Virginian — 25 - Ch 35 - With Malice Aforethought (Part 1)
XXXV. WITH MALICE AFORETHOUGHT
Town lay twelve straight miles before the lover and his sweetheart, when they came to the brow of the last long hill.
All beneath them was like a map: neither man nor beast distinguishable, but the veined and tinted image of a country, knobs and flats set out in order clearly, shining extensive and motionless in the sun.
It opened on the sight of the lovers as they reached the sudden edge of the tableland, where since morning they had ridden with the head of neither horse ever in advance of the other.
At the view of their journey’s end, the Virginian looked down at his girl beside him, his eyes filled with a bridegroom’s light, and, hanging safe upon his breast, he could feel the gold ring that he would slowly press upon her finger to-morrow.
He drew off the glove from her left hand, and stooping, kissed the jewel in that other ring which he had given her.
The crimson fire in the opal seemed to mingle with that in his heart, and his arm lifted her during a moment from the saddle as he held her to him.
But in her heart the love of him was troubled by that cold pang of loneliness which had crept upon her like a tide as the day drew near.
None of her own people were waiting in that distant town to see her become his bride.
Friendly faces she might pass on the way; but all of them new friends, made in this wild country: not a face of her childhood would smile upon her; and deep within her, a voice cried for the mother who was far away in Vermont.
That she would see Mrs. Taylor’s kind face at her wedding was no comfort now.
There lay the town in the splendor of Wyoming space.
Around it spread the watered fields, westward for a little way, eastward to a great distance, making squares of green and yellow crops; and the town was but a poor rag in the midst of this quilted harvest.
After the fields to the east, the tawny plain began; and with one faint furrow of river lining its undulations, it stretched beyond sight.
But west of the town rose the Bow Leg Mountains, cool with their still unmelted snows and their dull blue gulfs of pine.
From three canyons flowed three clear forks which began the river.
Their confluence was above the town a good two miles; it looked but a few paces from up here, while each side the river straggled the margin cottonwoods, like thin borders along a garden walk.
Over all this map hung silence like a harmony, tremendous yet serene.
“How beautiful!
how I love it!
” whispered the girl.
“But, oh, how big it is!
” And she leaned against her lover for an instant.
It was her spirit seeking shelter.
To-day, this vast beauty, this primal calm, had in it for her something almost of dread.
The small, comfortable, green hills of home rose before her.
She closed her eyes and saw Vermont: a village street, and the post-office, and ivy covering an old front door, and her mother picking some yellow roses from a bush.
At a sound, her eyes quickly opened; and here was her lover turned in his saddle, watching another horseman approach.
She saw the Virginian’s hand in a certain position, and knew that his pistol was ready.
But the other merely overtook and passed them, as they stood at the brow of the hill.
The man had given one nod to the Virginian, and the Virginian one to him; and now he was already below them on the descending road.
To Molly Wood he was a stranger; but she had seen his eyes when he nodded to her lover, and she knew, even without the pistol, that this was not enmity at first sight.
It was not indeed.
Five years of gathered hate had looked out of the man’s eyes.
And she asked her lover who this was.
“Oh,” said he, easily, “just a man I see now and then.
” “Is his name Trampas?
” said Molly Wood.
The Virginian looked at her in surprise.
“Why, where have you seen him?
” he asked.
“Never till now.
But I knew.
” “My gracious!
Yu’ never told me yu’ had mind-reading powers.
” And he smiled serenely at her.
“I knew it was Trampas as soon as I saw his eyes.
” “My gracious!
” her lover repeated with indulgent irony.
“I must be mighty careful of my eyes when you’re lookin’ at ’em.
” “I believe he did that murder,” said the girl.
“Whose mind are yu’ readin’ now?
” he drawled affectionately.
But he could not joke her off the subject.
She took his strong hand in hers, tremulously, so much of it as her little hand could hold.
“I know something about that--that--last autumn,” she said, shrinking from words more definite.
“And I know that you only did--” “What I had to,” he finished, very sadly, but sternly, too.
“Yes,” she asserted, keeping hold of his hand.
“I suppose that--lynching--” (she almost whispered the word) “is the only way.
But when they had to die just for stealing horses, it seems so wicked that this murderer--” “Who can prove it?
” asked the Virginian.
“But don’t you know it?
” “I know a heap o’ things inside my heart.
But that’s not proving.
There was only the body, and the hoofprints--and what folks guessed.
” “He was never even arrested!
” the girl said.
“No. He helped elect the sheriff in that county.
” Then Molly ventured a step inside the border of her lover’s reticence.
“I saw--” she hesitated, “just now, I saw what you did.
” He returned to his caressing irony.
“You’ll have me plumb scared if you keep on seein’ things.
” “You had your pistol ready for him.
” “Why, I believe I did.
It was mighty unnecessary.
” And the Virginian took out the pistol again, and shook his head over it, like one who has been caught in a blunder.
She looked at him, and knew that she must step outside his reticence again.
By love and her surrender to him their positions had been exchanged.
He was not now, as through his long courting he had been, her half-obeying, half-refractory worshipper.
She was no longer his half-indulgent, half-scornful superior.
Her better birth and schooling that had once been weapons to keep him at his distance, or bring her off victorious in their encounters, had given way before the onset of the natural man himself.
She knew her cow-boy lover, with all that he lacked, to be more than ever she could be, with all that she had.
He was her worshipper still, but her master, too.
Therefore now, against the baffling smile he gave her, she felt powerless.
And once again a pang of yearning for her mother to be near her to-day shot through the girl.
She looked from her untamed man to the untamed desert of Wyoming, and the town where she was to take him as her wedded husband.
But for his sake she would not let him guess her loneliness.
He sat on his horse Monte, considering the pistol.
Then he showed her a rattlesnake coiled by the roots of some sage-brush.
“Can I hit it?
” he inquired.
“You don’t often miss them,” said she, striving to be cheerful.
“Well, I’m told getting married unstrings some men.
” He aimed, and the snake was shattered.
“Maybe it’s too early yet for the unstringing to begin!
” And with some deliberation he sent three more bullets into the snake.
“I reckon that’s enough,” said he.
“Was not the first one?
” “Oh, yes, for the snake.
” And then, with one leg crooked cow-boy fashion across in front of his saddle-horn, he cleaned his pistol, and replaced the empty cartridges.
Once more she ventured near the line of his reticence.
“Has--has Trampas seen you much lately?
” “Why, no; not for a right smart while.
But I reckon he has not missed me.
” The Virginian spoke this in his gentlest voice.
But his rebuffed sweetheart turned her face away, and from her eyes she brushed a tear.
He reined his horse Monte beside her, and upon her cheek she felt his kiss.
“You are not the only mind-reader,” said he, very tenderly.
And at this she clung to him, and laid her head upon his breast.
“I had been thinking,” he went on, “that the way our marriage is to be was the most beautiful way.
” “It is the most beautiful,” she murmured.
He slowly spoke out his thought, as if she had not said this.
“No folks to stare, no fuss, no jokes and ribbons and best bonnets, no public eye nor talkin’ of tongues when most yu’ want to hear nothing and say nothing.
” She answered by holding him closer.
“Just the bishop of Wyoming to join us, and not even him after we’re once joined.
I did think that would be ahead of all ways to get married I have seen.
” He paused again, and she made no rejoinder.
“But we have left out your mother.
” She looked in his face with quick astonishment.
It was as if his spirit had heard the cry of her spirit.
“That is nowhere near right,” he said.
“That is wrong.
” “She could never have come here,” said the girl.
“We should have gone there.
I don’t know how I can ask her to forgive me.
” “But it was not you!
” cried Molly.
“Yes.
Because I did not object.
I did not tell you we must go to her.
I missed the point, thinking so much about my own feelings.
For you see--and I’ve never said this to you until now--your mother did hurt me.
When you said you would have me after my years of waiting, and I wrote her that letter telling her all about myself, and how my family was not like yours, and--and--all the rest I told her, why you see it hurt me never to get a word back from her except just messages through you.
For I had talked to her about my hopes and my failings.
I had said more than ever I’ve said to you, because she was your mother.
I wanted her to forgive me, if she could, and feel that maybe I could take good care of you after all.
For it was bad enough to have her daughter quit her home to teach school out hyeh on Bear Creek.
Bad enough without havin’ me to come along and make it worse.
I have missed the point in thinking of my own feelings.
” “But it’s not your doing!
” repeated Molly.
With his deep delicacy he had put the whole matter as a hardship to her mother alone.
He had saved her any pain of confession or denial.
“Yes, it is my doing,” he now said.
“Shall we give it up?
” “Give what--?
” She did not understand.
“Why, the order we’ve got it fixed in.
Plans are--well, they’re no more than plans.
I hate the notion of changing, but I hate hurting your mother more.
Or, anyway, I OUGHT to hate it more.
So we can shift, if yu’ say so.
It’s not too late.
” “Shift?
” she faltered.
“I mean, we can go to your home now.
We can start by the stage to-night.
Your mother can see us married.
We can come back and finish in the mountains instead of beginning in them.
It’ll be just merely shifting, yu’ see.
” He could scarcely bring himself to say this at all; yet he said it almost as if he were urging it.
It implied a renunciation that he could hardly bear to think of.
To put off his wedding day, the bliss upon whose threshold he stood after his three years of faithful battle for it, and that wedding journey he had arranged: for there were the mountains in sight, the woods and canyons where he had planned to go with her after the bishop had joined them; the solitudes where only the wild animals would be, besides themselves.
His horses, his tent, his rifle, his rod, all were waiting ready in the town for their start to-morrow.
He had provided many dainty things to make her comfortable.
Well, he could wait a little more, having waited three years.
It would not be what his heart most desired: there would be the “public eye and the talking of tongues”--but he could wait.
The hour would come when he could be alone with his bride at last.
And so he spoke as if he urged it.
“Never!
” she cried.
“Never, never!
” She pushed it from her.
She would not brook such sacrifice on his part.
Were they not going to her mother in four weeks?
If her family had warmly accepted him--but they had not; and in any case, it had gone too far, it was too late.
She told her lover that she would not hear him, that if he said any more she would gallop into town separately from him.
And for his sake she would hide deep from him this loneliness of hers, and the hurt that he had given her in refusing to share with her his trouble with Trampas, when others must know of it.
Accordingly, they descended the hill slowly together, lingering to spin out these last miles long.
Many rides had taught their horses to go side by side, and so they went now: the girl sweet and thoughtful in her sedate gray habit; and the man in his leathern chaps and cartridge belt and flannel shirt, looking gravely into the distance with the level gaze of the frontier.
Having read his sweetheart’s mind very plainly, the lover now broke his dearest custom.
It was his code never to speak ill of any man to any woman.
Men’s quarrels were not for women’s ears.
In his scheme, good women were to know only a fragment of men’s lives.
He had lived many outlaw years, and his wide knowledge of evil made innocence doubly precious to him.
But to-day he must depart from his code, having read her mind well.
He would speak evil of one man to one woman, because his reticence had hurt her--and was she not far from her mother, and very lonely, do what he could?
She should know the story of his quarrel in language as light and casual as he could veil it with.
He made an oblique start.
He did not say to her: “I’ll tell you about this.
You saw me get ready for Trampas because I have been ready for him any time these five years.
” He began far off from the point with that rooted caution of his--that caution which is shared by the primal savage and the perfected diplomat.
“There’s cert’nly a right smart o’ difference between men and women,” he observed.
“You’re quite sure?
” she retorted.
“Ain’t it fortunate?
--that there’s both, I mean.
” “I don’t know about fortunate.
Machinery could probably do all the heavy work for us without your help.
” “And who’d invent the machinery?
” She laughed.
“We shouldn’t need the huge, noisy things you do.
Our world would be a gentle one.
” “Oh, my gracious!
” “What do you mean by that?
” “Oh, my gracious!
Get along, Monte!
A gentle world all full of ladies!
” “Do you call men gentle?
” inquired Molly.
“Now it’s a funny thing about that.
Have yu’ ever noticed a joke about fathers-in-law?
There’s just as many fathers--as mothers-in-law; but which side are your jokes?
” Molly was not vanquished.
“That’s because the men write the comic papers,” said she.
“Hear that, Monte?
The men write ’em.
Well, if the ladies wrote a comic paper, I expect that might be gentle.
” She gave up this battle in mirth; and he resumed:-- “But don’t you really reckon it’s uncommon to meet a father-in-law flouncin’ around the house?
As for gentle--Once I had to sleep in a room next a ladies’ temperance meetin’.
Oh, heavens!
Well, I couldn’t change my room, and the hotel man, he apologized to me next mawnin’.
Said it didn’t surprise him the husbands drank some.
” Here the Virginian broke down over his own fantastic inventions, and gave a joyous chuckle in company with his sweetheart.
“Yes, there’s a big heap o’ difference between men and women,” he said.
“Take that fello’ and myself, now.
” “Trampas?
” said Molly, quickly serious.
She looked along the road ahead, and discerned the figure of Trampas still visible on its way to town.
The Virginian did not wish her to be serious--more than could be helped.
“Why, yes,” he replied, with a waving gesture at Trampas.
“Take him and me.
He don’t think much o’ me!
How could he?
And I expect he’ll never.
But yu’ saw just now how it was between us.
We were not a bit like a temperance meetin’.
” She could not help laughing at the twist he gave to his voice.
And she felt happiness warming her; for in the Virginian’s tone about Trampas was something now that no longer excluded her.
Thus he began his gradual recital, in a cadence always easy, and more and more musical with the native accent of the South.
With the light turn he gave it, its pure ugliness melted into charm.
“No, he don’t think anything of me.
Once a man in the John Day Valley didn’t think much, and by Cañada de Oro I met another.
It will always be so here and there, but Trampas beats ’em all.
For the others have always expressed themselves--got shut of their poor opinion in the open air.
” “Yu’ see, I had to explain myself to Trampas a right smart while ago, long before ever I laid my eyes on yu’.
It was just nothing at all.
A
little matter of cyards in the days when I was apt to spend my money and my holidays pretty headlong.
My gracious, what nonsensical times I have had!
But I was apt to win at cyards, ’specially poker.
And Trampas, he met me one night, and I expect he must have thought I looked kind o’ young.
So he hated losin’ his money to such a young-lookin’ man, and he took his way of sayin’ as much.
I had to explain myself to him plainly, so that he learned right away my age had got its growth.
“Well, I expect he hated that worse, having to receive my explanation with folks lookin’ on at us publicly that-a-way, and him without further ideas occurrin’ to him at the moment.
That’s what started his poor opinion of me, not havin’ ideas at the moment.
And so the boys resumed their cyards.
“I’d most forgot about it.
But Trampas’s mem’ry is one of his strong points.
Next thing--oh, it’s a good while later--he gets to losin’ flesh because Judge Henry gave me charge of him and some other punchers taking cattle--” “That’s not next,” interrupted the girl.
“Not?
Why--” “Don’t you remember?
” she said, timid, yet eager.
“Don’t you?
” “Blamed if I do!
” “The first time we met?
” “Yes; my mem’ry keeps that--like I keep this.
” And he brought from his pocket her own handkerchief, the token he had picked up at a river’s brink when he had carried her from an overturned stage.
“We did not exactly meet, then,” she said.
“It was at that dance.
I
hadn’t seen you yet; but Trampas was saying something horrid about me, and you said--you said, ‘Rise on your legs, you pole cat, and tell them you’re a liar.
’ When I heard that, I think--I think it finished me.
” And crimson suffused Molly’s countenance.
“I’d forgot,” the Virginian murmured.
Then sharply, “How did you hear it?
” “Mrs. Taylor--” “Oh!
Well, a man would never have told a woman that.
” Molly laughed triumphantly.
“Then who told Mrs. Taylor?
” Being caught, he grinned at her.
“I reckon husbands are a special kind of man,” was all that he found to say.
“Well, since you do know about that, it was the next move in the game.
Trampas thought I had no call to stop him sayin’ what he pleased about a woman who was nothin’ to me--then.
But all women ought to be somethin’ to a man.
So I had to give Trampas another explanation in the presence of folks lookin’ on, and it was just like the cyards.
No ideas occurred to him again.
And down goes his opinion of me some more!
“Well, I have not been able to raise it.
There has been this and that and the other,--yu’ know most of the later doings yourself,--and to-day is the first time I’ve happened to see the man since the doings last autumn.
Yu’ seem to know about them, too.
He knows I can’t prove he was with that gang of horse thieves.
And I can’t prove he killed poor Shorty.
But he knows I missed him awful close, and spoiled his thieving for a while.
So d’ yu’ wonder he don’t think much of me?
But if I had lived to be twenty-nine years old like I am, and with all my chances made no enemy, I’d feel myself a failure.
” His story was finished.
He had made her his confidant in matters he had never spoken of before, and she was happy to be thus much nearer to him.
It diminished a certain fear that was mingled with her love of him.
During the next several miles he was silent, and his silence was enough for her.
