The Loom of the Desert

by Idah Meacham Strobridge

Lovesick as any boy he was befooled to his heart’s content, wilfully blind to the fact that it was the old pitiful story of a woman’s greed, and that her white hands had caresses and her lips kisses for his gold—not for himself. Her arms were eager to hold in their clasp—not him, but—the great wealth which was his, the gold which had come from the fabulously rich strike he had cleaned up on the bedrock of the claim, where a cross reef had held it hidden a thousand years and more. Her red lips were athirst to lay kisses—— On his mouth? Nay! on the piles of minted gold that had lain in the bank vault since he had sold his mine. The Twentieth Century Aspasia has a hundred arts her sister of old knew naught of; and Williston was not the first man who has unwittingly played the part of proxy to another, or blissfully believed in the lying lips whose kisses sting like the sting of wild bees—those honey-sweet kisses that stab one’s soul with needles of passionate pain. All these were for the gold-god, not him; he was but the unconscious proxy.

Keith mused on the situation as he sat in the flickering candle-light blown by the night wind that—coming in through the open window—brought with it the pungent odor of sagebrush-covered hills.

“Strange,” he thought, “how a woman of that particular stamp gets a hold on some fellows! And with a whole world full of other women, too—sweet, good women who are ready to give a man the right sort of love and allegiance, if he’s a half-way decent sort of a fellow with anything at all worthy to give in exchange; God bless ’em!—and confound him! He makes me angry; why can’t he pull himself together and be a man!”

Bayard Keith was no saint. Far from it. Yet, for all his drifting about the world, he had kept a pretty clean and wholesome moral tone. Women of the Gloria Howard class did not appeal to his taste; that was all there was about it. But he knew men a-plenty who, for her sake, would have committed almost any crime in the calendar if she set it for them to do. There were men who would have faced the decree of judge and jury without a tremor, if the deed was done for her sake. He himself could not understand such things. Not that he felt himself better or stronger than his fellows; it was simply that he was made of a different sort of stuff.

Yet, in spite of his manifest indifference to the charm of her large, splendid beauty—dazzling as the sun at noon-day—and that marked personality which all others who ever came within the circle of her presence seemed to feel, Keith knew he could have this woman’s love for the asking—the love of a woman who, ’twas said, won love from all, yet giving love to none. Nay, but he knew it was already his. His very indifference had fanned a flame in her breast; a flame which had been lit as her eyes were first lifted to his own and she beheld her master, and burning steadily it had become the consuming passion of this strange creature’s existence. Hopeless, she knew it was; yet it was stronger than her love of life. Even stronger than her inordinate love of money was this passion for the man whose heart she had utterly failed to touch.

That he must know it to be so, was but an added pain for her fierce nature to bear. Keith wondered if Williston had ever suspected, as she played her part, the woman’s passionate and genuine attachment to himself. He hoped not, for the two men had been good comrades, though without the closer bond of a fine sympathy; and Keith’s wish was that their comradeship should continue, while he hoped the woman’s love, in time, would wear itself out. To Williston he had once tried to give a word of advice.

“Drop it, Keith,” came the quick answer to his warning, “I love her.”

“Granted that you do, why should you so completely enslave yourself to a woman of that type?”

“What do you mean by ‘that type?’ Take care! take care, Keith! I tell you I love her! Were I not already a married man I would make Mrs. Howard my wife.”

“Oh, no, you wouldn’t,” Keith answered quietly. “Howard refuses to get a divorce, and you know very well she cannot. Besides, Sid, it would be sheer madness for you to do such a thing, even were she free.”