The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
They saw the sunlight begin upon a hilltop; and presently came the sun
itself, and lakes of warmth flowed into the air, slowly filling the
green solitude. Along the island shores the ripples caught flashes from
the sun.
“I am going into the stream,” he said to her; and rising, he left her in
the tent. This was his side of the island, he had told her last night;
the other was hers, where he had made a place for her to bathe. When
he was gone, she found it, walking through the trees and rocks to the
water’s edge. And so, with the island between them, the two bathed in
the cold stream. When he came back, he found her already busy at their
camp. The blue smoke of the fire was floating out from the trees,
loitering undispersed in the quiet air, and she was getting their
breakfast. She had been able to forestall him because he had delayed
long at his dressing, not willing to return to her unshaven. She looked
at his eyes that were clear as the water he had leaped into, and at his
soft silk neckerchief, knotted with care.
“Do not let us ever go away from here!” she cried, and ran to him as he
came. They sat long together at breakfast, breathing the morning breath
of the earth that was fragrant with woodland moisture and with the
pines. After the meal he could not prevent her helping him make
everything clean. Then, by all customs of mountain journeys, it was time
they should break camp and be moving before the heat of the day. But
first, they delayed for no reason, save that in these hours they so
loved to do nothing. And next, when with some energy he got upon his
feet and declared he must go and drive the horses in, she asked, Why?
Would it not be well for him to fish here, that they might be sure of
trout at their nooning? And though he knew that where they should stop
for noon, trout would be as sure as here, he took this chance for more
delay.
She went with him to his fishing rock, and sat watching him. The rock
was tall, higher than his head when he stood. It jutted out halfway
across the stream, and the water flowed round it in quick foam, and fell
into a pool. He caught several fish; but the sun was getting high, and
after a time it was plain the fish had ceased to rise.
Yet still he stood casting in silence, while she sat by and watched him.
Across the stream, the horses wandered or lay down in their pasture. At
length he said with half a sigh that perhaps they ought to go.
“Ought?” she repeated softly.
“If we are to get anywhere to-day,” he answered.
“Need we get anywhere?” she asked.
Her question sent delight through him like a flood. “Then you do not
want to move camp to-day?” said he.
She shook her head.
At this he laid down his rod and came and sat by her. “I am very glad we
shall not go till to-morrow,” he murmured.
“Not to-morrow,” she said. “Nor next day. Nor any day until we must.”
And she stretched her hands out to the island and the stream exclaiming,
“Nothing can surpass this!”
He took her in his arms. “You feel about it the way I do,” he almost
whispered. “I could not have hoped there’d be two of us to care so
much.”
Presently, while they remained without speaking by the pool, came a
little wild animal swimming round the rock from above. It had not seen
them, nor suspected their presence. They held themselves still, watching
its alert head cross through the waves quickly and come down through
the pool, and so swim to the other side. There it came out on a small
stretch of sand, turned its gray head and its pointed black nose this
way and that, never seeing them, and then rolled upon its back in the
warm dry sand. After a minute of rolling, it got on its feet again,
shook its fur, and trotted away.
Then the bridegroom husband opened his shy heart deep down.
“I am like that fellow,” he said dreamily. “I have often done the same.”
And stretching slowly his arms and legs, he lay full length upon his
back, letting his head rest upon her. “If I could talk his animal
language, I could talk to him,” he pursued. “And he would say to me:
‘Come and roll on the sands. Where’s the use of fretting? What’s the
gain in being a man? Come roll on the sands with me.’ That’s what he
would say.” The Virginian paused. “But,” he continued, “the trouble is,
I am responsible. If that could only be forgot forever by you and me!”
Again he paused and went on, always dreamily. “Often when I have camped
here, it has made me want to become the ground, become the water, become
the trees, mix with the whole thing. Not know myself from it. Never
unmix again. Why is that?” he demanded, looking at her. “What is it? You
don’t know, nor I don’t. I wonder would everybody feel that way here?”
“I think not everybody,” she answered.
“No; none except the ones who understand things they can’t put words to.
But you did!” He put up a hand and touched her softly. “You understood
about this place. And that’s what makes it--makes you and me as we are
now--better than my dreams. And my dreams were pretty good.”
He sighed with supreme quiet and happiness, and seemed to stretch his
length closer to the earth. And so he lay, and talked to her as he had
never talked to any one, not even to himself. Thus she learned secrets
of his heart new to her: his visits here, what they were to him, and why
he had chosen it for their bridal camp. “What I did not know at all,”
he said, “was the way a man can be pining for--for this--and never guess
what is the matter with him.”
When he had finished talking, still he lay extended and serene; and she
looked down at him and the wonderful change that had come over him,
like a sunrise. Was this dreamy boy the man of two days ago? It seemed
a distance immeasurable; yet it was two days only since that wedding
eve when she had shrunk from him as he stood fierce and implacable. She
could look back at that dark hour now, although she could not speak of
it. She had seen destruction like sharp steel glittering in his eyes.
Were these the same eyes? Was this youth with his black head of hair in
her lap the creature with whom men did not trifle, whose hand knew how
to deal death? Where had the man melted away to in this boy? For as she
looked at him, he might have been no older than nineteen to-day. Not
even at their first meeting--that night when his freakish spirit was
uppermost--had he looked so young. This change their hours upon the
island had wrought, filling his face with innocence.
By and by they made their nooning. In the afternoon she would have
explored the nearer woods with him, or walked up the stream. But since
this was to be their camp during several days, he made it more complete.
He fashioned a rough bench and a table; around their tent he built a
tall wind-break for better shelter in case of storm; and for the fire he
gathered and cut much wood, and piled it up. So they were provided for,
and so for six days and nights they stayed, finding no day or night long
enough.
Once his hedge of boughs did them good service, for they had an
afternoon of furious storm. The wind rocked the pines and ransacked the
island, the sun went out, the black clouds rattled, and white bolts of
lightning fell close by. The shower broke through the pine branches and
poured upon the tent. But he had removed everything inside from where it
could touch the canvas and so lead the water through, and the rain ran
off into the ditch he had dug round the tent. While they sat within,
looking out upon the bounding floods and the white lightning, she saw
him glance at her apprehensively, and at once she answered his glance.
“I am not afraid,” she said. “If a flame should consume us together now,
what would it matter?”
And so they sat watching the storm till it was over, he with his face
changed by her to a boy’s, and she leavened with him.
When at last they were compelled to leave the island, or see no more of
the mountains, it was not a final parting. They would come back for the
last night before their journey ended. Furthermore, they promised each
other like two children to come here every year upon their wedding day,
and like two children they believed that this would be possible. But
in after years they did come, more than once, to keep their wedding day
upon the island, and upon each new visit were able to say to each other,
“Better than our dreams.”
For thirty days by the light of the sun and the camp-fire light they
saw no faces except their own; and when they were silent it was all
stillness, unless the wind passed among the pines, or some flowing water
was near them. Sometimes at evening they came upon elk, or black-tailed
deer, feeding out in the high parks of the mountains; and once from the
edge of some concealing timber he showed her a bear, sitting with an
old log lifted in its paws. She forbade him to kill the bear, or any
creature that they did not require. He took her upward by trail and
canyon, through the unfooted woods and along dwindling streams to their
headwaters, lakes lying near the summit of the range, full of trout,
with meadows of long grass and a thousand flowers, and above these the
pinnacles of rock and snow.
They made their camps in many places, delaying several days here, and
one night there, exploring the high solitudes together, and sinking deep
in their romance. Sometimes when he was at work with their horses, or
intent on casting his brown hackle for a fish, she would watch him with
eyes that were fuller of love than of understanding. Perhaps she never
came wholly to understand him; but in her complete love for him she
found enough. He loved her with his whole man’s power. She had listened
to him tell her in words of transport, “I could enjoy dying”; yet she
loved him more than that. He had come to her from a smoking pistol, able
to bid her farewell--and she could not let him go. At the last white-hot
edge of ordeal, it was she who renounced, and he who had his way.
Nevertheless she found much more than enough, in spite of the sigh that
now and again breathed through her happiness when she would watch him
with eyes fuller of love than of understanding.
They could not speak of that grim wedding eve for a long while after;
but the mountains brought them together upon all else in the world and
their own lives. At the end they loved each other doubly more than at
the beginning, because of these added confidences which they exchanged
and shared. It was a new bliss to her to know a man’s talk and thoughts,
to be given so much of him; and to him it was a bliss still greater to
melt from that reserve his lonely life had bred in him. He never would
have guessed so much had been stored away in him, unexpressed till now.
They did not want to go to Vermont and leave these mountains, but the
day came when they had to turn their backs upon their dream. So
they came out into the plains once more, well established in their
familiarity, with only the journey still lying between themselves and
Bennington.
“If you could,” she said, laughing. “If only you could ride home like
this.”
“With Monte and my six-shooter?” he asked. “To your mother?”
“I don’t think mother could resist the way you look on a horse.”
But he said, “It’s this way she’s fearing I will come.”
“I have made one discovery,” she said. “You are fonder of good clothes
than I am.”
He grinned. “I cert’nly like ’em. But don’t tell my friends. They would
say it was marriage. When you see what I have got for Bennington’s
special benefit, you--why, you’ll just trust your husband more than
ever.”
She undoubtedly did. After he had put on one particular suit, she arose
and kissed him where he stood in it.
“Bennington will be sorrowful,” he said. “No wild-west show, after all.
And no ready-made guy, either.” And he looked at himself in the glass
with unbidden pleasure.