Never in the after years could Winston clearly recall the incidents of
that night's ride across the sand waste. The haze which shrouded his
brain would never wholly lift. Except for a few detached details the
surroundings of that journey remained vague, clouded, indistinct. He
remembered the great, burning desert; the stars gleaming down above
them like many eyes; the ponderous, ragged edge of cloud in the west;
the irregular, castellated range of hills at their back; the dull
expanse of plain ever stretching away in front, with no boundary other
than that southern sky. The weird, ghostly shadows of cactus and
Spanish bayonet were everywhere; strange, eerie noises were borne to
them out of the void--the distant cries of prowling wolves, the
mournful sough of the night wind, the lonely hoot of some far-off owl.
Nothing greeted the roving eyes but desolation,--a desolation utter and
complete, a mere waste of tumbled sand, by daylight whitened here and
there by irregular patches of alkali, but under the brooding night
shadows lying brown, dull, forlorn beyond all expression, a trackless,
deserted ocean of mystery, oppressive in its drear sombreness.
He rode straight south, seeking no trail, but guiding their course by
the stars, his right hand firmly grasping the pony's bit, and
continually urging his own mount to faster pace. The one thought
dominating his mind was the urgent necessity for haste--a savage
determination to intercept that early train eastward. Beyond this
single idea his brain seemed in hopeless turmoil, seemed failing him.
Any delay meant danger, discovery, the placing of her very life in
peril. He could grasp that; he could plan, guide, act in every way the
part of a man under its inspiration, but all else appeared chaos. The
future?--there was no future; there never again could be. The chasm of
a thousand years had suddenly yawned between him and this woman. It
made his head reel merely to gaze down into those awful depths. It
could not be bridged; no sacrifice, no compensation might ever undo
that fatal death-shot. He did not blame her, he did not question her
justification, but he understood--together they faced the inevitable.
There was no escape, no clearing of the record. There was nothing left
him to do except this, this riding through the night--absolutely
nothing. Once he had guided her into safety all was done,--done
forever; there remained to him no other hope, ambition, purpose, in all
this world. The desert about them typified that forthcoming
existence--barren, devoid of life, dull, and dead. He set his teeth
savagely to keep back the moan of despair that rose to his lips, half
lifting himself in the stirrups to glance back toward her.
If she perceived anything there was not the slightest reflection of it
within her eyes. Lustreless, undeviating, they were staring directly
ahead into the gloom, her face white and almost devoid of expression.
The sight of it turned him cold and sick, his unoccupied hand gripping
the saddle-pommel as though he would crush the leather. Yet he did not
speak, for there was nothing to say. Between these two was a fact,
grim, awful, unchangeable. Fronting it, words were meaningless,
pitiable.