Pangs of anxiety akin to jealousy shot through his heart as he studied her features; her downcast eyes were hidden by the heavy lashes as she bent over her work. “She doesn’t resemble her mother as Mary does, but she must be the almost exact counterpart of what my mother was at her age,” he mused, as he noted for the first time the ripening lips, the rosy and yet transparent hue of her cheeks, and the sunny sheen of her hair. He was surprised that he had not before observed the soft, exquisite contour of her face and neck, the full rounded bust, and the shapely development of her feet and hands.
As he sat watching the lights and shadows of thought and feeling that played upon her features, the remembrance of the girlhood of her mother, whose arduous married years had all been spent in his service, arose before him with startling power. “Dear, patient, tender, self-sacrificing Annie!” he exclaimed, as he arose from his rocking seat and strode away in the gloaming. “I never half appreciated your worth until I lost you for ever!”
“No, not for ever,” softly sung a still, small voice in the depths of his inner consciousness. “Do not reproach yourself. All eternity is yet to be.”
Jean felt, rather than saw, the pressure of his eyes, and half divined his thoughts. She felt the telltale blood as it rushed unbidden to her cheeks, and was seized with a great longing to throw herself into his arms and breathe out the full secret of her great awakening in his ears; but something in his manner repelled her advances, and she withdrew more than ever into herself.
“O Love!” she cried in a tone so low and sweet that none but a messenger from the Unseen might hear, “how ungovernable art thou, and how incomprehensible! The worldly-wise may decry thee; the misanthropic may deride thee; the vulgar may make of thy existence an unholy jest; the selfish and ignorant may trample upon thee; human laws may crush thee; but thou remainest still a thing of life, to fill thy votaries with a holy joy and endow them with the very attributes of God. An imperishable entity art thou, O Love! Thou art interblended with every fibre of my being now, and I accept thee as a sweet fulfilment of my earthly destiny.”
Of course Jean was young and fond and inexperienced and foolish; and these chronicles would offer her rhapsodies as the utterances of no worldly-wise oracle. But her thoughts were fresh and pure; and who shall say they did not emanate from the very fountain of life itself, whose presence she could sense but could not understand?
She wandered off toward the rushing, maddening torrent of Snake River, whose music had for her, in these moods of introspection, but one interpretation.
“Daddie may denounce, Hal and Mame may tease, and Marjorie,—yes, and all the world deride me,” she said, as she sat upon a bowlder and abandoned herself to reverie; “but henceforth there shall be nothing in this world for me to cherish but Love and its handmaiden, Duty.”
Snake River, full at this point of jutting rocky islands, through which the foaming, roaring waters rushed like a thousand mill-races on parade, dashed madly against its banks beneath her feet, and rushing on again, roared and laughed and shrieked and sang. Lichens clung to the uplifted rocks, which, hoary with age and massive in proportions, held vigil in the midst of the eternal grandeur. Mountains clambered over mountains in the dimly lighted distance, and reaching to the red horizon, overlooked the Pacific seas.
“The antelope and elk are gone,” she thought, “and we are lone watchers amid the eternal vastness. But the sage-hen, the lizard, the owl, and the jaybird linger; and yonder, among the everlasting rocks, are the homes of the Indian, the rattlesnake, the badger, and the wolf.”