"Why dearest," the girl answered frankly, "I don't know, myself, why I didn't tell you"--which, Myra Willard knew, was the exact truth.
Then Sibyl told her foster-mother everything about her acquaintance with the artist and Conrad Lagrange--from the time she first watched the painter, from the arbor in the rose garden, where she met the novelist; until that afternoon, when she had invited them to supper, the next day.
Only of her dancing before the artist, the girl did not tell.
Later in the evening, Sibyl--saying that she would sing Myra to sleep--took her violin to the porch, outside the window; and in the dusk made soft music until the woman's troubled heart was calmed. When the moon came up from behind the Galenas, across the canyon, the girl tiptoed into the house, to bend over the sleeping woman, in tender solicitude. With that mother tenderness belonging to all true women, she stooped and softly kissed the disfigured face upon the pillow. At the touch, Myra Willard stirred uneasily; and the girl--careful to make no sound--withdrew.
On the porch, she again took up her violin as if to play; but, instead, sat motionless--her face turned down the canyon--her eyes looking far away. Then, quickly, she put aside the instrument, and--as though with sudden yielding to some inner impulse--slipped out into the grassy yard.
And there, in the moon's white light,--with only the mountains, the trees, and the flowers to see,--she danced, again, as she had danced before the artist in the glade--with her face turned down the canyon, and her arms outstretched, longingly, toward the camp in the sycamores back of the old orchard.
Suddenly, from the room where Myra Willard slept, came that shuddering, terror-stricken cry.
The girl, fleet-footed as a deer, ran into the house. Kneeling, she put her strong young arms about the cowering, trembling form on the bed.
"There, there, dear, it's all right."
The woman of the disfigured face caught Sibyl's hand, impulsively.
"I--I--was dreaming again," she whispered, "and--and this time--O Sibyl--this time, I dreamed that it was _you_."
Chapter XXI
The Last Climb
That first visit of Aaron King and Conrad Lagrange to the old home of Sibyl Andres was the beginning of a delightful comradeship.
Often, in the evening, the two men, with Czar, went to spend an hour in friendly intercourse with their neighbors up the canyon. Always, they were welcomed by Myra Willard with a quiet dignity; while Sibyl was frankly delighted to have them come. Always, they were invited with genuine hospitality to "come again." Frequently, Brian Oakley and perhaps Mrs.
Oakley would be there when they arrived; or the Ranger would come riding into the yard before they left. At times, the canyon's mountain wall echoed the laughter of the little company as Sibyl and the novelist played their fantastical game of words; or again, the older people would listen to the blending voices of the artist and the girl as, in the quiet hush of the evening, they sang together to Myra Willard's accompaniment on the violin; or, perhaps, Sibyl, with her face upturned to the mountain tops, would make for her chosen friends the music of the hills.
Not infrequently, too, the girl would call at the camp in the sycamore grove--sometimes riding with the Ranger, sometimes alone; or they would hear her merry hail from the gate the other side of the orchard as she passed by. And sometimes, in the morning, she would appear--equipped with rod or gun or basket--to frankly challenge Aaron King to some long ramble in the hills.
So the days for the young man at the beginning of his life work, and for the young woman at the beginning of her womanhood, passed. Up and down the canyon, along the boulder-strewn bed of the roaring Clear Creek, from the Ranger Station to the falls; in the quiet glades under the alders hung with virgin's-bower and wild grape; beneath the live-oaks on the mountains' flanks or shoulders; in dimly lighted, cedar-sheltered gulches, among tall brakes and lilies; or high up on the canyon walls under the dark and fragrant pines--over all the paths and trails familiar to her girlhood she led him--showing him every nook and glade and glen--teaching him to know, as he had asked, the mountains that she herself so loved.
The time came, at last, when the two men must return to Fairlands. With Mr. and Mrs. Oakley they were spending the evening at Sibyl's home when Conrad Lagrange announced that they would leave the mountains, two days later.
"Then,"--said the girl, impulsively,--"Mr. King and I are going for one last good-by climb to-morrow. Aren't we?" she concluded--turning to the artist.
Aaron King laughed as he answered, "We certainly seem to be headed that way. Where are we going?"
"We will start early and come back late"--she returned--"which really is all that any one ought to know about a climb that is just for the climb.
And listen--no rod, no gun, no sketch-book. I'll fix a lunch."
"Watch out for my convict," warned the Ranger. "He must be getting mighty hungry, by now."
Early in the morning, they set out. Crossing the canyon, they climbed the Oak Knoll trail--down which the artist and Conrad Lagrange had been led by the uncanny wisdom of Croesus, a few weeks before--to the pipe-line. Where the path from below leads into the pipe-line trail, under the live-oaks, on a shelf cut in the comparatively easy slope of the mountain's shoulder, they paused for a look over the narrow valley that lay a thousand feet below. Across the wide, gray, boulder-strewn wash of the mountain torrent's way, with the gleaming thread of tumbling Clear Creek in its center, they could see the white dots that marked the camp back of the old orchard; and, farther up the stream, could distinguish the little opening with the cedar thicket and the giant sycamores that marked the spot where Sibyl was born.
Aaron King, looking at the girl, recalled that day when he and Conrad Lagrange, in a spirit of venturesome fun, had left the choice of trails to the burro. "Good, old Croesus!" he said smiling.
She knew the story of how they had been guided to their camping place, and laughed in return, as she answered, "He's a dear old burro, is Croesus, and worthy of a better name."
"Plutus would be better," suggested the artist.
"Because a Greek God is better than a Lydian King?" she asked curiously.
"Wasn't Plutus the giver of wealth?" he returned.
"Yes."
"Well, and wasn't he forced by Zeus to distribute his gifts without regard to the characters of the recipients?"
She laughed merrily. "Plutus or Croesus--I'm glad he chose the Oak Knoll trail."
"And so am I," answered the man, earnestly.
Leisurely, they followed the trail that is hung--narrow thread-like path--high upon the mountain wall, invisible from the floor of the canyon below. At a point where the trail turns to round the inward curve of one of the small side canyons--where the pines grow dark and tall--some thoughtful hand had laid a small pipe from the large conduit tunnel, under the trail, to a barrel fixed on the mountainside below the little path.
Here they stopped again and, while they loitered, filled a small canteen with the cold, clear water from the mountain's heart. Farther on, where the pipe-line again rounds the inward curve of the wall between two mountain spurs, they turned aside to follow the Government trail that leads to the fire-break on the summit of the Galenas and then down into the valley on the other side. At the gap where the Galena trail crosses the fire-break, they again turned aside to make their leisure way along the broad, brush-cleared break that lies in many a fold and curve and kink like a great ribbon on the thin top of the ridge. With every step, now, they were climbing. Midday found them standing by a huge rock at the edge of a clump of pines on one of the higher points of the western end of the range. Here they would have their lunch.
As they sat in the lee of the great rock, with the wind that sweeps the mountain tops singing in the pines above their heads, they looked directly down upon the wide Galena Valley and far across to the spurs and slopes of the San Jacintos beyond. Sibyl's keen eyes--mountain-trained from childhood--marked a railway train crawling down the grade from San Gorgonio Pass toward the distant ocean. She tried in vain to point it out to her companion. But the city eyes of the man could not find the tiny speck in the vast landscape that lay within the range of their vision. The artist looked at his watch. The train was the Golden State Limited that had brought him from the far away East, a few months before.
Aaron King remembered how, from the platform of the observation car, he had looked up at the mountains from which he now looked down. He remembered too, the woman into whose eyes he had, for the first time, looked that day. Turning his face to the west, he could distinguish under the haze of the distance the dark squares of the orange groves of Fairlands. Before three days had passed he would be in his studio home again. And the woman of the observation car platform--From distant Fairlands, the man turned his eyes to the winsome face of his girl comrade on the mountain top.
"Please"--she said, meeting his serious gaze with a smile of frank fellowship--"please, what have I done?"
Smiling, he answered gravely, "I don't exactly know--but you have done something."
"You look so serious. I'm sure it must be pretty bad. Can't you think what it is?"
He laughed. "I was thinking about down there"--he pointed into the haze of the distant valley to the west.
"Don't," she returned, "let's think about up here"--she waved her hand toward the high crest of the San Bernardinos, and the mountain peaks about them.
"Will you let me paint your portrait--when we get back to the orange groves?" he asked.
"I'm sure I don't know," she returned. "Why do you want to paint me? I'm nobody, you know--but just me."
"That's the reason I want to paint you," he answered.
"What's the reason?"
"Because you are you."
"But a portrait of me would not help you on your road to fame," she retorted.
He flinched. "Perhaps," he said, "that's partly why I want to do it."
"Because it won't help you?"