Stony River (22 page)

“I can see why you felt that way.” Sevana was on his side completely. “Your whole relationship was based on false pretenses.”

“It wasn’t entirely false. It was true she had fallen in love with me before she realized what was happening. She kept silent about her engagement at first for fear of turning me away, and waited too long to speak after discovering what her feelings had become. But I wouldn’t listen to her beg me to forgive her, because I didn’t want to marry someone I couldn’t trust to tell me the truth. I went off to the wilderness without seeing her again, and when the summer was over, she went back to Vancouver and married the Mountie.”

“But that wasn’t the end of it?” she prompted, knowing it couldn’t be.

“No. During that summer in the high country I started to look at things differently. My anger had long since cooled, and all I felt was the pain of losing her. I regretted that I hadn’t listened to her or made any allowances. I became convinced that if I had been more tolerant, more broadminded to the whole situation, it would have been a relatively easy thing for her to break her engagement and marry me. But I’d been young, confused, blinded into wrong reactions by the intensity of my first and only love.

“From my camp at Stormy Pass I could see her mountaintop down the river valley, but there was no way to communicate. Like some kind of lunatic I yelled her name, willing her to hear me. I made the decision to tell her I was sorry, and left the wilderness early to find her before she left. It was mid-August when I started my trek off the high ground to ask her not to go to Vancouver. But no sooner had I started out, than a massive storm system moved in and rained for three days without letting up…what lookouts call a season-ender. And by the time I got home and drove to Landmark Peak, the lookout was boarded up.

“I didn’t know her address—I barely knew her last name under the unconventional circumstances we’d met—but I went to Vancouver and tracked her down. When I found her apartment, the Mountie was there with her. I couldn’t say what I wanted in front of him; and after meeting him, I was no longer sure I should say anything. He became a real person to me then, not just a faceless hindrance to my plans. I saw them together and found him a real likable fellow, and I decided I was not going to destroy that relationship for the sake of my own desire. So I acted as though I had been in Vancouver anyway, and was just dropping by to congratulate them—their wedding was in less than a month—and got out of there faster than a snowshoe rabbit with a bobcat on its tail.

“But it wasn’t long after that, just a couple of months or so, she sent me a letter—Why had I come to see her? She said she had to know; she had kept her own post office box so no one else would see my reply. And I wrote, explaining what I had realized in summer pasture, and apologized for not seeing it sooner. She wrote back—she had guessed it might be so, but with the wedding plans in place she had allowed herself to be carried along by them. But she never should have done it, it was all the worst mistake; she was still in love with me. I said I still loved her, too, but everything had pretty much gone against us one way or the other, and it was too late for anything but friendship. She accepted that, but we kept writing. Soon we were sharing every thought of the day just as we’d done before anything came between us. For my birthday, she had a florist in Nelson deliver a bouquet of forget-me-nots to my cabin on foot—it must have cost her hundreds of dollars. We continued to write over the next four years. But words on paper seemed innocent enough—I felt no one could say anything against our being friends. During that time she and her husband transferred to Victoria, and she was working for a branch of the same magazine there.

“Then I got a letter saying she wanted to see me while she was in Nelson on assignment—she would rent a car and meet me in Cragmont. Her career had taken off, and she was traveling all over the country with the magazine crew. So much time had passed since I’d seen her face or heard her voice, I thought it would do no harm to have dinner with her for old time’s sake. And I wanted to see her for another reason, because I had never stopped missing her, almost insanely at times. I thought if I saw her again, she would be different than I remembered—a world-class photographer and someone’s wife—and I would realize we were no longer the same two people who had once fallen in love, and it would help me close that chapter of my life. But you know, Sevana, that night we met in Cragmont, I ran into a brick wall.”

“You were still in love with her.” It was a swift, definite response.

“Yes.” He seemed impressed by her perception. “If anything, the years had made our affinity deeper. We stayed all night talking it out. How it was hopeless to keep denying facts. How we couldn’t seem to live a whole life without each other. We even brought up the unthinkable—her leaving him for me. How it would be hard all around, but maybe there was no real alternative. Things we’d never dared put into words before. So even though I went intending to say goodbye, I left defeated—a helpless, pathetic prisoner. Because now I know I can never say goodbye.”

The lantern dimmed, flickered, went out. “That’s what I get for burning too much midnight oil,” came Joel’s voice. He lit a candle on his desk, bringing a lesser, fluctuating light into the room. “More tea?”

“I still have some.” She swirled it in her cup. “What kind is it?” she asked, hoping to sound merely curious.

“It’s a mixture of plants I dried—wood-nettle, wild ginger, rosehips…maybe some fireweed. Every batch I make is a little different.”

It was different, all right. But it wasn’t completely disagreeable, once she’d gotten over the shock of discovering it wasn’t ordinary tea. She thought she’d masked that rather well. She took another drink to show him she was drinking it. “Was it Chantal you went to see that first day I met you?”

He seemed surprised by the direct question. “Yes, that was when I went to Cragmont,” he admitted. “I never should have agreed to go. Now instead of giving it up, we’re planning to see each other next time we can find a way.”

He leaned his forehead against his hand. With his eyes closed—every time his eyes were closed—he was holding her again, holding onto the moments that she was his, willing them to last forever so he would never have to let go. But always the moments fleeted by; it was only the memories that lasted forever.

When he looked up again, his expression was unguarded, torn open by conflicting emotions. “It’s supposed to be over,” he said savagely. “I was supposed to let it go. It’s supposed to be over.”

“Joel, you can’t help whom you love.”

That statement, in its naïve simplicity, cut into his agonized thoughts like a well-aimed arrow. It reached through in a way that all the accusations and judgments in the world couldn’t have. Amid his bitter condemnation of himself, there had been no allowances, no excusing of his actions. Now, because of her words, something eased in his heart almost physically.

“It’s true, Sevana, you can’t.” Once again he seemed to admire her insight. “It’s a place I never thought I’d be,” he confessed. “I’ve tried to stand against it. I know the right course of action, but I’m powerless to take it. In fact,” he got up and walked to the window beyond the desk to look out at the starlight, “I’ve been thinking since I’m unable to resist her, it’s time to do something about it.”

“What do you mean?” She was uneasy at the reckless tone that had crept into his voice.

“When I saw her in Cragmont we talked about marriage. It used to be out of the question in my mind. It’s against everything I know is right. Now as the years go by with no improvement, no way out of how I feel, I think what’s the use of it? If I am to be damned for my love, let me at least hold her for my own!”

He turned to face her, his eyes shining so fiercely out of the dark that she flinched at his changed countenance. “Why do you look so startled?” he demanded hoarsely. “You’re saner than I am. Tell me I’m a fool to talk so!”

She stood up, meaning to go put a hand on his arm to console him, but faltered in her intention and stayed where she was. “Joel, I don’t know if there
is
a right and wrong, when you love her so much. Maybe you will be damned if you
don’t
marry her…because maybe love is the highest law there is.”

“Those are beautiful words,” he said, looking at her absently, “—and I could believe them if there were not other laws set higher still—a certain unalterable order that can’t be violated without consequences. When you take something that is not yours to have, it can never bring the happiness it seems to offer.”

“But maybe she
is
yours to have. You fell in love with her when she was free to be yours. I think you must do what your heart says, and let everything else fall where it will.”

“Yes,” he said strangely, following her thought—even if it was the happy conviction of someone not yet twenty. “I’ve come to the place where all the philosophizing in the world can’t substitute for the reality of having her in my arms.”

He sat down at his desk and took a photograph from the center drawer. “She gave me this in Cragmont. A member of her crew took it.”

It was an unposed shot of an exceptionally beautiful girl with raven-dark tresses, sooty, impetuous eyes, and a full mouth curved in a laughing, self-possessed smile—a moment preserved out of real life with stunning effectiveness.

“I can see why the loggers wouldn’t let her alone.” Sevana, bending to see it by the candle’s light, felt a jolt to behold such true loveliness as she examined it from his hand. It only underscored her belief that the most beautiful girls had dark coloring.

“Yes,” he said distantly, staring at the picture as if even her likeness had the power to hypnotize him. “The time we spend together is so compelling it makes me willing to do anything I have to, to be with her.”

And because she lost him there, as surely as if he had gone into another world, Sevana left him in the room with his passion burning bright as the candleflame, and went unnoticed into her temporary sleeping quarters.

In the morning Joel was still preoccupied—or maybe he was just tired from his short night. He cooked buckwheat pancakes on a flat iron griddle with no more than the standard pleasantries of such an occasion, except to inquire about her arm. But Sevana didn’t notice his lack of conversation because she, too, was involved in thought. Despite the fact that Chantal was the entirety of Joel’s obsession, there was something about it that bothered her—something she wanted to examine more carefully when she was alone. It was a foolish thing—unaccountable, really. But it was she, Sevana, who had unwittingly stumbled across Joel on a walk up the mountain, a whole world away from anywhere, and she had always regarded him as exclusively her acquaintance; it had never occurred to her to think otherwise. And now to learn that the treasure she had found in the form of a shepherd named Joel Wilder was not only known outside that unfrequented valley, but had already been claimed by someone of prior association…it was funny how strongly she felt this peculiar covetousness, that she should rightfully have him all to herself.

After breakfast Joel said he was taking the flock up the hill, and asked if she was coming. But all Sevana wanted to do was get Trapper back on Fenn’s property as quickly as possible, by impetus of some obscure reasoning that the sooner she returned the horse, the more effectively she could atone for losing him.

As Joel stood to see her off, he mentioned casually that Chantal was telephoning him tomorrow night, so he was driving to town for the call. If Sevana would like to visit the thriving population center of Cragmont, she might consider coming along.

“I’d love to,” she said. “I’ll watch for you when you come by.”

Ready to direct the horse down the trail, she hesitated, holding back on the reins as she tried to thank Joel for coming to find her yesterday and taking care of her arm. But he cut her off, saying gruffly that knowing she hadn’t spent the night on the wrong side of the mountain was all the thanks he needed.

As Sevana rode homeward down the trail, thoughts of Joel came to her in a torrent, like the river at highwater. She contemplated his uncommon existence he lived with such strength, the beautiful music he played, his eyes so deep they were hard to understand. She still had things to ponder, but other things required no examination. Sometime, over the short course of the days she’d known him, he had become her friend.

CHAPTER 15

After Trapper had been treated to oats, a thorough brushing, and a stake in the best grass of the homestead, Sevana went to the river free of care because Fenn would never know she had almost lost his horse.

When she stepped onto the grassy bank and saw the river stones catching the sunlight in colors of rust and sage and cocoa and goldenrod beneath the amber water, she knew she had found her next picture. For that day, though, she settled on the bank and wrote her father a letter to mail in Cragmont. But so much of the life she described sounded so new and foreign, even to her, that it made her feel self-conscious when she imagined him reading it. It sounded like a different person than the one who had written him all those years from the four colorless walls of her room at school. However the thought did not disturb her sufficiently to keep her from stretching out in the grass, where she catnapped off and on with the river music running drowsily through her consciousness. She went home only when the afternoon was far gone, filled with a quiet happiness over the peaceful day she’d just spent, and a joyful, winging anticipation for the upcoming trip to town with Joel in the morning.