Over the Pass Part 6

Jack listened raptly, his face glowing. Once, when he looked in his host's direction suddenly, after speaking to Mary, he found that he was the object of the same inquiring scrutiny that he had been on the porch.

In lulls he caught the old man's face in repose. It had sadness, then, the sadness of wreckage; sadness against which he seemed to fence in his wordy feints and thrusts.

"Christian civilization began in the Tuscan valley," the philosopher proceeded, harking back to the book which had arrived by the evening's mail. "Florence was a devil--Florence was divine. They raised geniuses and devils and martyrs: the most cloud-topping geniuses, the worst devils, the most saintly martyrs. But better than being a drone in a Florence pension is all this"--with a wave of his hand to the garden and the stars--"which I owe to Mary and the little speck on her lungs which brought us here after--after we had found that we had not as much money as we thought we had and an old fellow who had been an idling student, mostly living abroad all his life, felt the cramp of the material facts of board-and-clothes money. It made Mary well. It made me know the fulness of wisdom of the bee and the ant, and it brought me back to the spirit of America--the spirit of youth and accomplishment. Instead of dreaming of past cities, I set out to make a city like a true American.

Here we came to camp in our first travelled delight of desert s.p.a.ces for her sake; and here we brought what was left of the fortune and started a settlement."

The spectator-philosopher att.i.tude of audience to the world's stage pa.s.sed. He became the builder and the rancher, enthusiastically dwelling on the growth of orchards and gardens in expert fondness. As Jack listened, the fragrance of flowers was in his nostrils and in intervals between Jasper Ewold's sentences he seemed to hear the rustle of borning leaf-fronds breaking the silence. But the narrative was not an idyll.

Toil and patience had been the handmaidens of the fecundity of the soil.

Prosperity had brought an entail of problems. Jasper Ewold mentioned them briefly, as if he would not ask a guest to share the shadows which they brought to his brow.

"The honey of our prosperity brings us something besides the bees. It brings those who would share the honey without work," said he. "It brings the Bill Lang hive and Pete Leddy."

At the mention of the name, Jack's and Mary's glances met.

"You have promised not to tell," hers was saying.

"I will not," his was answering.

But clearly he had grasped the fact that Little Rivers was getting out of its patron's hands, and every honest man in that community wanted to be rid of Pete Leddy.

"I should think your old friend, Cosmo de' Medici, would have found a way," Jack suggested.

"Cosmo is for talk," said Mary. "At heart father is a Quaker."

"Some are for lynching," said Jasper Ewold, thoughtfully. "Begin to promote order with disorder and where will you end?" he inquired, belligerently. "This is not the Middle Ages. This is the Little Rivers of peace."

Then, after a quotation from Cardinal Newman, which seemed pretty far-fetched to deal with desert ruffians, he was away again, setting out fruit trees and fighting the scale.

"And our Date Tree Wonderful!" he continued. "This year we get our first fruit, unless the book is wrong. You cannot realize what this first-born of promise means to Little Rivers. Under the magic of water it completes the cycle of desert fecundity, from Scotch oats and Irish potatoes to the Arab's bread. Bananas I do not include. Never where the banana grows has there been art or literature, a good priesthood, unimpa.s.sioned law-makers, honest bankers, or a n.o.ble knighthood. It is just a little too warm. Here we can build a civilization which neither roasts us in summer nor freezes us in winter."

There was a fluid magnetism in the rush of Jasper Ewold's junketing verbiage which carried the listener on the bosom of a pleasant stream.

Jack was suddenly reminded that it must be very late and he had far overstayed the retiring hour of the desert, where the Eternal Painter commands early rising.

"Going--going so soon!" protested Jasper Ewold.

"So late!" Jack smiled back.

To prove that it was, he called attention to the fact, when they pa.s.sed through the living-room to the veranda, that not a light remained in any ranch-house.

"I have not started my talk yet," said Jasper. "But next time you come I will really make a beginning--and you shall see the Date Tree Wonderful."

"I go by the morning train," Jack returned.

"So! so!" mused Jasper. "So! so!" he objected, but not gloomily. "I get a good listener only to lose him!"

But Jack was hardly conscious of the philosopher's words. In that interval he had still another glimpse of Mary's eyes without the veil and saw deeper than he had before; saw vast solitudes, inviting yet offering no invitation, where bright streams seemed to flash and sing under the sunlight and then disappear in a desert. That was her farewell to the easy traveller who had stopped to do her a favor on the trail. And he seemed to ask nothing more in that spellbound second; nor did he after the veil had fallen, and he acquitted himself of some spoken form of thanks for an evening of happiness.

"A pleasant journey!" Mary said.

"Luck, Sir Chaps, luck!" called Jasper Ewold.

Jack's easy stride, as he pa.s.sed out into the night, confirmed the last glimpse of his smiling, whimsical "I don't care" att.i.tude, which never minded the danger sign on the precipice's edge.

"He does not really want to go back to New York," Mary remarked, and was surprised to find that she had spoken her thought aloud.

"I hardly agree with that opinion," said her father absently, his thoughts far afield from the fetter of his words. "But of one thing I am sure, John Wingfield! A smile and a square chin!"

VI

OBLIVION IS NOT EASY

"A smile and a square chin!" Mary repeated, as they went back into the living-room.

"Yes, hasn't he both, this Wingfield?" asked her father.

"This Wingfield"--on the finish of the sentence there was a halting, appreciable accent. He moved toward the table with the listlessness of some enormous automaton of a man to whom every step of existence was a step in a treadmill. There was a heavy sadness about his features which rarely came, and always startled her when it did come with a fear that they had so set in gloom that they would never change. He raised his hand to the wick screw of the lamp, waiting for her to pa.s.s through the room before turning off the flame which bathed him in its rays, giving him the effect of a Rodinesque incarnation of memory.

Any melancholy that beset him was her own enemy, to be fought and cajoled. Mary slipped to his side, dropping her head on his shoulder and patting his cheek. But this magic which had so frequently rallied him brought only a transient, hazy smile and in its company what seemed a random thought.

"And you and he came down the pa.s.s together? Yes, yes!" he said. His tone had the vagueness of one drawing in from the sea a net that seemed to have no end.

Had Jack Wingfield been more than a symbol? Had he brought something more than an expression of culture, manner, and ease of a past which nothing could dim? Had he suggested some personal relation to that past which her father preferred to keep unexplained? These questions crowded into her mind speculatively. They were seeking a form of conveyance when she realized that she had been adrift with imaginings. He was getting older. She must expect his preoccupation and his absent-mindedness to become more exacting.

"Yes, yes!" His voice had risen to its customary sonority; his eyes were twinkling; all the hard lines had become benignant wrinkles of Olympian charm. "Yes, yes! You and this funny tourist! What a desert it is! I wonder--now, I wonder if he will go aboard the Pullman in that stage costume. But come, come, Mary! It's bedtime for all pastoral workers and subjects of the Eternal Painter. Off you go, or we shall be playing blind-man's-buff in the dark!" He was chuckling as he turned down the wick. "His enormous spurs, and Jag Ear and Wrath of G.o.d!" he said.

Her fancy ran dancing rejoicingly with his mood.

"Don't forget the name of his pony!" she called merrily from the stairs.

"It's P.D."

"P.D.!" said her father, with the disappointment of one tempted by a good morsel which he finds tasteless. "There he seems to have descended to alphabetic commonplace. No imagery in that!"

"He is a slow, reliable pony," put in Mary, "without the Q."

"Pretty d.a.m.n, without the Quick! Oh, I know slang!"

Jasper Ewold burst into laughter. It was still echoing through the house when she entered her room. As it died away it seemed to sound hollow and veiled, when the texture of sunny, transparent solidity in his laugh was its most p.r.o.nounced characteristic.

Probably this, too, was imagination, Mary thought. It had been an overwrought day, whose events had made inconsiderable things supreme over logic. She always slept well; she would sleep easily to-night, because it was so late. But she found herself staring blankly into the darkness and her thoughts ranging in a shuttle play of incoherency from the moment that Leddy had approached her on the pa.s.s till a stranger, whom she never expected to see again, walked away into the night. What folly! What folly to keep awake over an incident of desert life! But was it folly? What sublime egoism of isolated provincialism to imagine that it had been anything but a great event! Naturally, quiet, desert nerves must still be quivering after the strain. Inevitably, they would not calm instantly, particularly as she had taken coffee for supper. She was wroth about the coffee, though she had taken less than usual that evening.

She heard the clock strike one; she heard it strike two, and three. And he, on his part--this Sir Chaps who had come so abruptly into her life and evidently set old pa.s.sions afire in her father's mind--of course he was sleeping! That was the exasperating phlegm of him. He would sleep on horseback, riding toward the edge of a precipice!

"A smile and a square chin--and dreamy vagueness," she kept repeating.

The details of the scene in the store recurred with a vividness which counting a flock of sheep as they went over a stile or any other trick for outwitting insomnia could not drive from her mind. Then Pete Leddy's final look of defiance and Jack Wingfield's att.i.tude in answer rose out of the pantomime in merciless clearness.