Thor received these two letters together on returning to Colorado Springs from a day's visit to that high wilderness in which John Hay sought freedom from interruption in writing his Life of Lincoln. He understood fully that Lois was deliberately being cruel in order to be kind. The very spacing out of her information over two separate days was meant to impress him and at the same time to spare. Things would be easier for Claude, she said, when she meant that they would be easier for him.
But for him it was a matter of indifference. That is, it was the same kind of matter of indifference that pain becomes in a limb that has grown benumbed. For reasons he could hardly explain, that part of his being to which Rosie Fay had made her pathetic appeal couldn't feel any more. It was like something atrophied from over-strain. There was the impulse to suffer, but no suffering. Moreover, he was sure that though these nerves might one day vibrate again, they could never do so otherwise than reminiscently. To the episode he felt as a mother might feel to the dead child she has never been able to acknowledge as her own. It was something buried, and yet sacred—sacred in spite of the fact that it never should have been. As an incident in his life it had brought keen joy and keener pain, but he had already outlived both. He had outlived them as apparently Rosie had outlived them herself—not by the passage of time, but by an intensity of experience which seemed to have covered years.
He came to this conclusion not instinctively, nor all at once, but by dint of reflection, as he sat on the broad terrace of the hotel, watching the transformation scene that takes place in the Rockies during the half-hour before sunset. His pipe was in his mouth; Lois's letters lay open on the little table he had drawn up beside his chair. Other tourists bore him company, scattered singly or in groups, smoking and drinking tea. A mild suggestion of Europe, a suggestion of Cap Martin or of Cannes, was blocked by the domes of the great range and by a shifting interplay of magic lights where his eye was impelled to look for the broad, still levels of Mediterranean blue.
There was a wonder in the moment which the yearning in his spirit was tempted to take as symbolic, and perhaps prophetic, of his future. Where all day long he had seen nothing but hard ridges packed against one another, without water, without snow, without perspective, without a shred of mist, without a hint of mystery, without anything to set the mind to wondering what was above them or beyond them, the dissolving views of late afternoon began to throw up a succession of lovely ranges, pierced by valleys, glens, and gorges. Where the eye had ached with the harsh red of the rocks spread with the harsh green of the scant vegetation, soft vapors rose insensibly—purple, pink, and orange—changing into nameless hues as they climbed into the great clefts and veiled the rolling domes and swathed the pinnacles and furrowed the deep passes and put the horizon infinitely far away. The transmutation from conditions in which Nature herself seemed for once to be barbaric, alien, hostile to civilized man, painted with Cheyenne war-paint and girdled with a belt of scalps, to this breaking up of glory into glory, of color into color, and of form into form, rising, mingling, melting, fading, rising and mingling again, melting again, fading again, passing swiftly in a last brief recrudescence from gold into green and from green into black, with the hurried eclipse and the sudden tranquillity of night—the transmutation which produced all this was to Thor hopeful and in its way inspiriting. In the last rays of light he drew out his fountain-pen and the scribbling-book he kept for notes by the way, writing quickly without preamble or formality.
"Thanks for telling me about Rosie. It is as it should be—as will be best. Jim saved her. Nothing so good could ever happen to her as to marry him.
"As for me, there are two things, Lois, that I can truthfully affirm. I can declare them the more emphatically because I have had time to think them over—to think you over, and myself. If I ever had a doubt about them I haven't now, because leisure and solitude have enabled me to see them clearly. The first is that I have given you my best; and the second, that I have given it without any restriction of which I have been aware. If there was anything I withheld from you, and which you think you should have had, I can only say that it was not of the nature of my best. What it was I make no attempt to say, nor would it do any good to try. Whatever it was, I wish neither to depreciate it nor to deny it. It was something that swept me—like the tornado of which one of your letters speaks—but it passed. It passed, leaving me tired and older—oh, very much older!—and with an intense desire to creep home. As a physicist I know nothing of a carnal man and a spiritual man, so that I cannot enter into your analysis; but I do know that there are higher and lower promptings in the human heart, and that in my case the higher turn to you. As compared with you I'm only as the ship compared to the haven in which it would take refuge. The ship is good for something, but it needs a port."
Again he decided to leave his appeal suspended here, and on the next morning began his preparations for gradually turning homeward.
CHAPTER XXX
It was William Sweetapple, the gardener's boy, who informed Lois that Claude had come back, throwing the information casually over his shoulder as he watered the lawn.