Who can measure the influence upon youth the legends of its country, the effect of its brave early history? Would any of those coming later fail to find the thrill in the story of the man who had visioned the idea, the son whose eager service to a comrade had consecrated it?
A short span:—and a little joy, perhaps! Her eyes sought the light from Rickard’s window. A little joy,—and then the stars—again!
Slowly, the universe cradled her. She was in her first deep sleep when a step passed her. A hand fumbled uncertainly over the surface of the door; knocked gently. A heavy bundle dropped to the threshold. Again the figure passed the occupied cot, and paused, going on again, more softly.
No quickened pulse told MacLean, Jr., that it was Innes Hardin sleeping in her brother’s cot.
CHAPTER XLI
INCOMPLETENESS
STUMBLING and blind, Hardin pushed without volition toward the river which was sending its peaceful waters once again to the gulf. When he awoke to himself and the night, he was on the levee.
His bitterness was coloring both strands of his life. Strange, that a man’s attainment can bring him neither pride nor joy, his own achievement winning him dishonor in a double sense! The triumph of that mound of earth, of those turned waters, was not his. Gerty had felt it; else she had not flouted him. In everything he had failed. Life held only jeers for him.
Nothing in Hardin’s experience, or in his specialized reading had helped him to a philosophy of life; the books men live by were not his; and his crude egotism, as raw to-day as when he was twenty-five, in the moment of his trial tripped him to his fall. In all his jaundiced world, there was no rosy finger of light. His wounded shadow obscured the universe. His suffering, he felt, was unparalleled, because it was undeserved. What had betrayed him? His bitterness was crying to the stars. Where was the fault?
He kept telling himself that it was not true. He would wake up and find himself in his tent, under those same mocking stars; he would discover it to be a hideous dream. Why for him this bite of hate, cried his bleeding ego? It was as though life, which he had been pursuing, had turned suddenly on him, savage and virulent, had bitten him to the bone. It wasn’t true, cried his resistance, because it wouldn’t be right! This crash violated all his plans, warped his world, accused his judgments. This the Hardin who had followed a deliberate trail ever since that morning of resolution in this yet unawakened desert? In what had that man failed, where had he missed? Misfortune, trouble, he had thought of vaguely as a punishment for sin, or negligence, as do most eager spirits, before it comes! Himself! Tom Hardin,—why, life had scarcely begun! Why, since that moment, his path had known no turning; one woman, one ambition; selflessness. Something was wrong; the umpire caught napping!
His training betrayed him into a thicket of amaze, of protest. His mental processes kept him in a circle of tangled underbrush. What was physical pain, he cried, to the torture of his mind? What the agony of death?