Something like a sigh broke from between his blue-cold lips. The sound made the girl stir ever so slightly in her sleep. Caleb glanced down in alarm, dreading lest he had broken her slumber. There, against his arm rested Desirée’s upturned face. The dark silken lashes lay peacefully above the sleep-flushed cheeks. She was so little, so helpless, so wonderful, to the eyes bending above her! Inexpressibly precious to him always; a thousand-fold more so, now, in the hour of his renunciation of all else for love of her.
A wave of undreamed-of tenderness swept over Conover; possessing him to the utter extinction of every other thought or passion; sweeping away in its headlong rush all vestige of doubts and regrets. In an instant of blinding soul-light he saw once and for all the futility of what he had abandoned; the God-given marvel of what he had won in its place.
The battle was over. Caleb Conover had lost—and won. In his heart he knew he was no longer the Fighter; no more a seeker for Dead-Sea Fruit. His battles, social and financial, were at an end. This coming clash at the Legislature,—this mission on which Desirée was dispatching him, her true knight, to save the fortunes of others,—should be his last field. After that, a new, strange peace!—and Desirée!
Defiantly, Conover glared out into the night, beyond the smoking remnant of the fire; as though challenging the ghosts of slain ambitions to rise again before him that he might confound them all by merely pointing at the girl who slept in his arms. She—the mere sight of her—should be his reply to their taunts.
Something in his own look or attitude stirred a latent chord of memory. He recalled, by an odd turn of thought, a double-page drawing in one of the English weeklies that he had long ago seen at Desirée’s:—
A rocky hillock whereon sat a man clad in skins;—in his arms an unconscious woman whose long hair streamed over her loose robe;—confronting the twain a shadowy, armored goddess into whose commanding eyes the skin-clad man was staring with an awed courage born of desperation. Beneath the picture were the lines:
“So grüsse mir Walhall! Grüsse mir Wotan! Grüsse mir Wälse und alle Helden! Zu ihnen folg’ ich dir nicht!”
Desirée had translated the words for Caleb. She had told him the pictured man was Siegmund; who, pausing in his flight to a place of refuge, with the fainting Sieglinde whom he loved, beheld the Valkyr, Brunhilde, and was told by her that a hero’s death and a hero’s reward in Valhalla were in store for him. There in the Viking Paradise, waited the warrior-parent he had lost; there Wotan the All-Father would welcome him. The Valkyries were preparing his place. The heroes of olden days would be his boon companions.
And Siegmund, the Luckless, heard with joy. But one question he asked the goddess:—Would Sieglinde, his fellow fugitive, join him in that abode of the blest? Brunhilde scoffingly replied that Valhalla was for heroes; not for mere women. Then, unflinchingly casting aside his every hope of Paradise, Siegmund kissed the senseless woman’s brow; and, again facing the goddess, made answer:
“Greet for me Valhalla! Greet for me Wotan! Greet for me my father and all the heroes! To them, I’ll follow thee not! Where Sieglinde bides, there shall Siegmund stay.”