regarded her for a moment in her confusion and distress, and then, smiling, while the 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 flower garden," he said.
And why she knew not, but the fact had come as something definite and settled: she was no longer dizzy or uncertain. Calmly, in the triumph of mind over fear, in the glory of a new sensation of power, she looked down into that gulf of shadows—looked down for a thousand feet, where the narrowing, sheer walls merged into darkness.
From this pit to the blue above there was only infinite silence, with no movement but his pulse-beat which she could feel in his wrist distinctly. He had her fast, a pawn of one of his impulses. A shiver of revolt ran through her. He had taken this liberty because she had shown weakness. And she was not weak. She had come to the precipice to prove that she was not.
"Thank you. My little tremor of horror has passed," she told him. "I can stand without help, now."
He released his hold and she stood quite free of him, a glance flashing her independence. Smilingly she looked down and smilingly and triumphantly back at him.
"You need not keep your arm up in that fashion ready to assist me. It is tiring," she said, with a touch of her old fire of banter over the barrier. "I am all right, now. I don't know what gave me that giddy turn—probably sitting still so long and looking out at the blaze of the desert."
He swept her with a look of admiration; and their eyes meeting, she looked 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 answered uncomprehendingly.
Then both were silent until she spoke of a stunted little pine three or four hundred feet down, in the crotch of an outcropping. Its sinking roots had split a rock, over which the other roots sprawled in gnarly persistence. Some passing bird had dropped the seed which had found a bed in a pocket of dust from the erosions of time. So it had grown and set up housekeeping in its isolation, even as the community of Little Rivers had in a desert basin beside a water-course.
"The little pine has courage—the courage of the dwarf," she said. "It is worth more than a whole forest of its majestic cousins in Maine. How green it is—greener than they!"
"But they rise straight to heaven in their majesty!" he returned, to make controversy.
"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 was nothing! Every one of its needles is counted in its cost of birth out of the stubborn soil! And waiting all its life down there for the reward of a look and a word of praise!"
"But," he went on, in the delight of hearing her voice in rebuttal, "the big pines give us the masts of ships and they build houses and furnish the kindling for the hardwood logs of the hearth!"
"The little pine makes no pretensions. It has done more. It has given us something without which houses are empty: It has given us a thought!"
"True!" he exclaimed soberly, yielding. And now all the lively signals of the impulse of action played on his face. "For your glance and your word of praise it shall pay you tribute!" he cried. "I am going down to bring you 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 ledge yonder. I see stepping-places all the way."
How like him! While she thought only of the pine, he had been thinking how to make a descent; how to conquer some physical difficulty. Already he 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 when he was particularly headstrong he would laugh in his soft way. He was laughing 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 herself, that she could stand there alone, without the moral support of anyone at her side, and found that she could. She had mastered her weakness. It was as if a new force had been born in her. She felt its stiffening in every fibre as she saw him pass around the ledge and start down toward the little pine; felt it as something which could build barriers and mount them with an invulnerable guard.
How would he get past that steep shoulder? The worst obstacle confronted him 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 seam between him and the darkness far below. His foot slipped, his body turned half around, and she had a second of the horror that she had felt when waiting for the sound of Leddy's shot in Bill Lang's store. She saw his outspread hands clutching the seam above; watched for them to let go. But they held; the foot groped and got its footing again, and he worked his way out on a shelf.
He was safe and she dropped on her knees weakly, still looking down at him. It was the old story of their relations. Was this man ever to be subjecting her to spasms of fear on his account? And there he was beaming up at her reassuringly, while she felt the blood which had gone from her face 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!" His voice 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 the power of conserved strength bursting a dam in wild havoc. "There is nothing I would not like to do for you, Mary!" he cried. "I'd like to pull that pine up for you, even if it bled and suffered! I'd like to go on doing things for you forever!"
There was not even a movement of her lips in answer. It seemed to her now 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 broken through the barrier.
Half unconscious of his progress, of the chasm itself, she waited in a daze and came out of it to see him sweeping his hat upward from beside the 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 her wishes, broke off a tawny young branch. He waved it to her—this garland of conquest won out of the jaws of danger, which he was ready to throw at her feet from the lists.
"No, no, no!" she said, half aloud.
She saw him start back with his sure steps, his shoulders swinging with the lithe, adaptable movement of his body; and every step was drawing him nearer to a meeting which would be like no other between them. Soon he would be crunching the glass of the house under that confident tread; in the ecstasy of a new part he would be before the opening he had broken in the barrier with the jauntiness of one who expected admission. His pulse-beat under the touch of her fingers at the precipice edge, his artery-beat in the arroyo, was hammering in her temples, hammering out a decision which, when it came, brought her to her feet.
Now the shadows were deep; all the glory of the sunset in the Eternal Painter's chaotic last moments of his day's work overspread the western sky, and from the furnace in which he dipped his brush came a blade of rich, blazing gold through the pass and lay across the trail. It enveloped her as, half running, mindless of her footing, slipping as she went, 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, triumphant intensity, the sparkle of a splendid hope in his eyes, only Firio was there to welcome him.
"SeÑorita Ewold said she no could wait," Firio explained. "It was very late, she said."
Jack stopped as if struck and his features became a lifeless mask, as lifeless as the walls of the canyon. He looked down at the trophy of his climb and ran his fingers over the needles slowly, again and again, in abstraction.
"I understand!" he said, half to himself; and then aloud: "Firio, we will not go into town to-night. We will camp on the other side by the river."
"SÍ! I shot enough quail this afternoon for dinner."
But Jack did not have much appetite, and after dinner he did not amuse Firio with inventions of his fancy. He lay long awake, his head on his clasped hands, looking at the stars.
