He brought Glani to a halt. They
had left the sight of the meadow, though they could
still hear the snorting of the oxen at their labor,
a distant sound. Here, on one side of the road,
the forest tumbled back from a swale of ground across
which a tiny stream leaped and flashed with crooked
speed, and the ground seemed littered with bright gold,
so closely were the yellow wild flowers packed.
“Two days ago,” said David,
“they were only buds. See them now!”
He slipped from his horse and, stooping,
rose again in a moment with his hands full of the
yellow blossoms.
“They have a fragrance that
makes them seem far away,” he said. “See!”
He tossed the flowers at her; the
wind caught them and spangled her hair and her clothes
with them, and she breathed a rare perfume. David
fell to clapping his hands and laughing like a child
at the picture she made. She had never liked
him so well as she did at this moment. She had
never pitied him as she did now; she was not wise
enough to shrink from that emotion.
“It was made for you — this place.”
And before she could move to defend
herself he had raised her strongly, lightly from the
saddle, and placed her on the knoll in the thickest
of the flowers. He stood back to view his work,
nodding his satisfaction, and she, looking up at him,
felt the old sense of helplessness sweep over her.
Every now and then David Eden overwhelmed her like
an inescapable destiny; there was something foredoomed
about the valley and about him.
“I knew you would look like
this,” he was saying. “How do men
make a jewel seem more beautiful? They set it
in gold! And so with you, Ruth. Your hair
against the gold is darker and richer and more like
piles and coils of shadow. Your face against
the gold is the transparent white, with a bloom in
it. Your hands are half lost in the softness of
that gold. And to think that is a picture you
can never see! But I forget.”
His face grew dark.
“Here I have stumbled again,
and yet I started with strong vows and resolves.
My brother Benjamin warned me!”
It shocked her for a reason she could
not analyze to hear the big man call Connor his brother.
Connor, the gambler, the schemer! And here was
David Eden with the green of the trees behind, his
feet in the golden wild flowers, and the blue sky
behind his head. Brother to Ben Connor?
“And how did he warn you?” she asked.
“That I must not talk to you
of yourself, because, he said, it shames you.
Is that true?”
“I suppose it is,” she
murmured. Yet she was a little indignant because
Connor had presumed to interfere. She knew he
could only have done it to save her from embarrassment,
but she rebelled at the thought of Connor as her conversational
guardian.
Put a guard over David of Eden, and
what would he be? Just like a score of callow
youths whom she had known, scattering foolish commonplaces,
trying to make their dull eyes tell her flattering
things which they had not brains enough to put into
words.
“I am sorry,” said David,
sighing. “It is hard to stand here and see
you, and not talk of what I see. When the sun
rises the birds sing in the trees; when I see you
words come up to my teeth.”
He made a grimace. “Well,
I’ll shut them in. Have I been very wrong
in my talk to you?”
“I think you haven’t talked
to many women,” said Ruth. “And — most
men do not talk as you do.”
“Most men are fools,”
answered the egoist. “What I say to you
is the truth, but if the truth offends you I shall
talk of other things.”
He threw himself on the ground sullenly.
“Of what shall I talk?”
“Of nothing, perhaps. Listen!”
For the great quiet of the valley
was falling on her, and the distances over which her
eyes reached filled her with the delightful sense of
silence. There were deep blue mountains piled
against the paler sky; down the slope and through
the trees the river was untarnished, solid, silver;
in the boughs behind her the wind whispered and then
stopped to listen likewise. There was a faint
ache in her heart at the thought that she had not
known such things all her life. She knew then
what gave the face of David of Eden its solemnity.
She leaned a little toward him. “Now tell
me about yourself. What you have done.”
“Of anything but that.”
“Why not?”
“No more than I want you to
tell me about yourself and what you have done.
What you feel, what you think from time to time, I
wish to know; I am very happy to know. I fit
in those bits of you to the picture I have made.”
Once more the egoist was talking!
“But to have you tell me of
what you have done — that is not pleasant.
I do not wish to know that you have talked to other
men and smiled on them. I do not wish to know
of a single happy day you spent before you came to
the Garden of Eden. But I shall tell you of the
four men who are my masters if you wish.”
“Tell me of them if you will.”
“Very well. John was the
beginning. He died before I came. Of the
others Matthew was my chief friend. He was very
old and thin. His wrist was smaller than yours,
almost. His hair was a white mist. In the
evening there seemed to be a pale moonshine around
his face.
“He was very small and old — so
old that sometimes I thought he would dry up or dissolve
and disappear. Toward the last, before God called
him, Matthew grew weak, and his voice was faint, yet
it was never sharp or shaken. Also, until the
very end his eyes were young, for his heart was young.
“That was Matthew. He was
like you. He liked the silence. ‘Listen,’
he would say. ‘The great stillness is the
voice; God is speaking.’ Then he would
raise one thin finger and we caught our breath and
listened.
“Do you see him?”
“I see him, and I wish that I had known him.”
“Of the others, Luke was taller
than I. He had yellow hair as long and as coarse as
the mane of a yellow horse. When he rode around
the lake we could hear him coming for a great distance
by his singing, for his voice was as strong as the
neigh of Glani. I have only to close my eyes,
and I can hear that singing of Luke from beside the
lake. Ah, he was a huge man! The horses
sweated under him.
“His beard was long; it came
to the middle of his belly; it had a great blunt square
end. Once I angered him. I crept to him when
he slept — I was a small boy then — and
I trimmed the beard down to a point.
“When Luke wakened he felt the
beard and sat for a long time looking at me.
I was so afraid that I grew numb, I remember.
Then he went to the Room of Silence. When he
came out his anger was gone, but he punished me.
He took me to the lake and caught me by the heels and
swung me around his head. When he loosened his
fingers I shot into the air like a light stone.
The water flashed under me, and when I struck the surface
seemed solid. I thought it was death, for my senses
went out, but Luke waded in and dragged me back to
the shore. However, his beard remained pointed
till he died.”
He chuckled at the memory.
“Paul reproved Luke for what
he had done. Paul was a big man, also, but he
was short, and his bigness lay in his breadth.
He had no hair, and he stood under Luke nodding so
that the sun flashed back and forth on his bald head.
He told Luke that I might have been killed.
“‘Better teach him sober
manners now,’ said Luke, ’than be a jester
to knock at the gate of God.’
“This Paul was wonderfully silent.
He was born unhappy and nothing could make him smile.
He used to wander through the valley alone in the middle
of winter, half dead with cold and eating nothing.
In those times, even Luke was not strong enough to
make him come home to us.
“I know that for ten days at
one time he had gone without speech. For that
reason he loved to have Joseph with him, because Joseph
understood signs.
“But when silence left him,
Paul was great in speech. Luke spoke in a loud
voice and Matthew beautifully, but Paul was terrible.
He would fall on his knees in an agony and pray to
God for salvation for us and for himself. While
he kneeled he seemed to grow in size. He filled
the room. And his words were like whips.
They made me think of all my sins. That is how
I remember Paul, kneeling, with his long arms thrown
over his head.
“Matthew died in the evening
just as the moon rose. He was sitting beside
me. He put his hand in mine. After a while
I felt that the hand was cold, and when I looked at
Matthew his head had fallen.
“Paul died in a drift of snow.
We always knew that he had been on his knees praying
when the storms struck him and he would not rise until
he had finished the prayer.
“Luke bowed his head one day
at the table and died without a sound — in
spite of all his strength.
“All these men have not really
died out of the valley. They are here, like mists;
they are faces of thin air. Sometimes when I sit
alone at my table, I can almost see a spirit-hand
like that of Matthew rise with a shadow-glass of wine.
“But shall I tell you a strange
thing? Since you came into the valley, these
mist-images of my dead masters grow faint and thinner
than ever.”
“You will remember me, also, when I have gone?”
“Do not speak of it! But
yes, if you should go, every spring, when these yellow
flowers blossom, you would return to me and sit as
you are sitting now. However you are young, yet
there are ways. After Matthew died, for a long
time I kept fresh flowers in his room and kept his
memory fresh with them. But,” he repeated,
“you are young. Do not talk of death!”
“Not of death, but of leaving the Garden.”
He stared gravely at her, and flushed.
“You are tormenting me as I
used to torment my masters when I was a boy.
But it is wrong to anger me. Besides I shall not
let you go.”
“Not let me go?”
“Am I a fool?” he asked hotly. “Why
should I let you go?”
“You could not keep me.”
It brought him to his feet with a start.
“What will free you?”
“Your own honor, David.”
His head fell.
“It is true. Yes, it is
true. But let us ride on. I no longer am
pleased with this place. It is tarnished; there
are unhappy thoughts here!”
“What a child he is!”
thought the girl, as she climbed into the saddle again.
“A selfish, terrible, wonderful child!”
It seemed, after that, that the purpose
of David was to show the beauties of the Garden to
her until she could not brook the thought of leaving.
He told her what grew in each meadow and what could
be reaped from it.
He told her what fish were caught
in the river and the lake. He talked of the trees.
He swung down from Glani, holding with hand and heel,
and picked strange flowers and showed them to her.
“What a place for a house!”
she said, when, near the north wall, they passed a
hill that overlooked the entire length of the valley.
“I shall build you a house there,”
said David eagerly. “I shall build it of
strong rock. Would that make you happy? Very
tall, with great rooms.”
An impish desire to mock him came to her.
“Do you know what I’m
used to? It’s a boarding house where I live
in a little back bedroom, and they call us to meals
with a bell.”
The humor of this situation entirely
failed to appeal to him.
“I also,” he said, “have
a bell. And it shall be used to call you to dinner,
if you wish.”
He was so grave that she did not dare
to laugh. But for some reason that moment of
bantering brought the big fellow much closer to her
than he had been before. And when she saw him
so docile to her wishes, for all his strength and
his mastery, the only thing that kept her from opening
her heart to him, and despising the game which she
and Connor were playing with him, was the warning
of the gambler.
“I’ve heard a young buck
talk to a young squaw — before he married
her. The same line of junk!”
Connor must be right. He came from the great
city.
But before that ride was over she
was repeating that warning very much as Odysseus used
the flower of Hermes against the arts of Circe.
For the Garden of Eden, as they came back to the house
after the circuit, seemed to her very much like a
little kingdom, and the monarch thereof was inviting
her in dumb-show to be the queen of the realm.