Max Brand (24 page)

"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.

At the house they were met by one of the servants who had been waiting
for David to receive from the master definite orders concerning some
woodchopping. For the trees of the garden were like children to David of
Eden, and he allowed only the ones he himself designated to be cut for
timber or fuel. He left the girl with manifest reluctance.

"For when I leave you of what do you think, and what do you do? I am
like the blind."

She felt this speech was peculiar in character. Who but David of Eden
could have been jealous of the very thoughts of another? And smiling at
this, she went into the patio where Ben Connor was still lounging. Few
things had ever been more gratifying to the gambler than the sight of
the girl's complacent smile, for he knew that she was judging David.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Nothing worth repeating. But I think you're wrong, Ben. He isn't a
barbarian. He's just a child."

"That's another word for the same thing. Ever see anything more brutal
than a child? The wildest savage that ever stepped is a saint compared
with a ten-year-old boy."

"Perhaps. He acts like ten years. When I mention leaving the valley he
flies into a tantrum; he has taken me so much for granted that he has
even picked out the site for my house."

"As if you'd ever stay in a place like this!"

He covered his touch of anxiety with loud laughter.

"I don't know," she was saying thoughtfully a moment later. "I like
it—a lot."

"Anything seems pretty good after Lukin. But when your auto is buzzing
down Broadway—"

She interrupted him with a quick little laugh of excitement.

"But do you really think I can make him leave the valley?"

"Of course I'm sure."

"He says there's a law against it."

"I tell you, Ruth, you're his law now; not whatever piffle is in that
Room of Silence."

She looked earnestly at the closed door. Her silence had always bothered
the gambler, and this one particularly annoyed him.

"Let's hear your thoughts?" he asked uneasily.

"It's just an idea of mine that inside that room we can find out
everything we want to know about David Eden."

"What do we want to know?" growled Connor. "I know everything that's
necessary. He's a nut with a gang of the best horses that ever stepped.
I'm talking horse, not David Eden. If I have to make the fool rich, it
isn't because I want to."

She returned no direct answer, but after a moment: "I wish I knew."

"What?"

She became profoundly serious.

"The point is this: he
may
be something more than a boy or a savage.
And if he
is
something more, he's the finest man I've ever laid eyes
on. That's why I want to get inside that room. That's why I want to
learn the secret—if there is a secret—the things he believes in, how
he happens to be what he is and how—"

Connor had endured her rising warmth of expression as long as he could.
Now he exploded.

"You do me one favor," he cried excitedly, more moved than she had ever
seen him before. "Let me do your thinking for you when it comes to other
men. You take my word about this David Eden. Bah! When I have you fixed
up in little old Manhattan you'll forget about him and his mystery
inside a week. Will you lay off on the thinking?"

She nodded absently. In reality she was struck by the first similarity
she had ever noticed between David of Eden and Connor the gambler:
within ten minutes they had both expressed remarkable concern as to what
might be her innermost thoughts. She began to feel that Connor himself
might have elements of the boy in his make up—the cruel boy which he
protested was in David Eden.

She had many reasons for liking Connor. For one thing he had offered
her an escape from her old imprisoned life. Again he had flattered her
in the most insinuating manner by his complete trust. She knew that
there was not one woman in ten thousand to whom he would have confided
his great plan, and not one in a million whose ability to execute his
scheme he would have trusted.

More than this, before her trip to the Garden he had given her a large
sum of money for the purchase of the Indian's gelding; and Ruth Manning
had learned to appreciate money. He had not asked for any receipt. His
attitude had been such that she had not even been able to mention that
subject.

Yet much as she liked Connor there were many things about him which
jarred on her. There was a hardness, always working to the surface like
rocks on a hard soil. Worst of all, sometimes she felt a degree of
uncleanliness about his mind and its working. She would not have
recoiled from these things had he been nearer her own age; but in a man
well over thirty she felt that these were fixed characteristics.

He was in all respects the antipode of David of Eden. It was easier to
be near Connor, but not so exciting. David wore her out, but he also was
marvelously stimulating. The dynamic difference was that Connor
sometimes inspired her with aversion, and David made her afraid. She was
roused out of her brooding by the voice of the gambler saying: "When a
woman begins to think, a man begins to swear."

She managed to smile, but these cheap little pat quotations which she
had found amusing enough at first now began to grate on her through
repetition. Just as Connor tagged and labeled his idea with this
aphorism, so she felt that Connor himself was tagged by them. She found
him considering her with some anxiety.

"You haven't begun to doubt me, Ruth?" he asked her.

And he put out his hand with a note of appeal. It was a new rôle for him
and she at once disliked it. She shook the hand heartily.

"That's a foolish thing to say," she assured him. "But—why does that
old man keep sneaking around us?"

It was Zacharias, who for some time had been prowling around the patio
trying to find something to do which would justify his presence.

"Do you think David Eden keeps him here as a spy on us?"

This was too much for even Connor's suspicious mind, and he chuckled.

"They all want to hang around and have a look at you—that's the point,"
he answered. "Speak to him and you'll see him come running."

It needed not even speech; she smiled and nodded at Zacharias, and he
came to her at once with a grin of pleasure wrinkling his ancient face.
She invited him to sit down.

"I never see you resting," she said.

"David dislikes an idler," said Zacharias, who acknowledged her
invitation by dropping his withered hands on the back of the chair, but
made no move to sit down.

"But after all these years you have worked for him, I should think he
would give you a little house of your own, and nothing to do except take
care of yourself."

He listened to her happily, but it was evident from his pause that he
had not gathered the meaning of her words.

"You come from the South?" he asked at length.

"My father came from Tennessee."

There was an electric change in the face of the Negro.

"Oh, Lawd, oh, Lawd!" he murmured, his voice changing and thickening a
little toward the soft Southern accent. "That's music to old
Zacharias!"

"Do you come from Tennessee, Zacharias?"

Again there was a pause as the thoughts of Zacharias fled back to the
old days.

"Everything in between is all shadowy like evening, but what I remember
most is the little houses on both sides of the road with the gardens
behind them, and the babies rolling in the dust and shouting and their
mammies coming to the doors to watch them."

"How long ago was that?" she asked, deeply touched.

He grew troubled.

"Many and many a year ago—oh, many a long, weary year, for Zacharias!"

"And you still think of the old days?"

"When the bees come droning in the middle of the day, sometimes I think
of them."

He struck his hands lightly together and his misty-bright eyes were
plainly looking through sixty years as though they were a day.