The heart of Thunder Mountain

by Edfrid A. Bingham

Haig turned away with a groan, and tried to obey her. But eat? Eat that repulsive food that he had choked down these many days only to please her, only to subscribe to her foolish faith? He could not! But presently she raised her head, and saw that he was not eating, and chided him. Whereupon he swallowed some morsels of the venison, and assured her that he had eaten heartily.

All that day she lay there, her face flushed, her eyes gleaming with a brightness that was more than the brightness of her indomitable spirit. When she smiled up at him he turned his face away that she might not see what he knew was written on it. And then he realized how much that smile had come to mean to him––how all unawares he had come to covet and to prize it––how he had half-consciously of late resorted to unexpected words and gestures to coax it to her lips.

There was no sleep for either of them that night. The next day Marion grew steadily worse, and toward evening she became delirious. And there was no concealment in this delirium as there had been in his. All that he had not seen and heard and guessed before was now wholly revealed to him. He was permitted to 310 see deep into the pure soul of the girl, into her very heart that was brimming over with love for him. His name came riding on every breath. It was Philip, Philip, Philip! And bit by bit, and fragment by fragment, he heard all the pitiful story of her love, of her petty stratagems, of the wicked little plot she had made, of the traps from which he had extricated himself, of the pretended sprain in her ankle, of her watching and waiting, of the anguish he had caused her, of her solitary communion with the stars on Mount Avalanche, of her dismissal of Hillyer, of her faith in the love that should not be denied and unrequited, of her prayers for a miracle that should bring him to her at last.

He looked down at the poor, small foot in its ragged shoe; yes, that was the foot that was “sprained.” And how it had trudged, and dragged itself along for him, when every bone and muscle of her body ached! He looked at her hands, thin even in their swollenness, raw and bleeding, hard as a laborer’s on the palms. How they had toiled and bled for him! For him! And what about him? What about Philip Haig?

He leaned back from her, and closed his eyes. And suddenly it seemed as if something fell away from them, as if something that had bound and imprisoned and blinded him had been rudely shattered. In one terrible, torturing revelation he saw clearly what he had been, what he had done, what a miserable wreck he had made of life, what a pitiable, dwarfed, misshapen thing his soul had become in comparison with the soul of this girl whom he had despised. He saw that he had lived a life of almost untouched egoism, setting his own wrongs above all the other wrongs in the world, 311 counting his own griefs the greatest of all griefs, nursing his own tragedy as if it had been the first tragedy and the last. Bitterly, remorselessly he reviewed his selfishness, his hatred, his senseless rage, the heartlessness wrought by himself in a nature that had been, in the beginning, as pure, if not as precious and fine and beautiful, as hers.

And that was not all. He had taken woman for the special object of his hatred. He had made himself believe that all women were alike. Was there, then, only one kind of woman in a world filled with many kinds of men? Because he had been a fool, because he had been deceived by one woman, he had concluded, in his folly, that every woman was a vampire or a parasite,––“a rag and a bone and a hank of hair”!

And now there lay before him indeed (and the words took on a new and more terrible meaning) “a rag and a bone and a hank of hair.” Yes, this was all that was left of her. This was what he had made of the most joyous and most beautiful creature that had ever crossed his path; this was the best he could do for one who had had the misfortune to love him and the courage to tell him so. This was his work! His memory went back to that day before the post-office. How beautiful she was then, how strangely beautiful, coming out of that halo of light by the side of the golden outlaw. Something had stirred within him then, as it had stirred again and again: at Huntington’s when she reached for his revolver; in his cottage that last afternoon of her nursing. And he had repulsed it, put it down, and trampled on it, as if it had been an execrable thing instead of the very treasure he had been 312 seeking all his life without knowing what he sought. And now he recognized it for what it was––too late!

He bent nearer to her, listening.

“Philip! Philip!” she was saying, in tender, coaxing accents, with that quivering of her chin that had many times been almost irresistible.

Then came the final break-up of everything within him. He felt lifted as upon a flood, and a wild and passionate longing surged through all his being. He leaned swiftly over her, and clasped her in his arms, and pressed her hot cheek against his own. And then––it was unendurable; he felt one of her arms softly encircling his neck. There was just one gentle pressure, and then the arm fell to her side, and her head sank weakly away from him. He laid her back tenderly on her hard bed.