Bred of the Desert - Charles Marcus Horton (best short novels .TXT) 📗

mere pity and sympathy. It was the anguish preceding tears. Quickly withdrawing her hand, she turned and fled to the house. Inside, she slowly approached a window. He was leading Pat into the corral; and, watching him unsaddle and unbridle her horse, her treasure, she awoke to something else within her, a strange swelling of her heart, different from anything she had ever known. It was like ownership; it was a something as of maternal pride, a something new to her which she could not fathom. She turned away. When she looked out again, her eyes dry and burning, he was riding slowly along the trail toward town.

It was the beginning of the end. Winter passed, with horses abandoned for the delights, swift-following, of dinner and dance and house party. These affairs made deep inroads upon Helen’s time, and so Pat was left pretty much to his own reflections.

Yet he managed to fill the days to his satisfaction. Standing in the stable, he loved to watch the snow-capped mountains, and the tiny white clouds scudding around them, and the mellow radiance of golden sunlight streaming over them. Also, gazing out of the little square window, he spent long periods in viewing the hard brown of the nearer mesaland–the dips and dunes and thread-like arroyos, with an occasional horseman crawling between. Or else, when he found himself yearning for his mistress, he would turn eyes upon the house, and with lazy speculation regard its sun-flecked windows, tightly shut doors, and smoking chimneys, in the hope that she might step forth. Then came more mild weather when he would spend long hours outside the stable, in his corner in the corral, there to renew his silent vigil over nature and the house from this vantage. Thus he filled his days, and found them not so long as formerly in his babyhood, when each hour was fraught with so many little things that demanded his closest interest and attention.

Nights found him early at rest. But not all nights. Nights there were when the house would be lighted from cellar to garret, when spectral forms would move in and out of doors, and when shadows would flicker across drawn shades. Such nights were always his nights, for he would hear sounds of merriment, and voices lifted in song, and above the voices, tinkling toward him on the crisp air, the music of a piano. Such nights were his nights, for he knew that his mistress was happy, and he would force open the stable door, step out under the cold stars, and take up his stand in his corner, there to rest his head upon the topmost board and turn steady eyes upon the scene of merriment until the last guest had departed.

Always on these nights, with wintry chills coursing down his legs or rollicking along his spine, he found himself wanting to be a part of this gaiety, wanting to enter the house, where he instinctively knew it was warm and comfortable, where he might nuzzle the whole gathering for sugar and apples. But this he could not do. He could only turn longing eyes upon the cottage and stand there until, all too soon, sounds of doors opening and closing, together with voices in cheery farewell, told him that the party was at an end. Then he would see mysterious forms flitting across to the trail, and lights in the house whisking out one by one, until the cottage gradually became engulfed in darkness. Then, but not till then, would he turn away from his corner, walk back slowly into the stable, and, because of the open door, which he could open but never close, suffer intensely from the cold throughout the long night.

One such occasion, when the round moon hung poised in the blue-black dome of heaven, and he was standing as usual in his corner, with eyes upon the brilliantly lighted house, he became suddenly aware of two people descending the rear porch and making slowly toward him. At first he did not recognize his own mistress and the young man who had been her almost constant companion since that memorable fright on the mesa eight months before. But as they drew closer, and he came to know the slender form in white, he sounded a soft whinny of greeting and pressed eagerly close to the fence. The pair came near, very near; but neither of them paid the least attention to him–a fact which troubled him deeply. And directly his mistress spoke, but, as she was addressing herself to the young man, this troubled him even more. But he could listen, and listen he did.

“Stephen,” she was saying, “you must accept my answer as final. For you must know, Stephen,” she went on, quietly, “that I have not changed toward you. My answer to-night, and my answer to-morrow night, and my answer for ever, in so far as I can see, will be what it was last autumn. I am more than sorry that this is so. But it is so, nevertheless.” She was firm, though Pat, knowing her well, knew that it required all the force of her trembling soul to give firmness to her words.

Stephen felt something of this as he stood beside her in grim meekness. With his hungry eyes upon her, he felt the despair of one sunk to utter depths, of a man mentally and physically broken. For he loved this girl. And it was this love, God-given, that made him persist. In the spell of this love he realized that he was but a weak agent, uttering demands given him to utter, and unable, through a force as mighty as Nature herself, to do otherwise. Yet though he was utterly torn apart, he was able, despite this mighty demand within him, to understand her viewpoint. He had understood it from the first. But the craving within would not let him accept it.

“I suppose,” he rejoined, “that the one decent course for me would be to drop all this. But somehow I can’t. I love you that way, Helen! Don’t you understand? I cannot let go! I seem to be forced repeatedly to make–make a boor of myself!” There was a moment’s silence. “Yet I have resisted it,” he went on. “I have fought it–fought it with all the power I have! But I–I somehow–cannot let go!”

Helen said nothing. She herself was coming to realize fully the depths of this man’s passion. She knew–knew as few women have known–that here was a man who wanted her; but she knew also, and she was sorry to know it, that she could not conscientiously give herself to him. She regretted it not alone for his sake, but for her own as well. She liked him, liked him better than any other man she had ever known. But she knew that she could not marry him, and believed in her heart that her reasons for refusing him were just reasons. But she remained silent, true to her decision.

When Stephen spoke again it was not to plead with her; he seemed at last to have accepted her refusal for all time. But he asked her reason for absolutely refusing him–not that it mattered much now, since he faced the inevitable, but thought the knowledge might in future guide and strengthen him. He talked rapidly, hinting at beliefs and idolatries, comparing West with East, and East with West, while he stood motionless, one hand upon the fence–earnest, sincere, strong in his request. When he had uttered his last sad word, Helen found herself, as she searched his drawn profile pityingly, no more able to deny him an answer than at the time of their first chance meeting she could have controlled the fate which had brought it about.

“Stephen,” she burst out, “I will tell you–though I don’t want to tell you–remember! And if in the telling,” she hurried on, “I prove rather too candid–please stop me! You will, won’t you?”

He nodded listlessly.

“To begin with,” she began, quietly, dreading her task, “we as a people are selfish. We are isolated here–are far from the center of things–but only certain things. We are quite our own center in certain other ways. But we are selfish as regards advancement, and being selfish in this way–being what we are and where we are–we live solely for that advancement–for the privilege of doing what we will, and of knowing! It is the first law of the country down here–of my people! We have aims and aspirations and courage all peculiar to ourselves. And when we meet your type, as I met you, we come–(Now, stop me when I get too severe!)–we come to know our own values a little better–to respect ourselves, perhaps–though perhaps, too, I shouldn’t say it–a little more. Not that you lack virtues, you Easterners, but they differ from ours–and probably only in kind. And exactly what your type is you yourself have made plain to me during our many little trips together in the saddle. And–and now I fear I must become even more personal,” she broke off. “And I am very sorry that I must. Though I know you will forgive me. You will, won’t you?” And she looked up at him wistfully. “You thought it might benefit you to know. This is only my opinion. Others may not see it this way. But I am giving it for what it is, and I am giving it only because you asked it and have asked it repeatedly.”

He roused himself. “Go on,” he said, with evident forced lightness. “I see your viewpoint perfectly.”

“Well,” she resumed, hurriedly, “you lack ambition–a real ambition. You have ridden horses, played tennis, idled about clubs. You were a coddled and petted child, a pampered and spoiled youth. You attended a dozen schools, and, to use your own language, were ‘canned’ out of all of them. Which about sums up your activities. You have idled your time away, and you give every promise of continuing. I regret that I must say that, but I regret more deeply that it is true. You have many admirable qualities. You have the greatest of all qualities–power for sincere love. But in the qualities which make one acceptable down here–Wait! I’ll change that. In the qualities which would make one acceptable to me you are lacking to a very considerable degree. And it is just there that you fill me with the greatest doubt–doubt so grave, indeed, that I cannot–and I use the verb advisedly–cannot permit myself to like you in the way you want me to like you.”

Again he bestirred himself. “What is that, please? What is that quality?”

“I have tried to tell you,” she rejoined, patiently. “It is a really worth-while ambition. You lack the desire to do something, the desire to be something–a desire that ought to have been yours, should have been yours, years ago–the thing part and parcel of our blood down here. It may take shape in any one of a hundred different things–business ventures; personal prospectings; pursuit of art, science; raising cattle–anything, Stephen! But something, something which will develop a real value, both to yourself and to your fellow-man. We have it. We have inherited it. We got it from our grandfathers–our great-grandfathers, in a few cases–men who wanted to know–to learn–to learn by doing. It is a powerful force. It must be a powerful force, it must have been strong within them, for it dragged them out of the comforts of civilization and led them into the desert. But they found what they sought; and in finding what they sought they found themselves also. And what they found–”

“Was something which, having drawn them forward to the frontier, filled them with dislike for those who remained behind?”

“If you wish to put it