Overland: A Novel

by John William De Forest

CHAPTER XXXIII.

The tread of Coronado's horse passing within fifteen feet of Thurstane roused him from the troubled sleep into which he had sunk after his long fainting fit.

Slowly he opened his eyes, to see nothing but long grasses close to his face, and through them a haze of mountains and sky. His first moments of wakening were so far from being a full consciousness that he did not comprehend where he was. He felt very, very weak, and he continued to lie still.

But presently he became aware of sounds; there was a trampling, and then there were words; the voices of life summoned him to live. Instantly he remembered two things: the starving comrades whom it was his duty to save, and the loved girl whom he longed to find. Slowly and with effort, grasping at the rock to aid his trembling knees, he rose to his feet just as Clara turned her horse's head toward the plain.

Coronado threw a last anxious glance in the direction of the wretch whom he meant to abandon to the desert. To his horror he saw a lean, smirched, ghostly face looking at him in a dazed way, as if out of the blinding shades of death. The quickness of this villain was so wonderful that one is almost tempted to call it praiseworthy. He perceived at once that Thurstane would be discovered, and that he, Coronado, must make the discovery, or he might be charged with attempting to leave him to die.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed loudly, "there he is!"

Clara turned: there was a scream of joy: she was on the ground, running: she was in Thurstane's arms. During that unearthly moment there was no thought in those two of Coronado, or of any being but each other. It is impossible fully to describe such a meeting; its exterior signs are beyond language; its emotion is a lifetime. If words are feeble in presence of the heights and depths of the Colorado, they are impotent in presence of the altitudes and abysses of great passion. Human speech has never yet completely expressed human intellect, and it certainly never will completely express human sentiments. These lovers, who had been wandering in chasms impenetrable to hope, were all of a sudden on mountain summits dizzy with joy. What could they say for themselves, or what can another say for them?

Clara only uttered inarticulate murmurs, while her hands crawled up Thurstane's arms, pressing and clutching him to make sure that he was alive. There was an indescribable pathos in this eagerness which could not trust to sight, but must touch also, as if she were blind. Thurstane held her firmly, kissing hair, forehead, and temples, and whispering, "Clara! Clara!" Her face, which had turned white at the first glimpse of him, was now roseate all over and damp with a sweet dew. It became smirched with the dust of his face; but she would only have rejoiced, had she known it; his very squalor was precious to her.

At last she fell back from him, held him at arm's length with ease, and stared at him. "Oh, how sick!" she gasped. "How thin! You are starving."

She ran to her horse, drew from her saddle-bags some remnants of food, and brought them to him. He had sunk down faint upon a stone, and he was too weak to speak aloud; but he gave her a smile of encouragement which was at once pathetic and sublime. It said, "I can bear all alone; you must not suffer for me." But it said this out of such visible exhaustion, that, instead of being comforted, she was terrified.