The Hills of Desire

by Richard Aumerle Maher

The three years of separation had not kept them apart. It seemed that they had at first been thrown violently away from each other. But there had been an immediate rebound, and Augusta knew that they had ever since been approaching each other in understanding and spirit. She had worked, and trained, to prepare herself for this work so dear to her which she was doing now. And Jimmie had suffered—here in France. Augusta's eyes had seen the things which he must have gone through, things which her heart and her intuitions had before told her concerning him. But all seemed only to fit them into the design that was prepared for them. In fact, in the supreme egoism of love, it had not been difficult to believe that the whole world's tragedy had been in some measure arranged to form a setting for their love.

Every subconscious thought of her waking days, every half formed dream of day or night had of late been bringing Jimmie to Augusta, until it seemed that the terrible world about her—which she was still obliged to call reality—could not much longer persist. The end must be near. For she had felt the coming of her love so vividly that material, brute things could not much longer keep it from her.

Jimmie was coming to her! The mistakes, the travail, the dim misunderstandings of this phase of being which was called life, would soon be past. Jimmie and she would once more take the open road out into the country of God.

For weeks her spirit had lived upon and breathed upon her dream, until it, the dream, had become to her the real. And it seemed to her that she was already going through the transition that would bring her out with Jimmie upon the glorious, untried road that lay beyond the world's death. She had no fear. The very daring of her dream had raised in her a faith in love that trembled at nothing.

And then, in an instant, everything had gone black.

She had seen Jimmie. And she had thought that she saw Jimmie die, and—and—nothing—

Jimmie was gone from her forever. And there was left to her nothing but the dry little reflection that she had been a fool.

In those two black days when her soul strained, listening and watching over the edges of the normal world, she had breasted the dark tide of despair running full down upon her, and not even she herself could have told how near she was to going down under it.

And in the darkness, as would happen, the old love came back to mock her. Oh, why, why? had she not kept the love that was hers? Why had she not fought that dark woman for it? She had meanly run away, because it was not good enough, because it was not perfect. Because she had found a flaw in it she had thrown away her jewel.

Now it was given her, for punishment, to know how good that love had been. The touch of Jimmie's clumsy hands as he had tucked her into her hammock at night burned her now with the maddening sweetness of a lost dream. The nights when she had watched over him, the pride and the swelling love of seeing rugged health come back to him, the memories of brave, struggling, laughing walks by his side through wind and snow, all these and a thousand dear, intimate memories came to haunt her with the mocking difference between a warm, happy human love, and the empty dream that she had made for herself.