The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of Colorado

by Cyrus Townsend Brady

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE MAN'S HEART

  Now love produces both happiness and unhappiness, dependent uponconditions, but on the whole I think the happiness predominates, forlove itself if it be true and high is its own reward. Love may feelitself unworthy and may shrink even from the unlatching of the shoe laceof the beloved, yet it joys in its own existence nevertheless. Of courseits greatest satisfaction is in the return, but there is a sweetnesseven in the despair of the truly loving.

  Enid Maitland, however, did not have to endure indifference, or fightagainst a passion which met with no response, for this man loved herwith a love that was greater even than her own. The moon, in the triteaphorism, looks on many brooks, the brook sees no moon but the one abovehim in the heavens. In one sense his merit in winning her affection forhimself from the hundreds of men she knew was the greater; in many yearshe had only seen this one woman. Naturally she should be everything tohim. She represented to him not only the woman but womankind. He hadbeen a boy practically when he had buried himself in those mountains,and in all that time he had seen nobody like Enid Maitland. Everyargument which has been exploited to show why she should love him couldbe turned about to account for his passion for her. Those arguments arenot necessary, they are all supererogatory, like idle words. To him alsolove had been born in an hour. It had flashed into existence as if fromthe fiat of the Divine.

  Oh, he had fought against it. Like the eremites of old he had beenscourged into the desert by remorse and another passion, but time haddone its work. The woman he first loved had ministered not to thespiritual side of the man, or if she had so ministered in any degree itwas because he had looked at her with a glamour of inexperience andyouth. During those five years of solitude, of study and of reflection,the truth had gradually unrolled itself before him. Conclusions vastlyat variance with what he had ever believed possible as to the woman uponwhom he had first bestowed his heart had got into his being and were insolution there, this present woman was the precipitant which broughtthem to life. He knew now what the old appeal of his wife had been. Heknew now what the new appeal of this woman was.

  In humanity two things in life are inextricably intermingled, body andsoul. Where the function of one begins and the function of the otherends no one is able to say. In all human passions there are admixturesof the earth earthy. We are born the sons of the Old Adam as we arere-born the sons of the New. Passions are complex. As in harvest wheatand tares grow together until the end, so in love earth and heavenmingle ever. He remembered a clause from an ancient marriage service hehad read. "With my body I thee worship," and with every fiber of hisphysical being, he loved this woman.

  It would be idle to deny that, impossible to disguise the facts, but inthe melting pot of passion the preponderant ingredients were mental andspiritual; and just because higher and holier things predominated, heheld her in his heart a sacred thing. Love is like a rose: the materialpart is the beautiful blossom, the spiritual factor is the fragrancewhich abides in the rose jar even after every leaf has faded away, orwhich may be expressed from the soft petals by the hard circumstances ofpain and sorrow until there is left nothing but the lingering perfume ofthe flower.

  His body trembled if she laid a hand upon him, his soul thirsted forher; present or absent he conjured before his tortured brain thesweetness that inhabited her breast. He had been clear-sighted enoughin analyzing the past, he was neither clear-sighted nor coherent inthinking of the present. He worshiped her, he could have thrown himselfupon his knees to her; if it would have added to her happiness she couldhave killed him, smiling at her. Rode she in the Juggernaut car of theancient idol, with his body would he have unhesitatingly paved the wayand have been glad of the privilege. He longed to compass her with sweetobservances. The world revenged itself upon him for his long neglect, ithad summed up in this one woman all its charm, its beauty, its romance,and had thrust her into his very arms. His was one of those greatpassions which illuminate the records of the past. Paolo had not lovedFrancesca more.

  Oh, yes, the woman knew he loved her. It was not in the power of mortalman, no matter how iron his restraint, how absolute the imposition ofhis will, to keep his heart hidden, his passion undisclosed. No onecould keep such things secret. His love for her cried aloud in athousand ways: even his look when he dared to turn his eyes upon her waseloquent of his feeling. He never said a word, however; he held his lipsat least fettered and bound for he believed that honor and itsobligations weighed down the balance upon the contrary side to whichhis inclinations lay.

  He was not worthy of this woman. In the first place all he had to offerher was a blood-stained hand. That might have been overcome in his mind;but pride in his self-punishment, his resolution to withdraw himselffrom man and woman until such time as God completed his expiation andsignified His acceptance of the penitent by taking away his life, heldhim inexorably.

  The dark face of his wife rose before him. He forced himself to thinkupon her; she had loved him, she had given him all that she could. Heremembered how she had pleaded with him that he take her on that lastand most dangerous of journeys, her devotion to him had been so greatshe could not let him go out of her sight a moment, he thoughtfatuously! And he had killed her. In the queer turmoil of his brain heblamed himself for everything. He could not be false to his purpose,false to her memory, unworthy of the passion in which he believed shehad held him and which he believed he had inspired.

  If he had gone out in the world, after her death, he might haveforgotten most of these things, he might have lived them down. Saner,clearer views would have come to him. His morbid self-reproach andself-consciousness would have been changed. But he had lived with themalone for five years and now there was no putting them aside. Honor andpride, the only things that may successfully fight against love,overcame him. He could not give way. He wanted to, every time he was inher presence he longed to, sweep her to his heart and crush her in hisarms and bend her head back and press kisses of fire on her lips.

  But honor and pride held him back. How long would they continue toexercise dominion over him? Would the time come when his passion risinglike a sea would thunder upon these artificial embankments of his soul,beat them down and sweep them away?

  At first the disparity between their situations, not so much on accountof family or of property--the treasures of the mountains, hidden sincecreation, he had discovered and let lie--but because of the youth andposition of the woman compared to his own maturer years, his desperateexperience, and his social withdrawal, had reinforced his determinationto live and love without a sign. But he had long since got beyond this.Had he been free he would have taken her like a viking of old, if he hadto pluck her from amid a thousand swords and carry her to a beggar's hutwhich love would have turned to a palace. And she would have come withhim on the same conditions.

  He did not know that. Women have learned through centuries of weaknessthat fine art of concealment which man has never mastered. She never lethim see what she thought of him. Yet he was not without suspicion; ifthat suspicion grew to certainty, would he control himself then?

  At first he had sought to keep out of her way, but she had compelled himto come in. The room that was kitchen and bedroom and store-room for himwas cheerless and somewhat cold. Save at night or when he was busy withother tasks outside they lived together in the great room. It was alwayswarm, it was always bright, it was always cheerful, there.

  The little piles of manuscript she had noted were books he had written.He made no effort to conceal such things from her. He talked franklyenough about his life in the hills, indeed there was no possibility ofavoiding the discussion of such topics. On but two subjects was heinexorably silent. One was the present state of his affections and theother was the why and wherefore of his lonely life. She knew beyondperadventure that he loved her, but she had no faint suspicion even asto the reason why he had become a recluse. He had never given her theslightest clew to his past save that admission that he had known Kirkby,which was in
itself nothing definite and which she never connected withthat package of letters which she still kept with her.

  The man's mind was too active and fertile to be satisfied with manuallabor alone, the books that he had written were scientific treatises inthe main. One was a learned discussion of the fauna and flora of themountains. Another was an exhaustive account of the mineral resourcesand geological formations of the range. He had only to allow a whisper,a suspicion of his discovery of gold and silver in the mountains toescape him and the canyons and crests alike would be filled with eagerprospectors. Still a third work was a scientific analysis of the waterpowers in the canyons.

  He had willingly allowed her to read them all. Much of them she foundtechnical and, aside from the fact that he had written them,uninteresting. But there was one book remaining in which he simplydiscussed the mountains in the various seasons of the year; when thesnows covered them, when the grass and the moss came again, when theflowers bloomed, when autumn touched the trees. There was the soul ofthe man, poetry expressed in prose, man-like but none the less poetryfor that. This book she pored over, she questioned him about it, theydiscussed it as they discussed Keats and the other poets.

  Those were happy evenings. She on one side of the fire sewing, herfinger wound with cloth to hold his giant thimble, fashioning forherself some winter garments out of a gay colored, red, white and blackancient and exquisitely woven Navajo blanket, soft and pliable almost asan old fashioned piece of satin--priceless if she had but knownit--which he put at her disposal. While on the other side of the samehomely blaze he made her out of the skins of some of the animals that hehad killed, shapeless foot coverings, half moccasin and wholly legging,which she could wear over her shoes in her short excursions around theplateau and which would keep her feet warm and comfortable.

  By her permission he smoked as he worked, enjoying the hour, puttingaside the past and the future and for a few moments blissfully content.Sometimes he laid aside his pipe and whatever work he was engaged uponand read to her from some immortal noble number. Sometimes theentertainment fell to her and she sang to him in her glorious contraltovoice, music that made him mad. Once he could stand it no longer. Atthe end of a burst of song which filled the little room--he had risento his feet while she sang, compelled to the erect position by themagnificent melody--as the last notes died away and she smiled at him,triumphant and expectant of his praise and his approval, he hurledhimself out of the room and into the night; wrestling for hours with thestorm which after all was but a trifle to that which raged in his bosom.While she, left alone and deserted, quaked within the silent room tillshe heard him come back.

  Often and often when she slept quietly on one side the thin partition,he lay awake on the other, and sometimes his passion drove him forth tocool the fever, the fire in his soul, in the icy, wintry air. Thestruggle within him preyed upon him, the keen loving eye of the womansearched his face, scrutinized him, looked into his heart, saw what wasthere.

  She determined to end it, deciding that he must confess his affections.She had no premonition of the truth and no consideration of any evilconsequences held her back. She could give free range to her love andher devotion. She had the ordering of their lives and she had the powerto end the situation growing more and more impossible. She fancied thematter easily terminable. She thought she had only to let him see herheart in such ways as a maiden may, to bring joy to his own, to makehim speak. She did not dream of the reality.

  One night, therefore, a month or more after she had come, she resolvedto end the uncertainty. She believed the easiest and the quickest waywould be to get him to tell her why he was there. She naturally surmisedthat the woman of the picture, which she had never seen since the firstday of her arrival, was in some measure the cause of it; and the onlypain she had in the situation was the keen jealousy that would obtrudeitself at the thought of that woman. She remembered everything that hehad said to her and she recalled that he had once made the remark thathe would treat her as he would have his wife treated if he had one;therefore whoever and whatever the picture of this woman was, she wasnot his wife. She might have been someone he had loved, who had notloved him. She might have died. She was jealous of her, but she did notfear her.

  After a long and painful effort the woman had completed the winter suitshe had made for herself. He had advised her and had helped her. It wasa belted tunic that fell to her knees, the red and black stripes ranaround it, edged the broad collar, cuffed the warm sleeves and markedthe graceful waist line. It was excessively becoming to her. He had beendown into the valley, or the pocket, for a final inspection of theburros before the night, which promised to be severe, fell, and she hadtaken advantage of the opportunity to put it on.

  She knew that she was beautiful; her determination to make this eveningcount had brought an unusual color to her cheeks, an unwonted sparkle toher eye. She stood up as she heard him enter the other room, she wasstanding erect as he came through the door and faced her. He had onlyseen her in the now somewhat shabby blue of her ordinary camp dressbefore, and her beauty fairly smote him in his face. He stood beforeher, wrapped in his great fur coat, snow and ice clinging to it,entranced. The woman smiled at the effect she produced.

  "Take off your coat," she said gently, approaching him. "Here, let mehelp you. Do you realize that I have been here over a month now? I wantto have a little talk with you. I want you to tell me something."