Happiness was not imperative; self-indulgence was not essential to life. Adam realized he had done wonderful things—perhaps noble things. But nothing great! Perhaps all his agony had been preparation for this supreme ordeal.
How saving and splendid would it be, if out of his stultified youth, with its blinded love of brother and its weakness of will—if out of the bitter sting of infidelity and his fatal, tragic deed—if out of the long torture of hardship of the desert and its strife and its contact with souls as wild as his—how glorious it would be if out of this terrible tide of dark, contending years, so full of remorse and fear and endless atonement, there should rise a man who, trained now in the desert’s ferocity to survive, should use that force to a noble aim, and, climbing beyond his nature, sacrifice himself to the old biblical law—a life for a life—and with faith in unknown future lend his spirit to the progress of the ages!
* * * * *
Adam divined that he did not belong to himself. What he wanted for himself, selfishly, was not commensurable with the need of others in this life. He was concerned here with many ideals, the highest of which was sacrifice, that the evil of him should not go on. Since he had loved Ruth Virey the whole value of life had shifted. Life was sweet, but no longer if he had to hide, no longer under the ban of crime. The stain must be washed away. By slow and gradual change, by torments innumerable, had he come to this realization. He had deceived himself by love of life. But the truth in him was the truth of the immortality of his soul, just as it was truth that he inherited instincts of the savage. Life was renewal. Every base, selfish man held back its spirituality.
“No more! No more!” cried Adam, looking up.
And in that cry he accepted the spirit of life, the mighty being that pulsated there in the darkness, the whispering voice of Genie’s mother, the love of Ruth that never was to be his, the strange, desperate fights with his instincts, the stranger fight of his renunciation—he accepted these on faith as his idea of God.
“I will give my life for my brother’s,” he said. “I will offer myself in punishment for my crime. I will pay with my body that I may save my soul!”
CHAPTER XXX
Adam lingered in his travel through the beautiful Palo Verde Valley, and at last reached the long swell of desert slope that led down to the Rio Colorado.