“Because they went there.”
“But no one lives long in that valley of death.”
“Then I will find their graves,” she said.
“Ruth, you must not. What good can come of your traveling there? I’ve told you of its desolate and forbidding nature. You are all wrong. Wait! Perhaps your mother will—perhaps you will hear of her some day.”
“Oh, desert man, I was a child when we parted. I’m a woman now. I want to know. The mystery haunts me. She loved me—ah, so well!... Sometimes I cannot bear to live. My grandfather hides me in lonely places. We meet but few people, and those he repels. It is because of me.... Desert man, I am lonelier than was Genie. She is like a bird. She must have lived on the sun and the winds. But I am no child, and I am forlorn.”
Brooding purple eyes of trouble, of longing, of discontent, of fire for life! The heart and soul of Ruth Virey—the heritage of need and unrest—shone from her eyes. All unconsciously she longed to be loved. She stood on the threshold of womanhood like a leaf in a storm.
“Talk with me, walk with me, desert man,” she said, wistfully. “You were Taquitch for Genie. Be Eagle for me. Your eyes know the desert where my mother sleeps—where perhaps her spirit wanders. You soothe my troubled heart. Oh, I can feel myself with you, for you understand.”
* * * * *
Thus Adam’s soul was stormed. Magdalene Virey had presaged the future. In the dark stillness of the night, sleepless, haunted, tossed by torment, it was revealed to him that Magdalene Virey had risen out of the depths on noble love for him, and through that love she had seen with mystic eyes into the future. She had projected that love into the spirit of the desert, and it had guided Adam’s wandering steps to her daughter Ruth. Was this only a wanderer’s dream as he lay on the hills? Was it only a knot in the tangled skein of his desert life? Was it inscrutable design of a power he disdained?
Be what this might, the one great love of his years possessed him, fierce and resistless on its march to his defeat. It mocked his ordeal. It flaunted a banner in his face—noble love, noble passion, love of the soul, all that revered woman, wife, mother, and babe. He had found his mate. Strange how he remembered Margarita Arallanes and the wild boy’s love of a day. Poor, pale, wasteful, sinful, lustful little gleam! And he recalled the spell of Genie—that strong call of nature in the wilderness. Above both he had arisen. But Ruth Virey was the woman. He could win her. The truth beat at his temples, constricted his throat. Ruth was the flower of her mother’s tragic longing to be loved. Ruth burned with that longing. And life was not to be denied. Magdalene Virey had given him this child of her agony. She trusted the fate of Ruth in his hands. She saw with superhuman eyes.