The Faith Healer Part 9

All my life long I have walked in the light of something to come, some labor, some mission, I have scarcely known what--but I have risen with it and lain down with it, and nothing else has existed for me.--Nothing, until--I lifted my eyes and you stood there. The stars looked down from their places, the earth wheeled on among the stars. Everything was as it had been, and nothing was as it had been; nor ever, ever can it be the same again.

RHODA.

_In a low and agitated voice._

You must not say these things to me. You are--I am not--. You must not think of me so.

MICHAELIS.

I must think of you as I must.

_Pause. Rhoda speaks in a lighter tone, as if to relieve the tension of their last words._

RHODA.

Tell me a little of your boyhood.--What was it like--that place where you lived?

MICHAELIS.

_Becomes absorbed in his own mental pictures as he speaks._

A great table of stone, rising five hundred feet out of the endless waste of sand. A little adobe house, halfway up the mesa, with the desert far below and the Indian village far above. A few peach trees, and a spring--a sacred spring, which the Indians wors.h.i.+pped in secret.

A little chapel, which my father had built with his own hands. He often spent the night there, praying. And there, one night, he died. I found him in the morning, lying as if in quiet prayer before the altar.

RHODA.

_After a moment's hush._

What did you do after your father died?

MICHAELIS.

I went away south, into the mountains, and got work on a sheep range. I was a shepherd for five years.

RHODA.

And since then?

MICHAELIS.

_Hesitates._

Since then I have--wandered about, working here and there to earn enough to live on.

RHODA.

I understand well why men take up that life. I should love it myself.

MICHAELIS.

I didn't do it because I loved it.

RHODA.

Why, then?

MICHAELIS.

I was waiting my time.

RHODA.

_In a low tone._

Your time--for what?

MICHAELIS.

To fulfil my life--my real life.

RHODA.

Your--real life?

_He sits absorbed in thought without answering. Rhoda continues, after a long pause._

There in the mountains, when you were a shepherd--that was not your real life?

MICHAELIS.

It was the beginning of it.

RHODA.

_With hesitation._

Won't you tell me a little about that time?

MICHAELIS.

In the fall I would drive the sheep south, through the great basin which sloped down into Mexico, and in the spring back again to the mountains.

RHODA.

Were you all alone?

MICHAELIS.