IN THE FAR REACHES
Charlie Bryant’s horse was a good one, far better than a rancher of his class might have been expected to ride. It was a big, compact animal with the long sloping pasterns of a horse bred for speed. It possessed those wonderful rounded ribs, which seemed to run right up to quarters let down like those of a racehorse. It was a beautiful creature, and as it chafed under the gentle, restraining hand of its rider its full veins stood out like ropes, and its shoulders and flanks were a-lather of sweat.
They were traveling over a broken country a few miles up the valley. There was no road of any sort, only cattle tracks, which, amid the wild tangle of bush, made progress difficult and slow.
The man’s eyes were brooding, and his effeminate face was overcast as he rode. The wild scene about him went for nothing, even to his artist eyes. His thoughts were full to the brim with things that held them concentrated to the exclusion of all else. And, for all he thought, or saw, or felt, of his surroundings, he might have been footing the superheated plains of a tropical desert.
He was thinking of a woman. She was never really out of his thoughts, and his heart was torn with the hopelessness of the passion consuming him. No overshadowing threat could give him the least disquiet, no physical fear ever seemed to touch him. But every thought of the one woman whose image was forever before him could sear and lacerate his heart almost beyond endurance.
He had no blame for her at any time. He had no protest to offer that her love, the love of a wife for a husband, was utterly beyond his reach. How could it be otherwise? He knew himself so well for what he was, he had so subtle an appreciation of all he must lack in the eyes of a big spirited, human woman, that, to his troubled mind, the situation as it was had almost become inevitable.
Now as he rode, he thought, too, of his newly arrived brother, and the hatefulness of personal comparison made him almost cringe beneath their flagellations. Bill, so big of heart and body, so lacking in the many abilities which go to make up the man in men’s eyes, but which count for so little in a woman’s, so strong in the buoyancy and fearlessness that was his. He felt he could almost hate him for these things. Bill had not one ugly thought or feeling in the whole of his nature. Temptation? He barely understood the word, because he was so naturally wholesome.
But more than these things it was the memory of that which, since his earliest youth, had looked back at him out of the mirror, that robbed Charlie Bryant of so much peace now. That, and the weakness which seemed to fit the vision so well. Whereas Bill, this child of the same parents, was all that might be, his own form and manner made him shudder as he thought of them. Then there was that devil haunting him, and from whom there seemed to be no escape.
How could he ever hope that Kate Seton would do more than lend her strong, pitying affection for his support? How could she ever look to him for support and guidance? His sense of proportion was far too acute to permit so grievous an error.