Wanderer of the Wasteland by Grey Zane

Author:Grey, Zane [GREY ZANE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7860-2784-2
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Published: 2011-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter

XVII

The hour came when Magdalene Virey stirred Adam to his depths.

“Wansfell,” she said, with a rare and wonderful tremor in her voice, “I love the silence, the loneliness, the serenity— even the tragedy of this valley of shadows. Ah! It is one place that will never be popular with men—where few women will ever come. Nature has set it apart for wanderers of the wastelands, men like you, unquenchable souls who endure, as you said, to fight, to strive, to seek, to find … And surely for lost souls like me! Most men and all women must find death here, if they stay. But there is death in life. I’ve faced my soul here, in the black, lonely watches of the desert nights. And I would endure any agony to change that soul, to make it as high and clear and noble as the white cone of the mountain yonder.”

Mysterious and inscrutable, the desert influence had worked upon Magdalene Virey. On the other hand, forces destructive to her physical being had attacked her. It was as if an invisible withering wind had blown upon a flower in the night. Adam saw this with distress. But she laughed at the truth of it—laughed without mockery. Something triumphant rang like a bell in her laugh. Always, in the subtlety of character she had brought with her and the mystery she had absorbed from the desert, she stayed beyond Adam’s understanding. It seemed that she liked to listen to his ceaseless importunities; but merciless to herself and aloof from Virey, she refused to leave Death Valley.

“Suppose I pack the burros and tuck you under my arm and take you, anyway?” he queried, stubbornly.

“I fancy I ’d like you to tuck me under your arm,” she replied, with the low laugh that came readily now, “but if you did—it would be as far as you’d get.”

“How so?” he demanded, curiously.

“Why, I ’d exercise the prerogative of the eternal feminine and command that time should stand still right there.”

A sweetness and charm, perhaps of other days, a memory of power, haunted face and voice then.

“Time—stand still?” echoed Adam, ponderingly. “Magdalene, you are beyond me.”

“So it seems. I’m a little beyond myself sometimes. You will never see in me the woman who has been courted, loved, spoiled by men.”

“Well, I grasp that, I guess. But I don’t care to see you as such a woman. I might not—”

“Ah! you might not respect me,” she interrupted. “Alas! … But, Wansfell, if I had met you when I was eighteen I would never have been courted and loved and ruined by men … You don’t grasp that, either.”

Adam had long ceased to curse his density. The simplicity of him antagonized her complexity. His had been the blessed victory over her bitterness, her mockery, her consciousness of despair. His had been the gladness of seeing her grow brown and strong and well, until these early June days had begun to weaken her. That fact had augmented his earnestness to get her to leave the valley.

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