The Rim of the Desert Part 41

Still Tisdale was silent. Then Foster's arm fell, and he said desperately: "Can't you see, Hollis? Weatherbee was greater than either of us, I grant that. But the one thing in the world you are so sure he most desired--the lack of which wrecked his life--the one thing I have tried for the hardest and missed--has fallen to you. Go and ask her to sail to Alaska with you.

You'll need her up there to carry the honors for you. You prize her, you love her,--you know you do."

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

THE CALF-BOUND NOTEBOOK

The statue was great. So Tisdale told Lucky Banks, that day the prospector met him at the station and they motored around through the park. The sculptor himself had said he must send people to Weatherbee when they wanted to see his best work. It was plain his subject had dominated him.

He had achieved with the freedom of pose the suggestion of decision and power that had been characteristic of David Weatherbee. Quick intelligence spoke in the face, yet the eyes held their expression of seeing a far horizon. To Hollis, coming suddenly, as he did, upon the bronze figure in the Wenatchee suns.h.i.+ne, it seemed to warm with a latent consciousness. He felt poignantly a sense of David's personality, as he had known him at the crowning period of his life.

"It suits me," responded Banks. "My, yes, it's about as good a likeness as we can get of Dave." He put on his hat, which involuntarily he had removed, and started the car on around the curve. "But it's a mighty lot like you. It crops out most in the eyes, seeing things off somewheres, clear out of sight, and the way you carry your size. You was a team."

"I am sorry I missed those services," said Tisdale. "I meant to be here."

Banks nodded. "But it all went off fine. She agreed with me it was the best place. If I was to go back to Alaska, and she was off somewheres on a trip, it would be sure to get taken care of here in the park; and, afterwards, when neither of us can come around to keep things in shape any more. And I told her how the ranchers up and down the valley would get to feeling acquainted and friendly with Dave, seeing his statue when they was in town; and how the fruit-buyers and the pickers, and maybe the tourists, coming and going, would remember about him and tell everybody they knew; and how the school children would ask questions about the statue, thinking he was in the same cla.s.s with Lincoln and Was.h.i.+ngton, and be always telling how he was the first man that looked ahead and saw what water in this valley could do."

"You were right, Johnny. The memory of him will live and grow with this town when the rest of us are forgotten."

They had turned from the park and went speeding up between the rows of new poplars along the Alameda, and the prospector's eyes moved over the reclaimed vale, where acres on acres of young fruit trees in cultivated squares crowded out the insistent sage. "And this town for a fact is bound to grow," he said.

Then at last, when Cerberus loomed near, and they entered the gap, the little man's big heart rose and his bleak face glowed, under Tisdale's expressions of wonder and approbation at the advance the vineyards and orchards had made, so soon after the consummation of the project. Fillers of alfalfa stretched along the spillways from the main ca.n.a.l like a green carpet; strawberry plants were blossoming; grapes reached out pale tendrils and many leaves. But, at the top of the pocket, where the road began to lift gently in a double curve across the front of the bench, Hollis dismissed Banks and his red car and walked the rest of the way. On the rim of the level, near the solitary pine tree, he stopped to look down on the transformed vale, and suddenly, once more he seemed to feel David's presence. It was as though he stood beside him and saw all this awakening, this responding of the desert to his project. Almost it compensated--for those four days.

Almost! Tisdale drew his hand across his eyes and turned to follow the drive between the rows of nodding narcissus. The irony of it! That Weatherbee should have lived to find the Aurora; that, with many times the needed capital in sight, he should have lost. The perfume of the flowers filled the warm atmosphere; the music of running water was everywhere. As he left the side of the flume, the silver note of the fountain came to him from the patio, then, like a mirage between him and the low Spanish building, rose that miniature house he had found in the Alaska wilderness, with the small snow figure before it, holding a bundle in her arms.

The vision pa.s.sed. But that image with the bundle was the one unfinished problem in the project he had come to solve.

He entered the court and saw on his right an open door and, across the wide room, Beatriz Weatherbee. She was seated at a quaint secretary on which were several bundles of papers, and the familiar box that had contained David's letters and watch. At the moment Tisdale discovered her, she was absorbed in a photograph she held in her hands, but at the sound of his step in the patio she turned and rose to meet him. Her face was radiant, yet she looked at him through arrested tears.

"I am sorry if I startled you," he said conventionally. "Banks brought me from the station, but he left me to walk up the bench."

"I should have seen the red car down the gap had I been at the window,"

she replied, "but I was busy putting away papers. Freight has been moving slowly over the Great Northern, and my secretary arrived only to-day. It bore the trip very well, considering its age. It belonged to my great-grandfather, Don Silva Gonzales. He brought it from Spain, but Elizabeth says it might have been made for this room. She is walking somewhere in the direction of the spring."

While she spoke, she touched her cheeks and eyes swiftly with her handkerchief and led the way to some chairs between the secretary and the great window that overlooked the vale. Tisdale did not look at her directly; he wished to give her time to cover the emotion he had surprised.

"I should say the room was built for Don Silva's desk," he amended. "And-- do you know?--this view reminds me of a little picture of Granada, a water-color of my mother's, that hung in my room when I was a boy. But this pocket has changed some since we first saw it; your dragon's teeth are drawn."

"Isn't it marvelous how the expression of the whole mountain has altered?"

she responded. "There, at the end of the pines, that looked like a bristling mane, the green gables of Mrs. Banks' home have changed the contour. And the Chelan peaks are showing now beyond it. That day the farther ones were obscured. But we watched the rain tramp up Hesperides Vale, you remember, and swing off unexpectedly to the near summits. There was a rainbow, and I said that perhaps somewhere in this valley I should find my pot of gold."

"I remember. And I shouldn't be surprised if you do."

"Do you think I do not know I have already?" she asked. "Do you think I have no appreciation, no grat.i.tude? Why, even had I been too dull to see it, Elizabeth would have told me that this house alone, to say nothing of the project, must have cost a good deal of money; and that, no matter how deeply Mr. Banks may have felt his obligation to David, it was not in reason he should have allowed everything to revert to me. But I told him I should consider the investment as a loan, and now, since he has let me know the truth"--her voice fluctuated softly--"I shall make it a debt of honor just the same. Sometime--I shall repay you."

It was very clear to Tisdale that though she saw the property had so greatly increased in value, and that the reclamation movement in the outer vale made the tract readily salable, she no longer considered placing it on the market. "I thought Banks showed you a way easily to cancel that loan," he began. But meeting her look, he paused; his glance returned to the window while he felt in his pocket for that deed Foster had refused to bring. It was going to be more difficult than he had foreseen to offer it to her. "Madam," and compelling his eyes to brave hers, he slightly frowned, "your share in the Aurora mine should pay you enough in dividends the next season or two to refund all that has been expended on this project."

"My share in the Aurora mine?" she repeated. "But I see, I see. You have been maligned into giving me the interest David conveyed to you. Oh, Mr.

Banks told me about that. How you were attacked at the trial; the use that was made of that Indian story in the magazine; that monstrous editorial note."

Tisdale smiled. "That had nothing to do with it. This deed was drawn last year as soon as I reached Was.h.i.+ngton. David knew the value of the Aurora.

That is the reason he risked another winter there, in the face of--all-- that threatened him. And when he felt the fight was going against him, he turned his interest over to me, not only as security on the small loan I advanced to him, but because I was his partner, and he could trust me to finish, his development work and put the mine on a paying basis. That is accomplished. There is no reason now that I should not transfer his share back to you."

He rose to give her the deed, and she took it with reluctance and glanced it over. "I think it is arranged about as David would have wished," he added. "He had confidence in Foster."

She looked up. "Mr. Foster knows how I regard the matter. I told him I would not accept an interest in the Aurora mine. I said all the gold in Alaska could not compensate you for--what you did. Besides, I do not believe as you do, Mr. Tisdale. I think David meant his share should be finally yours."

Hollis was silent. He stood looking off again over Cerberus to the loftier Chelan peaks. For a moment she sat regarding his broad back; her lip trembled a little, and a tenderness, welling from depths of compa.s.sion, brimmed her eyes. "You see I cannot possibly accept it," she said, and rose to return the deed to him.

She had forgotten the photograph, which dropped from her lap, and Tisdale stooped to pick it up. It was lying face upward on the floor, and he saw it was the picture of a child; then involuntarily he stopped to scan it, and it came over him this small face, so beautifully molded, so full of intelligence and charm, was a reproduction of Weatherbee in miniature; yet retouched by a blend of the mother; her eyes under David's level brows. He put the picture in her hand and an unspoken question flashed in the look that met hers.

Since he had not relieved her of the deed, she laid it down on the secretary to take the photograph.

"This is a picture of little Silva," she said. "It would have made a difference about the share in the Aurora if he had lived. He must have been provided for. David would have seen to that."

"There was a child!" His voice rang softly like a vibrant string. "You spoke of him that night you were lost above Scenic Springs, but I thought it was a fancy of delirium. It seemed incredible that David should not have told me if he had a son."

She did not answer directly, but nodded a little and moved back to her chair.

"He was christened Silva Falconer, for my mother's father and mine," she said. "They both were greatly disappointed in not having a son. I am going to tell you about him, only it will be a long story; please be seated. And it would be easier if you would not look at me."

She waited while he settled again in his chair and turned his eyes to the blue mountain tops. She was still able to see his face. "Silva was over six months old when this photograph was taken," she began. "It was lost, with the letter to David that enclosed it, on some terrible Alaska trail.

Afterwards, when the mailbag was recovered and the letter was returned to me through the dead-letter office, two years had pa.s.sed, and our little boy was--gone. You must understand I expected David back that first winter, and when word came that his expedition to the interior had failed, and he had arranged to stay in the north in order to make an early start in the following spring, I did not want to spoil his plans. So I answered as gayly as I could and told him it would give me an opportunity to make a long visit home to California. I went far south to Jacinta and Carlos.

They were caretakers at the old hacienda. My mother had managed that, with the people who bought the rancheria and built the hotel and sanitarium.

Jacinta had been her nurse and mine. She was very experienced. But Silva was born lame. He could not use his lower limbs. A great specialist, who came to the hotel, said he might possibly recover under treatment, but if he should not in a year or two, certain cords must be cut to allow him to sit in a wheel chair, and in that case I must give up hope he would ever walk. But--the treatment was very painful--Jacinta could not bear to-- torture him; I could not afford a trained nurse; so--I did everything. He was the dearest baby; so lovable. He never was cross, but he used to nestle his cheek in my neck and explain how it hurt and coax me not to.

Not in words, but I understood--every sound. And he understood me, I know.

'You are going to blame me, by and by, if I stop,' I would say, over and over; 'you are going to blame me for bringing you into the world.'"

Her voice broke; her breast labored with short, quick breaths, as though she were climbing some sharp ascent. Tisdale did not look at her; his face stirred and settled in grim lines.

"I could not write all this about our baby," she went on, "and I told myself if the treatment failed it would be soon enough for David to know of Silva when he came home. There was nothing he could do, and to share my anxiety might hamper him in his work. He wrote glowingly of the new placer he had discovered, and that was a relief to me, for I was obliged to ask him to send me a good deal of money,--the specialist's account had been so large. I believed he would start south when the Alaska season closed, for he had written I might expect him then, with his pockets full of gold dust, and I made my letters entertaining--or tried to--so he need not feel any need to hurry. At last, one morning in the bath, when Silva was five months old, he moved his right limb voluntarily. I shall never forget. It renewed my courage and my faith. At the end of another month he moved the left one, and after that, gradually, full use came to them both. It was then, when the paralysis was mastered, I sent the letter that was lost. At the same time David wrote that he must spend a second winter in Alaska.

But before that news reached me, my reaction set in. I was so ill I was carried, unconscious, to the sanitarium. And, while I was there, Silva, who had grown so st.u.r.dy and was creeping everywhere, followed his kitten into the garden, and a little later old Jacinta found him in the arroyo.

There was only a little water running but--he had fallen--face down."

Tisdale rose. Meeting her look, the emotion that was the surface stir of shaken depths swept his face. Then, as though to blot out the recollection, she pressed her fingers to her eyes.

"And David was thousands of miles away," he said. "You braved that alone, like the soldier you are."

"When I read David's letter," she went on, "he was winter-bound in the interior. A reply could not have reached him until spring. And meantime Elizabeth Morganstein came with her mother to the hotel. We had been, friends at boarding-school, and she persuaded me to go north to Seattle with them. Later, after the _Aquila_ was launched in the spring, I was invited to join the family on a cruise up the inside pa.s.sage and across the top of the Pacific to Prince William Sound. It seemed so much easier to tell David everything than to write, so--I only let him know I intended to sail to Valdez with friends and would go on by mail steamer to Seward to visit him. That had been his last post-office address, and I believed he expected to be in that neighborhood when the season opened. But our stay was lengthened at Juneau, where we were entertained by acquaintances of Mrs. Feversham's, and we spent a long time around Taku glacier and the Muir. I missed my steamer connections, and there was not another boat due within a week. But the weather was delightful, and Mr. Morganstein suggested taking me on in the yacht. Then Mrs. Feversham proposed a side trip along Columbia glacier and into College fiord. It was all very wonderful to me, and inspiring; the salt air had been a restorative from the start. And I saw no reason to hurry the party. David would understand.

So, the second mail steamer pa.s.sed us, and finally, when we reached Seward, David had gone back to the interior. The rest--you know."

"You mean," said Tisdale slowly, "you heard about Mrs. Barbour."

She bowed affirmatively. The color swept in a wave to her face; her lashes fell.

"Mrs. Feversham heard about it, how David had brought her down from the interior. I saw the cabin he had furnished for her, and she herself, sewing at the window. Her face was beautiful."