The Everlasting Whisper Part 10

Her first impulse was to face him down and demand to be told the rest.

But realizing that a father at the end of a long-distance line was possessed of a certain strategic advantage presenting more difficulties than a mother at hand, she said lightly:

"All right, papa. I'll call her. Be sure you take good care of yourself.

Bydie." She relinquished the telephone instrument to her mother and stood waiting.

She could hear the buzzing of her father's voice but no distinct word.

Her mother said "Yes?" and "Yes," and "Yes, Ben." And then: "Oh, _Ben_!

I don't understand." And then her mother's voice sharpened, and she cut into something Gaynor was saying: "I can't say anything like _that_! It is as though we suspected him of being underhanded. And----"

Such sc.r.a.ps of talk were baffling, and Gloria, with scant patience for the baffling, moved up and down restlessly. When her mother had clicked up the receiver, Gloria followed her and demanded to be told. Mrs.

Gaynor looked worried; said it was nothing, and refused to talk. But in five minutes her daughter knew everything Gaynor had said. King was to be told that Gratton, instead of going straight to San Francisco, had gone down to Placerville, and next had turned up at Coloma; that he had spent three days there; that he had gone several times to Honeycutt's shanty, and had been seen, more than once, with Swen Brodie.

"It's an outrage," cried Mrs. Gaynor, "to retail all that to Mark King.

What business of his is it if Mr. Gratton does go to Coloma, or anywhere else?"

"That's for you and papa to argue out," said Gloria serenely.

"We are going back to San Francisco to-morrow!"

"I'm not. You know I'm not ready to go yet."

"That is very undutiful, Gloria," said her mother anxiously. "When your own mother----"

"Oh, let's not get tragic! And, anyway, papa wanted us to stay until Mr.

King came, so that we could tell him."

"Jim Spalding will be here; he can tell----"

"Why, mamma! After papa has trusted to _us_ to see that his message is delivered!" Gloria looked shocked, incredulous. "Surely----"

So they waited for Mark King to come again out of the forest. All the next day Gloria, dressed very daintily and looking so lovely in her expectancy that even old Jim Spalding's eyes followed her everywhere, watched from the porch or a window or her place by the creek. She was sure that he would step out of the shadows into the sun with that familiar appearance of having just materialized from among the tree trunks; over and over she was prepared, with prettily simulated surprise, to greet his coming. But the day pa.s.sed, night drove them indoors to a cosy fireplace and lights and fragments of music which Gloria played wistfully or cras.h.i.+ngly in bursts of impatience, and still he did not come. Mrs. Gaynor went off to bed at nine o'clock; Gloria, suddenly absorbed in a book, elected to sit up and finish her chapter.

She out.w.a.tched the log fire; at eleven o'clock the air was chill, and Gloria as she went upstairs s.h.i.+vered a little and felt tired and vaguely sad.

The next day she put on another pretty dress, did her hair in her favourite way, and went about the house as gay as a lark. The day dragged by; King did not come. By nightfall the look in Gloria's eyes had altered, and a stubborn expression played havoc with the tenderer curves of her mouth. She resented at this late date King's way of going; not only had he not told her good-bye, he had left no word with her father for her. She sat smiling over a letter received some days ago from Gratton--after she had retrieved the letter from a heap of crumpled papers in her bedroom waste-paper basket. She read to her mother fragments, bright, gossipy remarks in Gratton's clever way of saying them; she wrote a long, das.h.i.+ngly composed answer.

Two days later she said to her mother, out of a long silence over the coffee cups:

"Let's go back to San Francisco. This stupid place gets on my nerves."

"Why, of course, dear," agreed Mrs. Gaynor. "I can have everything packed this afternoon, and to-morrow----"

"Nonsense," said Gloria. "You know we can get packed in half an hour."

That day they left Jim Spalding in charge and departed for Truckee to catch a train for San Francisco. Mrs. Gaynor dutifully entrusted to Spalding her husband's message for Mark King. That is to say, that portion of the message which she considered important. Gloria herself left no message with old Jim; not in so many words. But she did impress him with her abundant gaiety, with her eagerness for San Francisco, where all of her best and dearest friends were. If any one should ask old Jim concerning Miss Gloria, Jim would be sure to make it clear that she had no minutest regret in going but a very lively antic.i.p.ation of the fullest happiness elsewhere.

_Chapter IX_

Three or four weeks pa.s.sed before Mark King and Gloria met again. Weeks of busy gaiety on her part, of steady, persistent seeking on his. Now again Gloria and her mother and Ben were at the log house in the mountains, this time with a fresh set of guests. Only one of the former flock had been invited: Mr. Gratton. And this despite Ben Gaynor's uneasy "This chap Gratton, Nellie. He's cutting in pretty strong here of late, and I don't know that I like him. He's too confounded smooth somehow."

King came the day after the guests arrived for a talk with Ben. Gloria knew that he was coming and was coolly prepared to meet him. She gave him a bright little nod, friendly enough but casual, and resumed her lively chatter with her friends. King went off with Gaynor. That night there was no moon, but the stars, those great glittering stars of the Sierra, made the hour softly palpitant. King betook himself to smoke upon that particular, remembered corner of the porch; Gloria, slipping out from a dance, felt the little thrill that would not down when she found him there. In their two chairs, necessarily close together since the nook was so cosily narrow, her shoulder now and then brus.h.i.+ng his as she moved, the faint fragrances from her gown and hair blown across his face by the night breeze--for them his pipe hastily laid aside--they sat talking softly or in a pleasant silence. The next morning--the matter seemed to arrange itself with very little help from either--they were to have a ride together This time they would take their lunch. When they said good-night Gloria impulsively gave him her two hands; he remembered how she had done that the first time he had seen her. Her face was lifted up to his; in the starlight he saw her eyes s.h.i.+ning softly, gloriously; he saw her mouth, the lips barely apart. For an instant his hands shut down hard on hers; he felt the faint pressure of her own in return. When they heard her mother in the doorway calling, "Gloria, where are you?" they started apart. A strange and una.n.a.lysed sense of secrecy had fallen upon them; Gloria whispered, "Good-night, Mark," and then calling, "Here I am, mamma; just cooling off," she went skipping down the porch, slipped her arm about her mother, and carried her back into the house.

Before the new day was fairly come they met in the fringe of pines.

Again they shook hands; again for an instant they stood as they had stood last night. They were tremblingly close to the first kiss.

Suddenly Gloria, with her colour high and her eyes hidden under lashes which King marvelled at, lashes laid tenderly against her cheeks, pulled her hands out of his and began drawing on her gauntlets. Gravely, as though here were a rite to be approached solemnly, he lifted her into the saddle. They turned their horses and rode up the ridge among the trees.

They heard together the first sleepy twitterings of hidden birds; they saw the black shadows thinning; they watched the light come upon the peaks. Ridges shook off the shadow cloaks, seemed to quiver as they awoke to the new day, grew flushed and rosy. The chill of the early morning air was like wine, sparkling, tingling in the blood. The smell of resinous woods was insistent, the fine bouquet to the rare vintage.

The day, the world, themselves--all were young together--all awakening to the full, true, and triumphant meaning of life. They rode a mile with never a spoken word but in a never-broken communion; then it was Gloria who spoke first, saying, as she had said once before: "I love it!"

They followed narrow trails through the ceanothus-bushes, riding one behind the other; they climbed steep trails among the pines; then went down steep trails among granite boulders; they rode side by side through little upland valleys and gra.s.sy meadows. They broke off sprays of resinous needles as they rode, inhaling the sharp odours; they stooped for handfuls of fragrant sage; they splashed through swampy places where the gra.s.s and stalks of lush flowers swept their stirrups, through rock-bound noisy streams where they must pick their way cautiously, and where the horses snorted and shook their heads and Gloria laughed gleefully. To-day was like the completion of that other day when they had ridden to Coloma--to both it seemed that it was only yesterday. The weeks in between did not matter; they were wiped out of life by the green magic. Unfinished topics, left over from the first ride, presented themselves now to be completed. Once Gloria, speaking of their first woodland luncheon, said "Yesterday." Once King, as they crossed a wild mountain brook, said, "There's one's nest now. On that rock down by the waterfall. Looks like a bit of the rock itself, with moss all about it,"

and Gloria understood that it was her water-ouzel he was talking about.

"It was springtime yesterday and to-day it's summer!" said Gloria.

"It's always springtime somewhere in the world," answered King. "To-day we'll ride from one season up into the other."

"More magic!" laughed Gloria.

It is always springtime somewhere in the world! As youth knows and remembers, as age forgets. Always a place somewhere for laughter and love and light hands caressing, for bird song and bird mating and colourful flowers. And to-day they were seeking this place among the mountains, riding on expectantly through dark pa.s.ses, climbing winding trails, looking across deep canons and blue ridges. Gloria thought dreamily that she would like always to be riding thus, leaving summer behind and below, questing the joyous, full-sapped springtime.

He had promised to show her his latest temporary camp. They came to it before noon at an alt.i.tude of well above seven thousand feet. In a gra.s.sy open s.p.a.ce they left their horses; King carried their lunch bundle and they went on on foot. Along the frothing creek, along the mountain-side through a wild country of dwarfed vegetation. She began to understand a thing he had told her; that the Sierra is the land of dwarf and giant. Pine and cedar and, in one spot he knew, mighty sequoia piercing at the sky; and here pine, dwarfed, pygmied until it was but a mat of twisted, broken twigs carpeting the heights. "And I have walked among the pine tops!" cried Gloria. For up here there was scant soil; here the winds raged and the snow heaped itself high in the late fall and remained, icy-crusted, into late summer; and here, now, the springtime had just come. Never had Gloria seen more beautiful flowers, flowers half so delicate-looking. And yet how hardy they must be, to live here at all!

"You are like these flowers," King said quite gravely and with sincerity. Gloria told him, also gravely and sincerely, that that was the finest compliment she had ever received--she hoped that he meant it.

At least she understood and she would like to be like them.

His camp was in a little nearly level spot, sheltered by crags and so hidden by them that one must come fairly upon it before guessing its proximity. Back of it rose cliffs so sheer that Gloria craned her neck to look up at them. Below were the headwaters of the creek; across it the steep slope of the other canon wall. On all hands bleak, naked rock with tiny blossoms here and there between in the shallow soil and the carpeting of pygmy pine and flattened cedar. Only infrequently did a tree, with roots gripping like claws, lift its ragged top above the big boulders. A wild place, savagely silent save for the hissing of the wind around the cliffs above.

King brought water from the creek. He showed her where he had hidden his few camp utensils; the one small pot, one frying-pan, one cup, one spoon. To these he added his big-bladed pocket-knife. He made a fire where already there was a little heap of charred coals against a blackened rock, and they made coffee and cooked bacon. Gloria used a stick which he had pointed for her to turn the bacon. They took turns with the one cup.

"What was it like up on the cliff tops?" King did not know; he had not yet been up there. And would it take long to climb them? Not over an hour, he estimated; if she wasn't tired? It was decided that King would have his postprandial smoke up there; where they could sit and look out "across the top of the world."

As they climbed they came into a current of rus.h.i.+ng air. Higher up the wind strengthened. They stood poised on boulders, their shoulders thrown back, heads up, lungs filling. Gloria's hair was whipped out from under her turban; it blew across her face; a strand of it fluttered across King's eyes, brushed his lips. He gave her his hand up a steep place down which they sent a cascade of disintegrating stone. They stood side by side, shoulders brus.h.i.+ng, resting, breathing deeply. Perceptibly the air thinned; one's lungs were taxed to capacity here; the blood clamoured for deeper drafts, for more oxygen. When they came to the top Gloria dropped down, panting, though they had stopped many times on the way. She closed her eyes and her senses swam through a vast blur. King gave her a drink from his canteen; she merely thanked him with her eyes.

But in ten minutes she had rested and was on her feet, her slim body leaning against the wind. He stood by her and they looked out across the mountains. For what seemed to Gloria a thousand miles there was the broken wilderness of mountains gashed with gorges, crowned with peaks, painted with sunlight and distance, glinting white here, veiled in purple there. She gasped at the bigness of it; it spoke of the vastness of the world and of the world's primitive savagery. And yet it did not repel; it fascinated and its message had the seeming of an old, oft-told, and half-forgotten tale. It threatened with its spires as cruel as bared fangs, and yet it beckoned and invited with its blue distances. Always, since the first man fas.h.i.+oned the first club and made him a knife of a jagged flint, has mankind battled with the great mother, the earth who bore him. He has striven with her for his food, warred with her for his raiment, entrenched himself against the merciless attack of the seasons, winter to stab him with icy spear, summer to consume him. And always has he loved her and honoured her, since she is his great mother. Gloria, her thoughts confused by conflicting instincts, inspired and awed, drew closer to King.

"--But to be out here alone!" The utter, utter loneliness of it. She looked at him with new, curious eyes. "Doesn't it bear down on you; don't you feel at times that the loneliness----"

He understood.

"I am used to it, you know. I have never known what it was out here to feel lonely until----"

She waited for him to finish, her eyes on his. Until----?

"Until after our first ride together," he said.