Part 13

“Will, old fellow, you’re sick, you’re not yourself . . . .”

“I’m not myself. I shall never be myself again. You and Maisie have . . . . killed me.”

“Will, for God’s sake, listen!”

“To more lies? I felt it there under the canvas; felt the prongs and the ball on the top carved with little silver roses. Maisie’s other pin. She said: ‘P’raps I’ve given that to someone else, you old silly . . . .’ Had she, Jack, _had_ she? Or did you pick it up? I could forgive you then, for you couldn’t help loving her, could you, though I’d be sorry for Laure? Tell me if you found it or if she gave it to you. Tell me . . . . Only tell me the truth, no more lies! All these two years and nothing but lies. Jack!”

Through white lips, Rainger said: “I shall neither speak to you, nor lie to you, as you say, again.” And there was something implacable in his quietness; he was quick to pity where he loved; but doubt was to him the unpardonable sin against any love. And Will—Will!—had refused to believe him.

“You _shall_ tell me if you found it or if she gave it to you!”

Rainger was silent. He had his own dumb devil of pride, which would have kept him silent then, though the world fell.

“Jack! If I _kneel_ to you . . . . ?”

Silent still, and almost with wonder, Rainger stared at the man who doubted. And there rose up against Charron all the bitter longing and desolation of those exiled years. Something seemed poised above him, rushing down on him; an avalanche of darkness such as no hill ever loosed on man. He staggered forward, crying terribly: “You shall tell, if I have to tear the truth out of you with my hands!” He flung himself, panting, on Rainger, bore him backwards. They fell together and rolled to the lip of the ledge. Charron was uppermost. A swift and dreadful energy was his, a sureness of strength. He thrust Rainger outward till his unsupported head was over the sheer fall, the swept rock, and the spruce far below. “Tell now!” he said.

Rainger’s head went back, his eyelids fluttered, he was near fainting again. The edge of rock burnt the back of his neck like hot metal. His anger fell away. He felt that he must keep very quiet, or Will would have something to be sorry for . . . . The thought came mechanically; he could not have spoken to save either Will or himself.

“Did you find it? Did she give it to you?”

Rainger’s senses wavered. He heard the words from a distance. Yet those were Will’s hands brutally grasping him, that was Will’s savage, panting breath. The edge of pain passed to his shoulders and scorched there. His neck was an agony. He was beyond speech then, even if his hurt faith would have let him speak. The sky rode upon his eyes, beneath him the earth swam in vast abysses of silver and amethyst. The universe swung and poised, ready to crush him; then, steadied to a calm star. He knew he could not lose the star. Nearly gone, his eyes rested on it. He just breathed the word: “Laure . . . .”

He was aware of a cry going past him. He felt himself drawn suddenly to safety and laid down. He felt no more. Once again the world went out in a sweep of many waters; but even there he knew his star was with him, and would be with him to the end.

He woke, from swoon or sleep, to a world grown darker. The air was cold, and solemn with an utter quietness. The hills were silvering in moonlight before the day had entirely faded from them. Many stars were there, a great company of witnesses. He sat up; and saw at his feet the black shape of a man crouched upon the rock.

“Will . . . .”

Charron lifted his head slowly from his knees. His face was changed as if years had passed over him. He said slowly: “Do you remember? You’re speaking to a man who would have killed you an hour back.”

“I remember. Is it so long?”

“Yes.” The dead voice altered; he went on, hurriedly. “I have sat here with you. I have not touched you. I am not—fit to touch you. I’ve waited; not knowing if you’d live or die . . . . You can never forgive me, of course. It’s past that. But if you could give me the charity you’d show to any cur, the kindness you have for a lost husky or a hungry Siwash . . . . and then let me go . . . .”

The broken, humble voice died away. After a long silence, Rainger said: “Then you did not look?”

“No.”

“Come and look now, then. I was wrong too, Will. I should have spoken.”

Charron crept to his side. Rainger lifted the little canvas bag and shook something from it into his hand. This he held out to Charron.

“This is what was in it, Will.” Charron’s very life was in abeyance as he looked and looked again.

“Two long needles,” went on Rainger’s quiet voice, “their points stuck in a shrivelled chestnut that Laure picked up in the woods one day. They’re the only needles I’ve got whose points will go through leather. I keep ’em that way round my neck so they won’t get rusty. That’s your silver hairpin, Will.”

After a long time Charron moved. He sank slowly to his face, and lay there with his hands clasped over his head. Presently, he began to cry as a tired child cries, with sobs and broken words. Rainger waited, silently. When that passion had also spent itself, he too, moved. He took from his belt the pouch containing the hoarded gold-dust, and laid it by Charron’s hand. “This is yours, Will,” he said, gently.

Charron looked up. His eyes rested on the compassion of his friend’s face, as Rainger’s eyes had rested on his star.

“I guess this has decided for us, Will. You’re the one who will take the dust and go out and see your girl this winter; for you’re the one who needs to go the most.”

Charron looked at him, still with breathless, humble questioning.

“It’s this way, Will. Laure and I, we’re secure of each other. We can wait. Two years—five years—twenty; if it’s God’s will we can afford to wait a lifetime, and know it will make no difference. She trusts me as I trust her. Love like that—casts out fear.” He finished, almost with tenderness. “If I’d seen you with anything of hers—the most intimate, the most dear things,—in your hands, on your heart, I’d have known there was some explanation. Even then I _couldn’t_ have doubted her . . . . or you.

“But it’s not that way with you. Your love isn’t self-sustaining. It needs to see, to touch, to _know_; or else it doubts and suffers. Take the dust and go and see Maisie. But—don’t teach her to doubt, poor child.”

“Jack . . . .”

“Ours is the stronger, you see, Will. And the strong things of life can always afford to wait. It’s you who must go and I who must stay, because your need’s the greater of the two.”

He rose unsteadily to his feet, and waited a moment. But there was no word from Charron, flung before him in the dust of the soul. Rainger turned away and took a few steps down the giddy ledge, holding to the rocks as he went. But in a little while he paused, and turned again, and called, wistfully: “Will!”

Some sort of a broken answer. Rainger, his eyes on his serene star, smiled a little.

“I’m kind of—knocked about, Will. Won’t you come and help me home?”

He stood patiently in the clear, kind twilight, till, with a great sobbing cry, Charron rose and ran to him, and put a strong arm around him, holding him as though he would never let him go. And so, under the eternal patience of the stars, they went slowly down together to their home.

THE DESERT ROAD

Cuthbertson, urging his jaded horse over the last of the weary miles from the mines to Los Santos, always pulled up at old Juana’s hut. He had pulled up one day when new to the work and the land, deathly sunsick; and Juana had dragged him into the shadow of the wall, and given him water, and finally tramped into the town for the superintendent’s buggy and mules. Cuthbertson never found out why she had done this, but he was grateful, in the silent way he had early learned of the desert. Since then she always had cool water for him, and a skin spread in the shade. And sometimes she would talk to him in brief Spanish. He was the only white man to whom she ever spoke; and she spoke to him because she thought him like the Rainmaker.

If you asked anyone in Los Santos how long Juana had been there, they said, “God knows.” Cuthbertson thought it quite likely that God did know, and kept account of it.

There were peach-orchards round Los Santos, and the sound of running water, and a pleasant acreage of alfalfa fields. But green life stopped where the water stopped; and westward of the last irrigation ditch lay the desert, oldest of all things save the sea. When the east wind blew by day across Los Santos, the scent and bloom of the orchards was breathed out into the sands. But at sunset, when the west wind brought the bitterness of the alkali-wastes, the little town seemed to cower and shrink beleaguered in the heart of the vast night. Only the steady sound of running water, like the footfall of a sentry, stood between Los Santos and the eternal threat of the sand.

The road ran through the town and out into the desert. It paused at the mines, then went on and was lost in the coloured hills of the far distance. No rain fell on these hills, which were like great jewels worn brittle and thin with ceaseless wind and sun. If a man had business with the desert, he went by that road; sometimes he returned by it. Between the town and the mines, beside a tiny pool that dried to white dust in the heats, was Juana’s hut.

When there was water in the pool, she grew a few melons and a patch of corn. When it dried, she carried water from the tanks, miles away. She had a pot hanging under the roof of her hut to keep cool, and in the drip of it, gray lizards and snakes and earth-coloured birds would gather silently. They were voiceless creatures of the voiceless waste, but not more dumb than old Juana.

Every evening she climbed to the crest of a long wave of sand and watched the sun going down at the end of the desert road. She saw the night sweeping inwards visibly with a movement that was as a sound, the sound of great wings trailed along the sand. Then the stars glowed out in the transparent heights of darkness, the lights of Los Santos, twinkling within their defences, were answered over the curve of the world by the one high light from the mines. Then she went home and slept, knowing that that day no word would come from the Rainmaker.

Once, looking at Cuthbertson with her grave eyes, she said, in the speech he but half understood, “Hate is more patient than day or night, the sand is more patient than hate, and love waits longer than the sand.”

Cuthbertson leaned his head back in the shadow. Westward a mirage danced in the heat, and the crumbling dry hills seemed to lift from blue water and green reeds. He said, “I don’t like the sand, Juana.”

Old Juana laid her hand on her breast. “It takes youth and strength, wit and the memory of many gods. I’m only an old woman of the sands.” Her eyes glinted at him like a snake’s. “Only an old woman. . . But the desire of the heart is stronger than the sand.”

Cuthbertson sighed, thinking of the machinery abandoned at Lost Mesa when the water dried. “We’ve found nothing stronger than the sand,” he said grimly, “but tell me about it, anyway.” He had a queer liking for the old woman, and he was grateful; besides, if she would talk, he might profit to the extent of a paper for the Smithsonian.

Juana looked out over the desert. After a time she said, “It is a long time since I was a girl, and the young men fluted to me in the cool of the evening, and in the maize-dance my shadow was blest. Like a shadow at midday was the Rainmaker to me. He was my husband.”

Cuthbertson shifted in the shadow so that he faced her, and his long boots creaked.

“There was no town then, and no mines. Only the cuttings of the Lost People in the mesas, and this little pool. We came here, my man and I, together. He said, ‘Stay here and rest, it is a good place. I am going to look for turquoise in the hills, and when I find another good place, I will send word. Then follow.’ He touched my long black hair and smiled upon me, and went. I watched him as he walked down the road into the wings of the sunset. Then I went back to my water-jars and waited.”

She was silent so long that Cuthbertson said, lazily, “Well, Juana, what’s the rest of it?”

“There is no more. I am waiting still for that word that tells me to follow. But it does not come. Somewhere between here and there”—she pointed to the vacant glare,—“the sand took him.”

“The sand. . . ?”

“Yes. Perhaps. The wind blew and the moving sand took him while he slept. Or perhaps the water had gone. I do not know. But if he lived, I should have seen his face, heard his voice. And I see him only in dreams, hear him only when the wind blows on the Lost Tombs of the mesas. There are many such.”

“And—you’re still waiting for word from him?”

“There is nothing else to do.” Juana would say no more.

Cuthbertson rode into Los Santos silently that night, thinking of many things, and the Smithsonian was not one of them. He went to bed early at the superintendent’s house, where he stayed; the superintendent’s daughter had found him an inattentive listener to her songs; he slept to the faint whispering of blown sand on the iron roof. Sand and yellowed peach-leaves rustled on the floor of his room. And he dreamed all night of a nameless Indian who had gone to look for turquoise in the hills, years and years ago. He dreamed too of Juana. “Is there anyone,” he found himself crying with a kind of passion to the night, “who’d wait like that for me. . . ?” And he rode on his way before breakfast without saying good-bye to the superintendent’s daughter. Somehow, old Juana had set him a new standard of the soul.

After that, as he rode into the hills in the endless search for water and wealth, he thought very much of Juana and the Rainmaker. Old Juana being an established fact, his thoughts went chiefly to the nameless dead man who still lived for one old woman. Riding up the stony Arroyos, through the wine-red gateways of the hills, the sun blistering his bridle-hand and the hot southwest drying his lungs, he began to reconstruct the Rainmaker’s journey from the pool beside Los Santos. It amused him to map it out mentally and in time this mental map grew to be a very minute and logical thing. Then, after the manner of men who lead lonely lives in places where the wind gives death and the sun madness, he began to see his own imaginings.

The first time this happened, he rode to Mesa City for a case of assorted medicines. He dosed himself variously; but the doses did not affect whatever obscure brain-cells or nerve centres were thrown out of balance. They went on busily at their work of building for Cuthbertson the bodily likeness of the Rainmaker.

As the thing went on, and his mind remained otherwise unshaken, Cuthbertson began to regard it scientifically, as befitted one who kept Smithsonian Reports in his packing-case of a room at the mines. He had methodical notes in a diary:—

“April 7. Found reputed spring near Presidio Pass. Water strongly impregnated mineral salts. (Cf. Analyst’s report on sample). Horse would not drink of it. Saw Rainmaker again. Hallucination commenced 11.45, continued until 12.4. He walked parallel with me at a distance of about 25 feet. Headband of antelope skin, circlets of copper or gold, large turquoise on right wrist. Appearance very vivid, as it has been from the beginning. Thought at first it was real Indian, like the one I rode down last week thinking he was an apparition, and had to pacify with 2 dols. (Mexican). Noticed at last that the hair, which is very long did not move in the wind. Face seemed turned away as usual, or somehow indistinct. Letter from Macnamara re sale of machinery at Lost Mesa. Bay pony injured.

“April 18. Sale of machinery fallen through; advised scrapping for old iron. Mac too thrifty make money here. Rode out to the Presidio pools again. Saw Rainmaker suddenly, walking along sand on parallel course as usual. Exceptional that he really does walk instead of sliding along like a magic-lantern picture. Have an idea that the face is not turned so far aside as it was. Don’t like this. Apparition somewhat indistinct otherwise against violent stratification. Had to shoot bay pony. Ordered new safety razor.

“April 25. During hallucinations, which are becoming more frequent, pulse and respiration remain normal. It must be overwork. Rainmaker joined us to-day three miles east of the pools. Very vivid, but only lasted ten minutes. Face undoubtedly being turned towards me. Apparitions coincide remarkably with supposed route of journey. (Logical effect of conscious on sub-conscious ideas or vice versa). Sand moving badly in prevalent winds, lower end of Presidio drifting up. Should I tell Juana?”

But he kept silence, as a lonely child keeps silence over the visualization of his imaginary play-fellows. He was keenly interested, and only at times a little afraid. The apparition always came after a day of unusual fatigue, and in exactly the same way. He began to watch for it as for a friend. . . Turning some rock wall or corner of desert, he would find himself riding parallel with an Indian, who walked through the sand about twenty-five feet away as a tired man walks. Then Cuthbertson would say to his pony “There’s the Rainmaker,” and watch. The pony never paid any attention, and the moving figure never came any nearer. Through it there always ran a certain flicker of uncertainty, as through a mirage. And, like a mirage, it shook and thinned and went out.

Perhaps it was the lonely child, coming to the surface in the lonely man that made Cuthbertson, as the vision passed, lift his hand to the brim of his Stetson with a soft “Vaya con Dios,—go with God.”

The machinery at Lost Mesa found a purchaser at last, and Cuthbertson, through three blinding hot weeks, had to see it taken apart and numbered and packed on mule-back to the Los Santos line. Mules died and men sickened, heads grew light and tempers uncertain. For these three weeks, Cuthbertson lived at the mines; he had no thought to spare by day or night for the Rainmaker.

On the last day he rode back from Lost Mesa to the mines, alone and tired out, sitting his tired pony like a sack. The hills reeled in the afternoon heat, the desert was a grayish glare under a sky so hot it had no colour in it. Cuthbertson was waiting thirstily for the hour when the mesas would suddenly stand up in the evening like the foundations of some apocalyptic city forgotten of God, and the dark sweep in on the world like a wave foamed with stars. He looked about him as he rode, as though half-consciously waiting for something. He was waiting for the Rainmaker. Presently, as he turned down a shallow arroyo grown with mummied yuccas, he saw the little white dazzle of the eyes that preceded the vision.

“There’s the Rainmaker,” he said as usual, the man clear in his brain. “But I didn’t think he’d been so far west.” The Rainmaker was walking through the sand as a tired man walks. With a little jump of the pulses, Cuthbertson saw that the face of the apparition was turned fully towards him.

He sickened for one strange instant, fearing, with a fear as old as the desert, the shadow of his own dream. But the face, seen uncertainly through the flicker of the heat, was only that of a young Indian of the sands; lean, grave, watchful. The headband gleamed with copper or gold, the hair fell long and straight. And beneath it the eyes were directed, not at Cuthbertson, but intently beyond him to the east, along the desert road.

“I know,” said Cuthbertson, quick as thought, “you’re looking for Juana. . .”

He reined in. But the figure moved on, still looking to the east. Against an outcrop of honey-yellow rock it broke and went out. Cuthbertson shook up his horse and followed slowly.

The rock was surrounded with great waves of loose sand that drifted perpetually before the prevailing winds. Sometimes it was buried, then in a few days, bared to the sky. Now as Cuthbertson stooped from the saddle, he saw that the wind had uncovered a little worn hollow in the rock, and in it a pale glitter of colour. He dismounted. The glitter of colour was a piece of turquoise veined with gold.

He had it in his hand. Then, slowly, he stooped and took out what else there was from the keeping of the desert. These things he tied in his handkerchief and fastened to the saddle, and his brown fingers shook a little over the knot. Mounting he rode on. But at the foot of the arroyo he looked back gravely, his hand at the hat-brim.

“Rest with God,” said Cuthbertson.

It was late before he stopped at old Juana’s hut. She sat just within, her chin on her knees, staring out at the low steady stars.

“Juana.” Cuthbertson’s voice was very tired.

“Come in, señor.” Her eyes gleamed in the dusk, alert and watchful as a snake’s. Her face slowly puckered into wrinkles of kindness. But Cuthbertson would not enter.

“It’s the sand, Juana,” he said, and now his voice was not quite steady. “It has given up something,—something it had hidden for a long, long time under a yellow rock beyond the last pools. It has spoken, Juana. Perhaps the word is for you, perhaps for someone else. I don’t know. You told me once the sand gripped hard as the grave.”

Old Juana raised her head. “But the hold of the heart is stronger,” she said, in the language Cuthbertson scarcely understood. But her eyes commanded him. Silently he stooped across the hut’s threshold, laying the beautiful veined turquoise at her feet. And with it what had once been a man’s hand.

The sand had dealt with it so long that it was no more terrible than a child’s toy of bone and leather. The night-wind moved it as it lay, lightly as the yellowed leaves of the peach-orchards, on Juana’s mat. A small square agate, bound in gold wire, shifted on the forefinger. Cuthbertson showed it silently.

“It is the Rainmaker’s ring,” said Juana at last. “The word has come.”

Cuthbertson bent his head. “There was nothing more. Just the turquoise in a little hollow and the curved hand,—kind of keeping it. . .”

“He was keeping it for me,” said old Juana quietly.

“There was nothing else. The rest had been taken by the sand, long ago.” His horse shifted restlessly outside, and he moved to leave. He was deadly tired in body and soul, lonely of heart.

The old woman sat motionless, but her eyes glowed. “It is the word,” she said again contentedly. “I have waited a long time. Now I can go.”

“Go with God,” answered Cuthbertson in deep Spanish as he mounted and rode on to Los Santos.

And when he was out of hearing, Juana wept. She placed her water-jug where the lizards might reach it, and scattered her ground corn on the sand. What the desert had restored to her she hid in her bosom with little murmured words. Behind her the lights of Los Santos twinkled within the guarding water, and ahead the lonely light from the mines shone across the curve of the world. But as she went down the desert road her face was to the stars. Before her the clear dusk parted as in welcome, it closed behind her like a tender barrier to be passed no more. Above her was the infinite heaven and the hosts of it. Under her feet the sand that took all things, youth and strength and the works of all men’s hands, but might not wholly take love.

Old Juana was going at last to join the Rainmaker in a good place.

LA TRISTESSE

This is not really the story of a child, though it began when Hypolite caught the measles at dancing-class. And when he was getting better, his uncle, who kept a business-like eye upon his health and his manners, sent him to Madame Dulac at Saint Jacques de Kilkenny, to grow strong in the air of the hills.