The Man of the Desert (11 page)

Then she wondered whether he’d have any way of discovering her name. Perhaps her father had given it to him, or the station agent might have known to whom their car belonged. Of course he would when they received the orders—or did they give orders about cars only by numbers? She wished she dared ask someone. Perhaps she could find out in some way how those orders were written. Yet all the time she knew instinctively that if he knew her name a thousand times he wouldn’t communicate with her. She knew by that fine look of renunciation upon his face that no longing whatsoever could make him overstep the bounds he’d laid down between her soul and his.

With a sigh she opened the little book. It fell apart by itself to the place where he read the night before, the page still marked by the little silk cord. She could see him now with the firelight flickering on his face and the moonlight silvering his head, that strong tender look on his face. How wonderful he was!

She read the psalm over now, the first time in her life she ever consciously gave herself to reading the Bible. But the words held a charm that gave them new meaning, the charm of his voice as she heard them in memory and watched his face change and stir at the words as he read.

The day waned, and the train raced on, but the landscape had lost its attraction now for the girl. She pleaded weariness and remained apart from the rest, dreaming over her wonderful experience and thinking deep thoughts of wonder, regret, sadness, and joy. When night fell and the moon rose, lighting the world again, she knelt beside her car window, gazing for a long time into the wide clear sky, the sky that covered them both and the moon that looked down upon them. Then switching on the electric light over her berth she read the psalm again and fell asleep with her cheek on the little book and a prayer for him in her heart.

Standing on the station platform, watching the train disappear behind the foothills, John Brownleigh experienced, for the first time since coming to Arizona, a feeling of utter desolation. He’d been lonely and homesick at times, but always with a sense of being master of it. And with delight in his work it would pass and leave him free and glad in the power whereby his God had called him to the service. But now he felt the light of life leaving him with the train, and the glory of Arizona and the world he loved to be in was darkened.

For a moment or two his soul cried out that it couldn’t be, that he must mount some winged steed and speed after the one his heart loved. Then the wall of the inevitable appeared before his eyes, and reason crowded close to bring him to his senses. He turned away to hide the emotion in his face. The Indian boy, who was holding both horses, received his customary smile and pleasant word, but the missionary gave them more by habit now. His soul had entered its Gethsemane, and his spirit was bowed within him.

As soon as he could get away from the people around the station who wanted to tell him their little griefs, joys, and perplexities, he mounted Billy and, leading the borrowed pony, rode away into the desert, retracing the way they’d come together only a short time before. They traveled only as far back as the edge of the corn, where they made their last stop of the journey together a few short hours before. Here the missionary stopped and gave the horses their freedom to rest and eat. He felt too weary to go farther.

He brought out the little ring she’d taken from her hand and laid within his palm and found it was too small to go more than halfway on his little finger. The low sun in the west stole into the jewel and sent its glory in a million multicolored facets, piercing his soul with the pain and joy of his love. He threw himself down on the grass where she’d sat, where, with his eyes closed and his lips on the jewel she’d worn, he met his enemy and fought.

Exhausted at last from the contest, he slept. The sun set, and the moon rose. And when the night coursed down its silver path, two jewels gleamed in its radiance, the one on his finger where he’d pressed her ring, the other from the grass beside him. Rousing, he reached over and found the topaz sparkling in the handle of her whip she’d dropped and forgotten when they sat together and talked. He seized it now. It seemed like a message of comfort from her. It was something tangible, with the ring, to show him he didn’t dream she came; she was real and had wanted him to tell her of his love and said it would make a difference the rest of her life.

He remembered reading or hearing a great man say that to be worthy of a great love a person must be able to do without it. He would prove his love, now, by doing without. He stood with uplifted face, transfigured in the light of the brilliant night, with a look of self-surrender. But only his heart communed that night, for no words came to his lips to express the fullness of his abnegation.

Then, his battle fought and stronger for it, he set out to be a staff for other men to lean on.

His Mother

D
eserts and mountains remained, duties crowded and pressed, hearts ached, but the world rushed on. The weeks that followed showed these two that great love is eternal.

Brownleigh didn’t try to stop thinking about it but rather let it glorify his life. Each day passed, and he traveled from post to post, from hogan to mesa, and back to his shanty again, always with the thought of her companionship. He’d never been less cheery when he met his friends, though he had a quiet dignity, a tender reserve behind it that a few discerning ones perceived. At the fort they said he was losing flesh, but if so he was gaining muscle. His lean brown arms were never stronger, and his fine strong face was never sad when anyone was nearby. Only in the nighttime, alone on the moonlit desert or in his quiet dwelling place, did he talk with his Father and tell Him of the loneliness and heartache. His people found him more sympathetic, more painstaking, more tireless than ever before, and the work prospered under his hand.

The girl in the city deliberately set herself to forget.

The first few days after she left him were a mingling of ecstatic joy and deep depression, as she alternately meditated on the great love or faced its impossibility.

She scorched Milton Hamar with her glance of aversion and avoided him constantly despite her family’s protest, until he made an excuse and left the party at Pasadena. There, too, Aunt Maria relieved them of her annoying interference, and the return trip taken by the southern route allowed the girl to meditate undisturbed. She became more dissatisfied with herself and her useless, ornamental life. Some days she read the little book, and other days she shut it away and tried to return to her former life, telling herself it was useless to attempt to change herself. The book gave her a deep unrest and a sense that life held sweeter, more serious things than just living to please oneself. She began to long for home and the summer round of activities to fill the emptiness of her heart.

As the summer advanced, her plans to have a good time every minute seemed almost reckless sometimes; yet in the quiet of her own room the yearning awakened in the desert and refusing to be silenced would always return.

Sometimes, when she remembered the great deep love she’d heard expressed for her, the bitter tears came to her eyes, and one thought throbbed through her consciousness:
“Not worthy! Not worthy!”
He didn’t think her fit to be his wife. Her father and her world would think otherwise. They’d count him unworthy to mate with her, an heiress, the pet of society—and he a man who gave up his life for a whim, a fad, a fanatical fancy! But she knew it wasn’t so. She knew him to be a man of all men. She knew she wasn’t a woman a man like that could rightly marry, and the thought galled her constantly.

She tried to accustom herself to think of him as a pleasant experience, a friend who might have been if circumstances with them both were different; she tried to tell herself it was a passing fancy both would forget; and she tried with all her heart to forget, even locking away the precious little book and trying to forget it, too.

And then, one day in late summer, she traveled with a motoring party through New England, as lively a party as could be found among New York society transferred for the summer to nature. A dance or house party or something of the sort was planned at the end of the drive. Hazel scarcely knew and didn’t care. She was tiring of her butterfly life.

The day was hot and dusty, Indian summer intensified. They got lost through the chauffeur’s mistake, and suddenly on the edge of a quaint village the car broke down and refused to go on without a lengthy siege of coaxing and petting.

The members of the party, powdered with dust and not in a pleasant frame of mind from the delay, took refuge at the village inn, an old-time hostelry close to the roadside. It had a wide, brick-paved, white-pillared piazza across the front and a mysterious hedged garden at the side. Plain wooden rockers neatly adorned with white crash sat on the piazza, and a few late summer boarders loitered about with knitting or a book. The landlord brought cool, tinkling glasses of water and rich milk from the springhouse, and they dropped into the chairs to wait while the men of the party assisted the chauffeur in patching up the car.

Hazel sank wearily into her chair and sipped the milk without appetite. She wished she hadn’t come; that she might have planned something more interesting; that she’d chosen different people to be in her party; and that the day were over. She idly watched a white hen with yellow kid boots and a coral comb in her nicely groomed hair picking daintily about the green under the oak trees that shaded the street. And she listened to the drone of the bees in the garden nearby, the distant whetting of a scythe, the monotonous whang of a steam thresher not far away, and the happy voices of children, and thought how empty a life in this village would be—almost as dreary and uninteresting as living in a desert. Then suddenly she caught a name, and memory set her heart pounding.

The landlord was talking to a lingering summer boarder, a quiet, gray-haired woman who sat reading at the end of the piazza.

“Well, Miss Norton, so you’re goin’ to leave us next week. Sorry to hear it. Don’t seem nat’ral ‘thout you clear through October. Ca’c’late you’re coming back to Granville in the spring?”

Granville! Granville! Where had she heard of Granville? Ah! She knew instantly. It was his old home! His mother lived there! But then of course it must be another Granville. She wasn’t even sure what state they were in now, New Hampshire or Vermont. They’d wavered about on the state line several times that day, and she never paid attention to geography.

Then the landlord raised his voice again.

He was gazing across the road where a small white colonial house, white-fenced with pickets like clean sugar frosting, nestled in the luscious green grass. It seemed apart from the road dust and soil, as if nothing wearisome could enter there. A border of late flowers, double asters, zinnias, and peonies, bloomed with a flame of scarlet poppies breaking into the smokelike blue of larkspurs and bachelor buttons, as it neared the house. Hazel hadn’t noticed it until now, and she almost cried out with pleasure over the splendor of color.

“Wal,” said the landlord, chinking some loose coins in his capacious pockets, “I reckon Mis’ Brownleigh’ll miss yeh ’bout as much as enny us. She lots on your comin’ over to read to her. I’ve heerd her say as how Amelia Ellen is a good nurse, but she never was much on the readin’, an’ Amelia Ellen knows it, too. Mis’ Brownleigh, she’ll be powerful lonesome fer yeh when yeh go. It’s not so lively fur her tied to her bed er her chair, even ef John does write to her reg’lar twicet a week.”

And now Hazel noticed on the covered veranda in front of the wing of the house across the street, an old lady sitting on a reclining wheeled chair and another woman in a plain blue gown waiting on her. A luxuriant woodbine partly hid the chair, and the distance was too great to see the woman’s face.

But Hazel grew weak with wonder and pleasure. She sat still trying to gather her forces while the summer boarder expressed sincere regret at leaving her resting place so much earlier than usual.

At last Hazel’s friends began to rally her on her silence. She turned away annoyed and answered them crossly, following the landlord into the house and questioning him eagerly. She’d suddenly arrived at the conclusion that she must see Mrs. Brownleigh to know if she looked like her son and if she really was the kind of mother one would expect such a son to have. She felt that in seeing her might lie her emancipation from the enchantment that had bound her since her Western trip. She also secretly hoped it might justify her dearest dreams of what his mother was like.

“Do you suppose that lady across the street would mind if I went over to look at her beautiful flowers?” she asked the astonished landlord.

He had just tipped his chair back and prepared to browse over yesterday’s paper for the third time that day. But now he brought his chair down on its four legs with a thump and pushed his hat further back on his forehead.

“Not a bit, young lady. She’s proud to show off her flowers. They’re one of Granville’s sights. Mis’ Brownleigh loves to have comp’ny. Jest go right over an’ tell her I sent you. She’ll tell you all about ’em, an’ like ez not she’ll give you a bokay to take ‘long. She’s real generous with ’em.”

He tottered out to the door after her on his stiff rheumatic legs and suggested the other young ladies might like to go along. But they declined, to Hazel’s intense relief, and called out their ridicule after her as she picked her way across the dusty road and opened the white gate into the peaceful scene beyond.

When she drew close to the side piazza she saw one of the most beautiful faces she’d ever gazed upon. The features were delicate and exquisitely modeled, aged by years and much suffering, yet lovely with a peace that permitted no fretting. An abundance of waving silky hair white as snow was piled high upon her head against the snowy pillow, and soft brown eyes made the girl’s heart beat quickly with their likeness to those other eyes that once looked into hers.

She was dressed in a simple muslin gown of white and gray with a white cloudlike finish at her throat and wrists, and across the helpless limbs was flung a light afghan of pink-and-gray wool. She made a sweet picture as she lay and watched her approaching guest with a smile of interest and welcome.