Heart's Desire by Emerson Hough (comprehension books .TXT) 📕

"Say, man," said he, jerking his thumb toward the house, "that new girl is the absolute limit. She dropped in just like we'd been expectin' her. I was some scared; but she's just folks!"

Dan Anderson hardly heard him. He passed on into the house, where he had long ago made himself easily at home with the women of the place. It was a half hour later that he spoke directly to the girl. "I was just thinking," said he, "that after all the dust and heat and everything you might like to walk, for just a minute or so, over to our city park. Foliage, you know; avenues, flowers; sweetness and light."

She looked at the man quietly, as if she failed to understand the half-cynical bitterness, the half-wistfulness in his voice, yet she rose and joined him. All human beings in Heart's Desire that evening fell in with the plans of Dan Anderson without cavil and without possible resistance.

A short distance up the arroyo, toward the old abandoned stamp mill, there was a two-inch pipe of water which came down from the Patos spring, far up on the mountain side. At the end of this pipe, where the water was now going to waste, the Littlest Girl from Kansas had taken in charge the precious flow, and proposed a tiny garden of her own. Here there were divers shrubs, among these a single rose bush, now blossomless. Dan Anderson broke off a leafy twig or so, and handed them to Constance, who pinned them on her breast.

"This is our park," said he, very gravely; "I hope you have enjoyed your stroll along the boulevard. I hope, also, that the entertainment of the cow gentleman was not displeasing."

"Not a word!" she answered, her cheek flushing; "you shall not rail at them. These people are genuine."

"I'm not apologizing," he said quickly; "there are just a few things a fellow learns out here. One is not to apologize; and another is not to beg. Sit down." There were two white boulders beside which the trickle of water rippled. Obeying him, she seated herself. Presently Dan Anderson settled himself upon the other, and for a time they sat in silence. The purple shadows had long ago deepened into half darkness, and as they looked up above the long, slow curve of old Carrizo, there rose the burnished silver of the wondrous moon of Heart's Desire. The bare and barren valley was softened and glorified into a strange, half-ghostly beauty. The earth has few scenes more beautiful than Heart's Desire at moonlight. These two sat and gazed for a time.

"And so this is your world!" the girl spoke at length, more to herself than to him.

"Yes," he replied almost savagely, sweeping his hand toward the mountain-rimmed horizon. "Yes, it's mine."

"It is very beautiful," she murmured softly.

"Yes," said Dan Anderson, "it's beautiful. Some time there'll be a man who'll learn something in such a place as this. I don't know but I've learned a little bit myself in the last few years."

"The years!" she whispered to herself.

"It seems forever," said he. "The time when a fellow's taking his medicine always seems long, I reckon, I have almost forgotten my life of five years ago—almost, except a part of it. It's been another world here. Nothing matters much, does it?"

Whether there was now bitterness or softness in his speech she could not tell, but she found no reproach for herself in word or tone.

"Look," said she at length, pointing down at the valley of Heart's Desire, now bathed in the full flood of the unveiled moonlight. "Look! It is unspeakable."

He looked at her face instead. "I've seen you right here," he said, "right at this very place, a thousand times. It's Eden. It's the Garden. It's the Beginning."

"It is the world," she whispered vaguely.

"Yes, yes—" Words burst from his lips beyond his power to control. "It is Eden, it is Paradise, but a vacant Eden, a Paradise incomplete. Constance—"

The girl felt herself shiver at this sound of a voice which all too often these past five years had come to her unbidden when she found moments of self-communion in her own restless and dissatisfied life. Walls had not shut it out, music had not drowned it, gayety had not served to banish it. She had heard it in her subjective soul ofttimes when the shadows fell and the firelight flickered. Now, beneath a limitless sky, under a strange radiance, in a wild primeval world—in this Eden which they two alone occupied—she heard him, the man whom in her heart she loved, speaking to her once more in very person, and speaking that very thought which was in her own heart that hour. Her bosom rose tumultuously, her throat fluttered. Instinctively she would have fled, but a hand on her shoulder pressed her back as she would have arisen, and she obeyed—as she had always obeyed him—as she always would.

"Paradise unfinished—" he whispered, his face close to hers. "You know what it is that's missing."

Ah! could not a woman also know the longing, the vacancy, the solitude of an Eden incomplete! She turned to him trembling, her lips half open, as though to welcome a long-hoped-for draught of happiness.

Alas! it was not happiness, but misery that came; for Constance Ellsworth now got taste of those bitter waters of life which are withheld from none. There was a sound of a distant shout—the chance call of some drunken reveller—far down the street, a tawdry, unimportant incident, but enough to break a spell, to destroy an illusion, to awaken a conscience for a man, if that phrase be just. Dan Anderson turned to look down the long street of Heart's Desire. It was as though the physical act restored him to another realm, another mental world. He started, and half shivered as his hand dropped to his side. His face showed haggard even in the moonlight.

"My God! what am I saying?" he murmured to himself.

Then presently he drew himself up, smiling bitterly. "Some prominent citizens of the place enjoying themselves," he said and nodded toward the street. "Don't you think you'd like Heart's Desire?"

The moment of Eve—the woman's moment—the instant for her happiness was past and gone! The light of the moon lay ghostly over all the world, but there was no radiance, no joy nor comfort in it now.

The girl herself was silent. She sat looking out over the street below, instinctively following Dan Anderson's gaze. Voices came to them, clamorous, strident, coarse. There lay revealed all that was crude, all that was savage, all that was unlovable and impossible of Heart's Desire. It had been a dream, but it was a man's dream in which he had lived. For a woman—for her—for this sweet girl of a gentler world, that dream could be nothing else than hideous. "Be just! Be fair!" Dan Anderson's soul demanded of him; and as best he saw justice and fairness to the woman he loved he answered for himself.

"Come," said the girl, gently, rousing herself from the lassitude which suddenly assailed her, "we must go in."

His face was averted as he walked beside her. There was no word that he could say. Accord being gone from all the universe, he could not know that in her heart, humbled and shamed as it was, she understood and in some part forgave.

"It has been very beautiful to-night," she said, as he turned back at length from the door of Curly's house.

Choking, he left her. As he stumbled blindly back, over the arroyo, there crossed on the heavens the long red line of a shooting star. Dully he watched it, and for him it was the flaming sword barring the gates of Eden.

Hours later—for sleep was not for him—Dan Anderson stood waiting for the sun to rise over old Carrizo. Far off, along the pathway of the morn, lay his former home, the States, the East, the fight, the combat, and the grovelling. "No, not for me; not there!" he said, conviction coming to him once more.

He turned then and glanced down the single street of Heart's Desire, a street as straggling and purposeless as his own misdirected life—a wavering lane through the poor habitations of a Land of Oblivion. Longer he looked, and stronger the conviction grew. "No, no," he said, clenching his hand; "not here for her—not here!"

Time wore on at Heart's Desire, uncalendared and unclocked. The sun rose, passed through a sky impenetrably blue, and sank behind Baxter Peak at evening. These were the main events of the day. All men had apparently long ago forgotten the departure of the stage-coach that had borne away at one voyaging both Eve and Eastern Capital. Eve had gone forever, as she supposed, although Capital secretly knew full well that it, at least, was coming back again.

The population shifted and changed, coming and going, as was the wont of the land, but none questioned the man booted and spurred who rode out of town or who came into town. Of late, however, certain booted and bearded men wandered afoot over the mountain sides, doing strange things with strange instruments. A railroad was about to cross the country somewhere. Grave and moody, Heart's Desire sat in the sun, and for two months did not mention the subject which weighed upon its mind. Curly broke the silence one morning at a plebiscite of four men who gathered to bask near Whiteman's corral.

"I hit the trail of them surveyors," said he, "other side of Lone Mountain, day before yestiday. They've got a line of pegs drove in the ground. Looks like they was afraid their old railroad was goin' to git lost from 'em, unless they picketed it out right strong."

Reproachful eyes were turned on Curly, but he went on.

"It's goin' to run right between Carrizoso ranch and the mouth of our cañon," said he. "You'll have to cross it every time you come to town, McKinney. When she gits to runnin' right free and general, there'll be a double row of cow corpses from here to Santa Rosa. What this here new railroad is a-goin' to do to your English stockholders, Mac, is a deep and abidin' plenty."

McKinney made no reply, but looked stolidly out across the valley.

"Them fellers come up into town for tobacco, Doc." Curly threw out the suggestion cheerfully.

"Tobacco ain't drugs," said Doc Tomlinson, annoyed. He was sensitive about allusions to his stock of drugs, which had been imported some years before, and under a misapprehension as to Heart's Desire's future.

"We might shoot up the surveyors," said Curly, tentatively. But Dan Anderson shook his head.

"That's the worst of it," he answered, "We might shoot any one of us here, and the world wouldn't care. But if we shot even a leg off one of the least of these, them States folks would never rest content. For me, I'm goin' in with the railroad. Looks like I'd have to be corporation counsel."

"Well, I reckon we won't have to drive our cows quite so far to market," apologized McKinney, striving to see the silver lining.

"Oh, drop it," snapped Doc Tomlinson. "I might as well say I could get in my drugs easier. Cows can walk; and as for importin' things, everybody knows that Tom Osby can haul in everything that's needed in this valley."

The members of the plebiscite fell silent for a time, willing to wait for Tom Osby's arrival, whenever that might be.

"Now, we ain't downtrod none in this country," finally began Doc Tomlinson, who had made political speeches in Kansas.

"Is anybody?" asked Curly, who had never lived