Often when Adam absented himself from camp, Virey had a trick of climbing the weathered slope to roll down rocks. He seemed mad to do this. Yet when Adam returned he would come clambering down, wet and spent, a haggard, sweating wretch not yet quite beyond fear. In vain had Adam argued, pleaded, talked with him; in vain had been the strident scorn of a man and the curses of rage. Virey, however, had a dread of Adam’s huge hands. Something about them fascinated him. When one of these, clenched in an enormous fist, was shoved under his nose with a last threat, then Virey would retire sullenly to the shack. In every way that was possible he kept before Magdalene Virey the spectacle of his ruin and the consciousness that it was her doing. These midsummer days soon made him a gaunt, unshaven, hollow-eyed wretch. Miserable and unkempt he presented himself at meals, and sat there, a haggard ghost, to mouth a little food and to stare at his wife with accusing eyes. He reminded her of cool, shaded rooms, of exquisite linen and china, of dainty morsels, of carved-glass pitchers full of refreshing drink and clinking ice. Always he kept before her the heat, the squalor, the dirt, the horror of Death Valley. When he could present himself before her with his thin, torn garments clinging wet to his emaciated body, his nerves gone from useless exertions, his hands bloody and shaking as if with palsy, his tongue hanging out—when he could surprise her thus and see her shrink, then he experienced rapture. He seemed to cry out: Woman! behold the wreck of Virey!
But if that was rapture for him, to gloat over the doom of her seemed his glory. Day by day Death Valley wrought by invisible lines and shades a havoc in Magdalene Virey’s beauty. To look at her was to have striking proof that Death Valley had never been intended for a woman, no matter how magnificent her spirit. The only spirit that could prevail here was the one which had lost its earthly habiliments. Like a cat playing with a mouse, Virey watched his wife. Like Mephistopheles gloating over the soul of a lost woman, Virey attended to the slow manifestations of his wife’s failing strength. He meant to squeeze every drop of blood out of her heart and still keep, if possible, life lingering in her. His most terrible bitterness seemed to consist of his failure to hide her utterly and forever from the gaze of any man save himself. Here he had hidden her in the most desolate place in the world, yet another man had come, and, like all the others, had been ready to lay down his life for her. Virey writhed under this circumstance over which he had no control. It was really the only truth about the whole situation that he was able to grasp. The terrible tragedy of his hate was that it was not hate, but love. Like a cannibal, he would have eaten his wife raw, not from hunger, but from his passion to consume her, incorporate her heart and blood and flesh into his, make her body his forever. Thought of her soul, her mind, her spirit, never occurred to Virey. So he never realized how she escaped him, never understood her mocking scorn.
But through his thick and heat-hazed brain there must have pierced some divination of his failing powers to torture her. The time came when he ceased to confront her like a scarecrow, he ceased accusing her, he ceased to hold before her the past and its contrast with the present, he gave up his refinement of cruelty. This marked in Virey a further change, a greater abasement. He reverted to instinct. He retrograded to a savage in his hate, and that hate found its outlet altogether in primitive ways.
Adam’s keen eye saw all this, and the slow boil in his blood was not all owing to the torrid heat of Death Valley. His great hands, so efficient and ruthless, seemed fettered. A thousand times he had muttered to the silence of the night, to the solemn, hazed daylight, to the rocks that had souls, and to the invisible presence ever beside him: “How long must I stand this? How long—how long?”
One afternoon as he awoke late from the sweltering siesta he heard Mrs. Virey scream. The cry startled him, because she had never done that before. He ran.
Adam found her lying at the foot of the stone bench in a dead faint. The brown had left her skin. How white the wasted face! What dark shadows under the hollow eyes! His heart smote him remorselessly.
As he knelt and was about to lift her head he espied a huge, black, hairy spider crawling out of the folds of her gray gown. It was a tarantula, one of the ugliest of the species. Adam flipped it off with his hand and killed it under his boot.
Then with basin of water and wetted scarf he essayed to bring Mrs. Virey back to consciousness. She did not come to quickly, but at last she stirred, and opened her eyes with a flutter. She seemed to be awakening from a nightmare of fear, loathing, and horror. For that instant her sight did not take in Adam, but was a dark, humid, dilated vision of memory.
“Magdalene, I killed the tarantula,” said he. “It can’t harm you now.... Wake up! Why, you’re stiff and you look like—like I don’t know what!... You fainted and I’ve had a time bringing you to.”
“Oh!” she cried. “It’s you.” And then she clung to him while he lifted her, steadying her upon her feet, and placed her on the stone bench. “So I fainted?... Ugh! That loathsome spider! Where is it?”