The Man of the Desert by Grace Livingston Hill

Author:Grace Livingston Hill [Hill, Grace Livingston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781634095099
Publisher: Barbour Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2015-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

His Mother

Deserts and mountains remained, duties crowded and pressed, hearts ached, but the world rushed on. The weeks that followed showed these two that great love is eternal.

Brownleigh didn’t try to stop thinking about it but rather let it glorify his life. Each day passed, and he traveled from post to post, from hogan to mesa, and back to his shanty again, always with the thought of her companionship. He’d never been less cheery when he met his friends, though he had a quiet dignity, a tender reserve behind it that a few discerning ones perceived. At the fort they said he was losing flesh, but if so he was gaining muscle. His lean brown arms were never stronger, and his fine strong face was never sad when anyone was nearby. Only in the nighttime, alone on the moonlit desert or in his quiet dwelling place, did he talk with his Father and tell Him of the loneliness and heartache. His people found him more sympathetic, more painstaking, more tireless than ever before, and the work prospered under his hand.

The girl in the city deliberately set herself to forget.

The first few days after she left him were a mingling of ecstatic joy and deep depression, as she alternately meditated on the great love or faced its impossibility.

She scorched Milton Hamar with her glance of aversion and avoided him constantly despite her family’s protest, until he made an excuse and left the party at Pasadena. There, too, Aunt Maria relieved them of her annoying interference, and the return trip taken by the southern route allowed the girl to meditate undisturbed. She became more dissatisfied with herself and her useless, ornamental life. Some days she read the little book, and other days she shut it away and tried to return to her former life, telling herself it was useless to attempt to change herself. The book gave her a deep unrest and a sense that life held sweeter, more serious things than just living to please oneself. She began to long for home and the summer round of activities to fill the emptiness of her heart.

As the summer advanced, her plans to have a good time every minute seemed almost reckless sometimes; yet in the quiet of her own room the yearning awakened in the desert and refusing to be silenced would always return.

Sometimes, when she remembered the great deep love she’d heard expressed for her, the bitter tears came to her eyes, and one thought throbbed through her consciousness: “Not worthy! Not worthy!” He didn’t think her fit to be his wife. Her father and her world would think otherwise. They’d count him unworthy to mate with her, an heiress, the pet of society—and he a man who gave up his life for a whim, a fad, a fanatical fancy! But she knew it wasn’t so. She knew him to be a man of all men. She knew she wasn’t a woman a man like that could rightly marry, and the thought galled her constantly.

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