Zane Grey (20 page)

"You asked me for it, an' I've fetched it over. To-morrow I'm off on a
trail I may never return from," he answered simply, and his voice
seemed cold.

An immeasurable distance stretched once more between them. Helen's
happiness slowly died.

"I thank you," she said with a voice that was tremulous despite all
her efforts.

"It's not much of a keepsake."

"I did not ask for it as a keepsake, but because—because I wanted it.
I need nothing tangible to keep alive my memory. A few words whispered
to me not many days ago will suffice for remembrance—or—or did I
dream them?"

Bitter disappointment almost choked Helen. This was not the gentle,
soft-voiced man who had said he loved her. It was the indifferent
borderman. Again he was the embodiment of his strange, quiet woods.
Once more he seemed the comrade of the cold, inscrutable Wetzel.

"No, lass, I reckon you didn't dream," he replied.

Helen swayed from sick bitterness and a suffocating sense of pain,
back to her old, sweet, joyous, tumultuous heart-throbbing.

"Tell me, if I didn't dream," she said softly, her face flashing warm
again. She came close to him and looked up with all her heart in her
great dark eyes, and love trembling on her red lips.

Calmness deserted the borderman after one glance at her. He paced the
floor; twisted and clasped his hands while his eyes gleamed.

"Lass, I'm only human," he cried hoarsely, facing her again.

But only for a moment did he stand before her; but it was long enough
for him to see her shrink a little, the gladness in her eyes giving
way to uncertainty and a fugitive hope. Suddenly he began to pace the
room again, and to talk incoherently. With the flow of words he
gradually grew calmer, and, with something of his natural dignity,
spoke more rationally.

"I said I loved you, an' it's true, but I didn't mean to speak. I
oughtn't have done it. Somethin' made it so easy, so natural like. I'd
have died before letting you know, if any idea had come to me of what
I was sayin'. I've fought this feelin' for months. I allowed myself to
think of you at first, an' there's the wrong. I went on the trail with
your big eyes pictured in my mind, an' before I'd dreamed of it you'd
crept into my heart. Life has never been the same since—that kiss.
Betty said as how you cared for me, an' that made me worse, only I
never really believed. Today I came over here to say good-bye,
expectin' to hold myself well in hand; but the first glance of your
eyes unmans me. Nothin' can come of it, lass, nothin' but trouble.
Even if you cared, an' I don't dare believe you do, nothin' can come
of it! I've my own life to live, an' there's no sweetheart in it.
Mebbe, as Lew says, there's one in Heaven. Oh! girl, this has been
hard on me. I see you always on my lonely tramps; I see your glorious
eyes in the sunny fields an' in the woods, at gray twilight, an' when
the stars shine brightest. They haunt me. Ah! you're the sweetest
lass as ever tormented a man, an' I love you, I love you!"

He turned to the window only to hear a soft, broken cry, and a flurry
of skirts. A rush of wind seemed to envelop him. Then two soft,
rounded arms encircled his neck, and a golden head lay on his breast.

"My borderman! My hero! My love!"

Jonathan clasped the beautiful, quivering girl to his heart.

"Lass, for God's sake don't say you love me," he implored, thrilling
with contact of her warm arms.

"Ah!" she breathed, and raised her head. Her radiant eyes darkly
wonderful with unutterable love, burned into his.

He had almost pressed his lips to the sweet red ones so near his, when
he drew back with a start, and his frame straightened.

"Am I a man, or only a coward?" he muttered. "Lass, let me think.
Don't believe I'm harsh, nor cold, nor nothin' except that I want to
do what's right."

He leaned out of the window while Helen stood near him with a hand on
his quivering shoulder. When at last he turned, his face was
colorless, white as marble, and sad, and set, and stern.

"Lass, it mustn't be; I'll not ruin your life."

"But you will if you give me up."

"No, no, lass."

"I cannot live without you."

"You must. My life is not mine to give."

"But you love me."

"I am a borderman."

"I will not live without you."

"Hush! lass, hush!"

"I love you."

Jonathan breathed hard; once more the tremor, which seemed pitiful in
such a strong man, came upon him. His face was gray.

"I love you," she repeated, her rich voice indescribably deep and
full. She opened wide her arms and stood before him with heaving
bosom, with great eyes dark with woman's sadness, passionate with
woman's promise, perfect in her beauty, glorious in her abandonment.

The borderman bowed and bent like a broken reed.

"Listen," she whispered, coming closer to him, "go if you must leave
me; but let this be your last trail. Come back to me, Jack, come back
to me! You have had enough of this terrible life; you have won a name
that will never be forgotten; you have done your duty to the border.
The Indians and outlaws will be gone soon. Take the farm your brother
wants you to have, and live for me. We will be happy. I shall learn to
keep your home. Oh! my dear, I will recompense you for the loss of all
this wild hunting and fighting. Let me persuade you, as much for your
sake as for mine, for you are my heart, and soul, and life. Go out
upon your last trail, Jack, and come back to me."

"An' let Wetzel go always alone?"

"He is different; he lives only for revenge. What are those poor
savages to you? You have a better, nobler life opening."

"Lass, I can't give him up."

"You need not; but give up this useless seeking of adventure. That,
you know, is half a borderman's life. Give it up, Jack, it not for
your own, then for my sake."

"No-no-never-I can't-I won't be a coward! After all these years I
won't desert him. No-no—"

"Do not say more," she pleaded, stealing closer to him until she was
against his breast. She slipped her arms around his neck. For love and
more than life she was fighting now. "Good-bye, my love." She kissed
him, a long, lingering pressure of her soft full lips on his.
"Dearest, do not shame me further. Dearest Jack, come back to me, for
I love you."

She released him, and ran sobbing from the room.

Unsteady as a blind man, he groped for the door, found it, and went
out.

The longest day in Jonathan Zane's life, the oddest, the most terrible
and complex with unintelligible emotions, was that one in which he
learned that the wilderness no longer sufficed for him.

He wandered through the forest like a man lost, searching for, he knew
not what. Rambling along the shady trails he looked for that
contentment which had always been his, but found it not. He plunged
into the depths of deep, gloomy ravines; into the fastnesses of
heavy-timbered hollows where the trees hid the light of day; he sought
the open, grassy hillsides, and roamed far over meadow and plain. Yet
something always eluded him. The invisible and beautiful life of all
inanimate things sang no more in his heart. The springy moss, the
quivering leaf, the tell-tale bark of the trees, the limpid, misty,
eddying pools under green banks, the myriads of natural objects from
which he had learned so much, and the manifold joyous life around him,
no longer spoke with soul-satisfying faithfulness. The environment of
his boyish days, of his youth, and manhood, rendered not a sweetness
as of old.

His intelligence, sharpened by the pain of new experience, told him
he had been vain to imagine that he, because he was a borderman, could
escape the universal destiny of human life. Dimly he could feel the
broadening, the awakening into a fuller existence, but he did not
welcome this new light. He realized that men had always turned, at
some time in their lives, to women even as the cypress leans toward
the sun. This weakening of the sterner stuff in him; this softening of
his heart, and especially the inquietude, and lack of joy and harmony
in his old pursuits of the forest trails bewildered him, and troubled
him some. Thousands of times his borderman's trail had been crossed,
yet never to his sorrow until now when it had been crossed by a woman.

Sick at heart, hurt in his pride, darkly savage, sad, remorseful, and
thrilling with awakened passion, all in turn, he roamed the woodland
unconsciously visiting the scenes where he had formerly found
contentment.

He paused by many a shady glen, and beautiful quiet glade; by gray
cliffs and mossy banks, searching with moody eyes for the spirit which
evaded him.

Here in the green and golden woods rose before him a rugged, giant
rock, moss-stained, and gleaming with trickling water. Tangled ferns
dressed in autumn's russet hue lay at the base of the green-gray
cliff, and circled a dark, deep pool dotted with yellow leaves.
Half-way up, the perpendicular ascent was broken by a protruding ledge
upon which waved broad-leaved plants and rusty ferns. Above, the cliff
sheered out with many cracks and seams in its weather-beaten front.

The forest grew to the verge of the precipice. A full foliaged oak and
a luxuriant maple, the former still fresh with its dark green leaves,
the latter making a vivid contrast with its pale yellow, purple-red,
and orange hues, leaned far out over the bluff. A mighty chestnut
grasped with gnarled roots deep into the broken cliff. Dainty plumes
of goldenrod swayed on the brink; red berries, amber moss, and green
trailing vines peeped over the edge, and every little niche and cranny
sported fragile ferns and pale-faced asters. A second cliff, higher
than the first, and more heavily wooded, loomed above, and over it
sprayed a transparent film of water, thin as smoke, and iridescent in
the sunshine. Far above where the glancing rill caressed the mossy
cliff and shone like gleaming gold against the dark branches with
their green and red and purple leaves, lay the faint blue of the sky.

Jonathan pulled on down the stream with humbler heart. His favorite
waterfall had denied him. The gold that had gleamed there was his
sweetheart's hair; the red was of her lips; the dark pool with its
lights and shades, its unfathomable mystery, was like her eyes.

He came at length to another scene of milder aspect. An open glade
where the dancing, dimpling brook raced under dark hemlocks, and where
blood-red sumach leaves, and beech leaves like flashes of sunshine,
lay against the green. Under a leaning birch he found a patch of
purple asters, and a little apart from them, by a mossy stone, a
lonely fringed gentian. Its deep color brought to him the dark blue
eyes that haunted him, and once again, like one possessed of an evil
spirit, he wandered along the merry water-course.

But finally pain and unrest left him. When he surrendered to his love,
peace returned. Though he said in his heart that Helen was not for
him, he felt he did not need to torture himself by fighting against
resistless power. He could love her without being a coward. He would
take up his life where it had been changed, and live it, carrying this
bitter-sweet burden always.

Memory, now that he admitted himself conquered, made a toy of him,
bringing the sweetness of fragrant hair, and eloquent eyes, and
clinging arms, and dewy lips. A thousand-fold harder to fight than
pain was the seductive thought that he had but to go back to Helen to
feel again the charm of her presence, to see the grace of her person,
to hear the music of her voice, to have again her lips on his.

Jonathan knew then that his trial had but begun; that the pain and
suffering of a borderman's broken pride and conquered spirit was
nothing; that to steel his heart against the joy, the sweetness, the
longing of love was everything.

So a tumult raged within his heart. No bitterness, nor wretchedness
stabbed him as before, but a passionate yearning, born of memory, and
unquenchable as the fires of the sun, burned there.

Helen's reply to his pale excuses, to his duty, to his life, was that
she loved him. The wonder of it made him weak. Was not her answer
enough? "I love you!" Three words only; but they changed the world. A
beautiful girl loved him, she had kissed him, and his life could never
again be the same. She had held out her arms to him—and he, cold,
churlish, unfeeling brute, had let her shame herself, fighting for her
happiness, for the joy that is a woman's divine right. He had been
blind; he had not understood the significance of her gracious action;
he had never realized until too late, what it must have cost her, what
heartburning shame and scorn his refusal brought upon her. If she ever
looked tenderly at him again with her great eyes; or leaned toward him
with her beautiful arms outstretched, he would fall at her feet and
throw his duty to the winds, swearing his love was hers always and his
life forever.

So love stormed in the borderman's heart.

Slowly the melancholy Indian-summer day waned as Jonathan strode out
of the woods into a plain beyond, where he was to meet Wetzel at
sunset. A smoky haze like a purple cloud lay upon the gently waving
grass. He could not see across the stretch of prairie-land, though at
this point he knew it was hardly a mile wide. With the trilling of the
grasshoppers alone disturbing the serene quiet of this autumn
afternoon, all nature seemed in harmony with the declining season. He
stood a while, his thoughts becoming the calmer for the silence and
loneliness of this breathing meadow.

When the shadows of the trees began to lengthen, and to steal far out
over the yellow grass, he knew the time had come, and glided out upon
the plain. He crossed it, and sat down upon a huge stone which lay
with one shelving end overhanging the river.

Far in the west the gold-red sun, too fiery for his direct gaze, lost
the brilliance of its under circle behind the fringe of the wooded
hill. Slowly the red ball sank. When the last bright gleam had
vanished in the dark horizon Jonathan turned to search wood and plain.
Wetzel was to meet him at sunset. Even as his first glance swept
around a light step sounded behind him. He did not move, for that step
was familiar. In another moment the tall form of Wetzel stood
beside him.