"Dear Girl:"I was in Seattle a few days ago and heard you sing. Here's hopinggood luck rides with you."JACK."
Stella sat down by the window. Outside, the ever-present Puget Sound rain drove against wall and roof and sidewalk, gathered in wet, glistening pools in the street. Through that same window she had watched Jack Fyfe walk out of her life three months ago without a backward look, sturdily, silently, uncomplaining. He hadn't whined, he wasn't whining now,—only flinging a cheerful word out of the blank spaces of his own life into the blank spaces of hers. Stella felt something warm and wet steal down her cheeks.
She crumpled the letter with a sudden, spasmodic clenching of her hand. A lump rose chokingly in her throat. She stabbed at the light switch and threw herself on the bed, sobbing her heart's cry in the dusky quiet. And she could not have told why, except that she had been overcome by a miserably forlorn feeling; all the mental props she relied upon were knocked out from under her. Somehow those few scrawled words had flung swiftly before her, like a picture on a screen, a vision of her baby toddling uncertainly across the porch of the white bungalow. And she could not bear to think of that!
When the elm before her window broke into leaf, and the sodden winter skies were transformed into a warm spring vista of blue, Stella was singing a special engagement in a local vaudeville house that boasted a "big time" bill. She had stepped up. The silvery richness of her voice had carried her name already beyond local boundaries, as the singing master under whom she studied prophesied it would. In proof thereof she received during April a feminine committee of two from Vancouver bearing an offer of three hundred dollars for her appearance in a series of three concerts under the auspices of the Woman's Musical Club, to be given in the ballroom of Vancouver's new million-dollar hostelry, the Granada. The date was mid-July. She took the offer under advisement, promising a decision in ten days.
The money tempted her; that was her greatest need now,—not for her daily bread, but for an accumulated fund that would enable her to reach New York and ultimately Europe, if that seemed the most direct route to her goal. She had no doubts about reaching it now. Confidence came to abide with her. She throve on work; and with increasing salary, her fund grew. Coming from any other source, she would have accepted this further augmentation of it without hesitation, since for a comparative beginner, it was a liberal offer.
But Vancouver was Fyfe's home town; it had been hers. Many people knew her; the local papers would feature her. She did not know how Fyfe would take it; she did not even know if there had been any open talk of their separation. Money, she felt, was a small thing beside opening old sores. For herself, she was tolerably indifferent to Vancouver's social estimate of her or her acts. Nevertheless, so long as she bore Fyfe's name, she did not feel free to make herself a public figure there without his sanction. So she wrote to him in some detail concerning the offer and asked point-blank if it mattered to him.
His answer came with uncanny promptness, as if every mail connection had been made on the minute.
"If it is to your advantage to sing here," he wrote, "by all meansaccept. Why should it matter to me? I would even be glad to come andhear you sing if I could do so without stirring up vain longings anduseless regrets. As for the other considerations you mention, theyare of no weight at all. I never wanted to keep you in a glass case.Even if all were well between us, I wouldn't have any feeling aboutyour singing in public other than pride in your ability to commandpublic favor with your voice. It's a wonderful voice, too big andfine a thing to remain obscure."JACK."
He added, evidently as an afterthought, a somewhat lengthy postscript:
"I wish you would do something next month, not as a favor to meparticularly, but to ease things along for Charlie and Linda. Theyare genuinely in love with each other. I can see you turning up yourlittle nose at that. I know you've held a rather biased opinion ofyour brother and his works since that unfortunate winter. But itdoesn't do to be too self-righteous. Charlie, then, was very littledifferent from any rather headlong, self-centered, red-bloodedyoungster. I'm afraid I'm expressing myself badly. What I mean isthat while he was drifting then into a piggy muddle, he had thesense to take a brace before his lapses became vices. Partlybecause—I've flattered myself—I talked to him like a Dutch uncle,and partly because he's cast too much in the same clean-cut moldthat you are, to let his natural passions run clean away with him.He'll always be more or less a profound egotist. But he'll be a gooddeal more of a man than you, perhaps, think."I never used to think much of these matters. I suppose my ownfailure at a thing in which I was cocksure of success had made me abit dubious about anybody I care for starting so serious anundertaking as marriage under any sort of handicap. I do likeCharlie Benton and Linda Abbey. They are marrying in the face of herpeople's earnest attempt to break it up. The Abbeys are hopelesslyconservative. Anything in the nature of our troubles aired in publicwould make it pretty tough sledding for Linda. As it stands, theyare consenting very ungracefully, but as a matter of family pride,intend to give Linda a big wedding."Now, no one outside of you and me and—well you and me—knows thatthere is a rift in our lute. I haven't been quizzed—naturally. Itgot about that you'd taken up voice culture with an eye to opera asa counteracting influence to the grief of losing your baby. Ifostered that rumor—simply to keep gossip down until things shapedthemselves positively. Once these two are married, they havestarted—Abbeypèreandmèrewill then be unable to frown onLinda's contemplated alliance with a family that's produced adivorce case."I do not suppose you will take any legal steps until after thoseconcerts. Until then, please keep up the fiction that the house ofFyfe still stands on a solid foundation—a myth that you've taken nomeasures to dispel since you left. When it does come, it will be asort of explosion, and I'd rather have it that way—one amazed yelpfrom our friends and the newspapers, and it's over."Meantime, you will receive an invitation to the wedding. I hopeyou'll accept. You needn't have any compunctions about playing thegame. You will not encounter me, as I have my hands full here, andI'm notorious in Vancouver for backing out of functions, anyway. Itis not imperative that you should do this. It's merely a safeguardagainst a bomb from the Abbey fortress."Linda is troubled by a belief that upon small pretext they would bevery nasty, and she naturally doesn't want any friction with herfolks. They have certain vague but highly material ambitions for hermatrimonially, which she, a very sensible girl, doesn't subscribeto. She's a very shrewd and practical young person, for all herwhole-hearted passion for your brother. I rather think she prettyclearly guesses the breach in our rampart—not the original mistakein our over-hasty plunge—but the wedge that divided us for good. Ifshe does, and I'm quite sure she does, she is certainly good stuff,because she is most loyally your champion. I say that becauseCharlie had a tendency this spring to carp at your desertion ofRoaring Lake. Things aren't going any too good with us, one way andanother, and of course he, not knowing the real reason of yourabsence, couldn't understand why you stay away. I had to squelchhim, and Linda abetted me successfully. However, that's beside thepoint. I hope I haven't irritated you. I'm such a dumb sort of brutegenerally. I don't know what imp of prolixity got into my pen. I'vegot it all off my chest now, or pretty near."J.H.F."
Stella sat thoughtfully gazing at the letter for a long time.
"I wonder?" she said aloud, and the sound of her own voice galvanized her into action. She put on a coat and went out into the mellow spring sunshine, and walked till the aimless straying of her feet carried her to a little park that overlooked the far reach of the Sound and gave westward on the snowy Olympics, thrusting hoary and aloof to a perfect sky, like their brother peaks that ringed Roaring Lake. And all the time her mind kept turning on a question whose asking was rooted neither in fact nor necessity, an inquiry born of a sentiment she had never expected to feel.
Should she go back to Jack Fyfe?
She shook her head impatiently when she faced that squarely. Why tread the same bitter road again? But she put that self-interested phase of it aside and asked herself candidly if shecouldgo back and take up the old threads where they had been broken off and make life run smoothly along the old, quiet channels? She was as sure as she was sure of the breath she drew that Fyfe wanted her, that he longed for and would welcome her. But she was equally sure that the old illusions would never serve. She couldn't even make him happy, much less herself. Monohan—well, Monohan was a dead issue. He had come to the Charteris to see her, all smiles and eagerness. She had been able to look at him and through him—and cut him dead—and do it without a single flutter of her heart.
That brief and illuminating episode in Wain's had merely confirmed an impression that had slowly grown upon her, and her outburst of feeling that night had only been the overflowing of shamed anger at herself for letting his magnetic personality make so deep an impression on her that she could admit to him that she cared. She felt that she had belittled herself by that. But he was no longer a problem. She wondered now how he ever could have been. She recalled that once Jack Fyfe had soberly told her she would never sense life's real values while she nursed so many illusions. Monohan had been one of them.
"But it wouldn't work," she whispered to herself. "I couldn't do it. He'd know I only did it because I was sorry, because I thought I should, because the old ties, and they seem so many and so strong in spite of everything, were harder to break than the new road is to follow alone. He'd resent anything like pity for his loneliness. And if Monohan has made any real trouble, it began over me, or at least it focussed on me. And he might resent that. He's ten times a better man than I am a woman. He thinks about the other fellow's side of things. I'm just what he said about Charlie, self-centered, a profound egotist. If I really and truly loved Jack Fyfe, I'd be a jealous little fury if he so much as looked at another woman. But I don't, and I don't see why I don't. I want to be loved; I want to love. I've always wanted that so much that I'll never dare trust my instincts about it again. I wonder why people like me exist to go blundering about in the world, playing havoc with themselves and everybody else?"
Before she reached home, that self-sacrificing mood had vanished in the face of sundry twinges of pride. Jack Fyfe hadn't asked her to come back; he never would ask her to come back. Of that she was quite sure. She knew the stony determination of him too well. Neither hope or heaven nor fear of hell would turn him aside when he had made a decision. If he ever had moments of irresolution, he had successfully concealed any such weakness from those who knew him best. No one ever felt called upon to pity Jack Fyfe, and in those rocked-ribbed qualities, Stella had an illuminating flash, perhaps lay the secret of his failure ever to stir in her that yearning tenderness which she knew herself to be capable of lavishing, which her nature impelled her to lavish on some one.
"Ah, well," she sighed, when she came back to her rooms and put Fyfe's letter away in a drawer. "I'll do the decent thing if they ask me. I wonder what Jack would say if he knew what I've been debating with myself this afternoon? I wonder if we were actually divorced and I'd made myself a reputation as a singer, and we happened to meet quite casually sometime, somewhere, just how we'd really feel about each other?"
She was still musing on that, in a detached, impersonal fashion, when she caught a car down to the theater for the matinée.
The formally worded wedding card arrived in due course. Following close came a letter from Linda Abbey, a missive that radiated friendliness and begged Stella to come a week before the date.
"You're going to be pretty prominent in the public eye when you singhere," Linda wrote. "People are going to make a to-do over you. Everso many have mentioned you since the announcement was made thatyou'll sing at the Granada concerts. I'm getting a lot of reflectedglory as the future sister-in-law of a rising singer. So you may aswell come and get your hand into the social game in preparation forbeing fussed over in July."
In the same mail was a characteristic note from Charlie which ran:
"Dear Sis:"As the Siwashes say, long time I see you no. I might have dropped aline before, but you know what a punk correspondent I am. They tellme you're becoming a real noise musically. How about it?"Can't you break away from the fame and fortune stuff long enough tobe on hand when Linda and I get married? I wasn't invited to yourwedding, but I'd like to have you at mine. Jack says it's up to youto represent the Fyfe connection, as he's too busy. I'll come overto Seattle and get you, if you say so."
She capitulated at that and wrote saying that she would be there, and that she did not mind the trip alone in the least. She did not want Charlie asking pertinent questions about why she lived in such grubby quarters and practiced such strict economy in the matter of living.
Then there was the detail of arranging a break in her engagements, which ran continuously to the end of June. She managed that easily enough, for she was becoming too great a drawing card for managers to curtly override her wishes.
Almost before she realized it, June was at hand. Linda wrote again urgently, and Stella took the night boat for Vancouver a week before the wedding day. Linda met her at the dock with a machine. Mrs. Abbey was the essence of cordiality when she reached the big Abbey house on Vancouver's aristocratic "heights," where the local capitalists, all those fortunate climbers enriched by timber and mineral, grown wealthy in a decade through the great Coast boom, segregated themselves in "Villas" and "Places" and "Views," all painfully new and sometimes garish, striving for an effect in landscape and architecture which the very intensity of the striving defeated. They were well-meaning folk, however, the Abbeys included.
Stella could not deny that she enjoyed the luxury of the Abbey ménage, the little festive round which was shaping about Linda in these last days of her spinsterhood. She relished the change from unremitting work. It amused her to startle little groups with the range and quality of her voice, when they asked her to sing. They made a much ado over that, a genuine admiration that flattered Stella. It was easy for her to fall into the swing of that life; it was only a lapsing back to the old ways.
But she saw it now with a more critical vision. It was soft and satisfying and eminently desirable to have everything one wanted without the effort of striving for it, but a begging wheedling game on the part of these women. They were, she told herself rather harshly, an incompetent, helpless lot, dependent one and all upon some man's favor or affection, just as she herself had been all her life until the past few months. Some man had to work and scheme to pay the bills. She did not know why this line of thought should arise, neither did she so far forget herself as to voice these social heresies. But it helped to reconcile her with her new-found independence, to put a less formidable aspect on the long, hard grind that lay ahead of her before she could revel in equal affluence gained by her own efforts. All that they had she desired,—homes, servants, clothes, social standing,—but she did not want these things bestowed upon her as a favor by some man, the emoluments of sex.
She expected she would have to be on her guard with her brother, even to dissemble a little. But she found him too deeply engrossed in what to him was the most momentous event of his career, impatiently awaiting the day, rather dreading the publicity of it.
"Why in Sam Hill can't a man and a woman get married without all this fuss?" he complained once. "Why should we make our private affairs a spectacle for the whole town?"
"Principally because mamma has her heart set on a spectacle," Linda laughed. "She'd hold up her hands in horror if she heard you. Decorated bridal bower, high church dignitary, bridesmaids, orange blossoms, rice, and all. Mamma likes to show off. Besides, that's the way it's done in society.Andthe honeymoon."
They both giggled, as at some mirthful secret.
"Shall we tell her?" Linda nodded toward Stella.
"Sure," Benton said. "I thought you had."
"The happy couple will spend their honeymoon on a leisurely tour of the Southern and Eastern States, remaining for some weeks in Philadelphia, where the groom has wealthy and influential connections. It's all prepared for the pay-a-purs," Linda whispered with exaggerated secrecy behind her hand.
Benton snorted.
"Can you beat that?" he appealed to Stella.
"And all the time," Linda continued, "the happy couple, unknown to every one, will be spending their days in peace and quietness in their shanty at Halfway Point. My, but mamma would rave if she knew. Don't give us away, Stella. It seems so senseless to squander a lot of money gadding about on trains and living in hotels when we'd much rather be at home by ourselves. My husband's a poor young man, Stella. 'Pore but worthy.' He has to make his fortune before we start in spending it. I'm sick of all this spreading it on because dad has made a pile of money," she broke out impatiently. "Our living used to be simple enough when I was a kid. I think I can relish a little simplicity again for a change. Mamma's been trying for four years to marry me off to her conception of an eligible man. It didn't matter a hang about his essential qualities so long as he had money and an assured social position."
"Forget that," Charlie counseled slangily. "I have all the essential qualities, and I'll have the money and social position too; you watch my smoke."
"Conceited ninny," Linda smiled. But there was no reproof in her tone, only pure comradeship and affection, which Benton returned so openly and unaffectedly that Stella got up and left them with a pang of envy, a dull little ache in her heart. She had missed that. It had passed her by, that clean, spontaneous fusing of two personalities in the biggest passion life holds. Marriage and motherhood she had known, not as the flowering of love, not as an eager fulfilling of her natural destiny, but as something extraneous, an avenue of escape from an irksomeness of living, a weariness with sordid things, which she knew now had obsessed her out of all proportion to their reality. She had never seen that tenderness glow in the eyes of a mating pair that she did not envy them, that she did not feel herself hopelessly defrauded of her woman's heritage.
She went up to her room, moody, full of bitterness, and walked the thick-carpeted floor, the restlessness of her chafing spirit seeking the outlet of action.
"Thank the Lord I've got something to do, something that's worth doing," she whispered savagely. "If I can't have what I want, I can make my life embrace something more than just food and clothes and social trifling. If I had to sit and wait for each day to bring what it would, I believe I'd go clean mad."
A maid interrupted these self-communings to say that some one had called her over the telephone, and Stella went down to the library. She wasn't prepared for the voice that came over the line, but she recognized it instantly as Fyfe's.
"Listen, Stella," he said. "I'm sorry this has happened, but I can't very well avoid it now, without causing comment. I had no choice about coming to Vancouver. It was a business matter I couldn't neglect. And as luck would have it, Abbey ran into me as I got off the train. On account of your being there, of course, he insisted that I come out for dinner. It'll look queer if I don't, as I can't possibly get a return train for the Springs before nine-thirty this evening. I accepted without stuttering rather than leave any chance for the impression that I wanted to avoid you. Now, here's how I propose to fix it. I'll come out about two-thirty and pay a hurry-up five-minute call. Then I'll excuse myself to Mrs. Abbey for inability to join them at dinner—press of important business takes me to Victoria and so forth. That'll satisfy the conventions and let us both out. I called you so you won't be taken by surprise. Do you mind?"
"Of course not," she answered instantly. "Why should I?"
There was a momentary silence.
"Well," he said at last, "I didn't know how you'd feel about it. Anyway, it will only be for a few minutes, and it's unlikely to happen again."
Stella put the receiver back on the hook and looked at her watch. It lacked a quarter of two. In the room adjoining, Charlie and Linda were jubilantly wading through the latest "rag" song in a passable soprano and baritone, with Mrs. Abbey listening in outward resignation. Stella sat soberly for a minute, then joined them.
"Jack's in town," she informed them placidly, when the ragtime spasm ended. "He telephoned that he was going to snatch a few minutes between important business confabs to run out and see me."
"I could have told you that half an hour ago, my dear," Mrs. Abbey responded with playful archness. "Mr. Fyfe will dine with us this evening."
"Oh," Stella feigned surprise. "Why, he spoke of going to Victoria on the afternoon boat. He gave me the impression of mad haste—making a dash out here between breaths, as you might say."
"Oh, I hope he won't be called away on such short notice as that," Mrs. Abbey murmured politely.
She left the room presently. Out of one corner of her eye Stella saw Linda looking at her queerly. Charlie had turned to the window, staring at the blue blur of the Lions across the Inlet.
"It's a wonder Jack would leave the lake," he said suddenly, "with things the way they are. I've been hoping for rain ever since I've been down. I'll be glad when we're on the spot again, Linda."
"Wishing for rain?" Stella echoed. "Why?"
"Fire," he said shortly. "I don't suppose you realize it, but there's been practically no rain for two months. It's getting hot. A few weeks of dry, warm weather, and this whole country is ready to blow away. The woods are like a pile of shavings. That would be a fine wedding present—to be cleaned out by fire. Every dollar I've got's in timber."
"Don't be a pessimist," Linda said sharply.
"What makes you so uneasy now?" Stella asked thoughtfully. "There's always the fire danger in the dry months. That's been a bugaboo ever since I came to the lake."
"Yes, but never like it is this summer," Benton frowned. "Oh, well, no use borrowing trouble, I suppose."
Stella rose.
"When Jack comes, I'll be in the library," she said. "I'm going to read a while."
But the book she took up lay idle in her lap. She looked forward to that meeting with a curious mixture of reluctance and regret. She could not face it unmoved. No woman who has ever lain passive in a man's arms can ever again look into that man's eyes with genuine indifference. She may hate him or love him with a degree of intensity according to her nature, be merely friendly, or nurse a slow resentment. But there is always that intangible something which differentiates him from other men. Stella felt now a shyness of him, a little dread of him, less sureness of herself, as he swung out of the machine and took the house steps with that effortless lightness on his feet that she remembered so well.
She heard him in the hall, his deep voice mingling with the thin, penetrating tones of Mrs. Abbey. And then the library door opened, and he came in. Stella had risen, and stood uncertainly at one corner of a big reading table, repressing an impulse to fly, finding herself stricken with a strange recurrence of the feeling she had first disliked him for arousing in her,—a sense of needing to be on her guard, of impending assertion of a will infinitely more powerful than her own.
But that was, she told herself, only a state of mind, and Fyfe put her quickly at her ease. He came up to the table and seated himself on the edge of it an arm's length from her, swinging one foot free. He looked at her intently. There was no shadow of expression on his face, only in his clear eyes lurked a gleam of feeling.
"Well, lady," he said at length, "you're looking fine. How goes everything?"
"Fairly well," she answered.
"Seems odd, doesn't it, to meet like this?" he ventured. "I'd have dodged it, if it had been politic. As it is, there's no harm done, I imagine. Mrs. Abbey assured me we'd be free from interruption. If the exceedingly cordial dame had an inkling of how things stand between us, I daresay she'd be holding her breath about now."
"Why do you talk like that, Jack?" Stella protested nervously.
"Well, I have to say something," he remarked, after a moment's reflection. "I can't sit here and just look at you. That would be rude, not to say embarrassing."
Stella bit her lip.
"I don't see why we can't talk like any other man and woman for a few minutes," she observed.
"I do," he said quietly. "You know why, too, if you stop to think. I'm the same old Jack Fyfe, Stella. I don't think much where you are concerned; I just feel. And that doesn't lend itself readily to impersonal chatter."
"How do you feel?" she asked, meeting his gaze squarely. "If you don't hate me, you must at least rather despise me."
"Neither," he said slowly. "I admire your grit, lady. You broke away from everything and made a fresh start. You asserted your own individuality in a fashion that rather surprised me. Maybe the incentive wasn't what it might have been, but the result is, or promises to be. I was only a milestone. Why should I hate or despise you because you recognized that and passed on? I had no business setting myself up for the end of your road instead of the beginning. I meant to have it that way until the kid—well, Fate took a hand there. Pshaw," he broke off with a quick gesture, "let's talk about something else."
Stella laid one hand on his knee. Unbidden tears were crowding up in her gray eyes.
"You were good to me," she whispered. "But just being good wasn't enough for a perverse creature like me. I couldn't be a sleek pussy-cat, comfortable beside your fire. I'm full of queer longings. I want wings. I must be a variation from the normal type of woman. Our marriage didn't touch the real me at all, Jack. It only scratched the surface. And sometimes I'm afraid to look deep, for fear of what I'll see. Even if another man hadn't come along and stirred up a temporary tumult in me, I couldn't have gone on forever."
"A temporary tumult," Fyfe mused. "Have you thoroughly chucked that illusion? I knew you would, of course, but I had no idea how long it would take you."
"Long ago," she answered. "Even before I left you, I was shaky about that. There were things I couldn't reconcile. But pride wouldn't let me admit it. I can't even explain it to myself."
"I can," he said, a little sadly. "You've never poured out that big, warm heart of yours on a man. It's there, always has been there, those concentrated essences of passion. Every unattached man's a possible factor, a potential lover. Nature has her own devices to gain her end. I couldn't be the one. We started wrong. I saw the mistake of that when it was too late. Monohan, a highly magnetic animal, came along at a time when you were peculiarly and rather blindly receptive. That's all. Sex—you have it in a word. It couldn't stand any stress, that sort of attraction. I knew it would only last until you got one illuminating glimpse of the real man of him. But I don't want to talk about him. He'll keep. Sometime you'll really love aman, Stella, and he'll be a very lucky mortal. There's an erratic streak in you, lady, but there's a bigger streak that's fine and good and true. You'd have gone through with it to the bitter end, if Jack Junior hadn't died. The weaklings don't do that. Neither do they cut loose as you did, burning all their economic bridges behind them. Do you know that it was over a month before I found out that you'd turned your private balance back into my account? I suppose there was a keen personal satisfaction in going on your own and making good from the start. Only I couldn't rest until—until—"
His voice trailed huskily off into silence. The gloves in his left hand were doubled and twisted in his uneasy fingers. Stella's eyes were blurred.
"Well, I'm going," he said shortly. "Be good."
He slipped off the table and stood erect, a wide, deep-chested man, tanned brown, his fair hair with its bronze tinge lying back in a smooth wave from his forehead, blue eyes bent on her, hot with a slumbering fire.
Without warning, he caught her close in his arms so that she could feel the pounding of his heart against her breast, kissed her cheeks, her hair, the round, firm white neck of her, with lips that burned. Then he held her off at arm's length.
"That's howIcare," he said defiantly. "That's how I want you. No other way. I'm a one-woman man. Some time you may love like that, and if you do, you'll know how I feel. I've watched you sleeping beside me and ached because I couldn't kindle the faintest glow of the real thing in you. I'm sick with a miserable sense of failure, the only thing I've ever failed at, and the biggest, most complete failure I can conceive of,—to love a woman in every way desirable; to have her and yet never have her."
He caught up his hat, and the door clicked shut behind him. A minute later Stella saw him step into the tonneau of the car. He never looked back.
And she fled to her own room, stunned, half-frightened, wholly amazed at this outburst. Her face was damp with his lip-pressure, damp and warm. Her arms tingled with the grip of his. The blood stood in her cheeks like a danger signal, flooding in hot, successive waves to the roots of her thick, brown hair.
"If I thought—I could," she whispered into her pillow, "I'd try. But I daren't. I'm afraid. It's just a mood, I know it is. I've had it before. A—ah! I'm a spineless jellyfish, a weathercock that whirls to every emotional breeze. And I won't be. I'll stand on my own feet if I can—so help me God, I will!"
This is no intimate chronicle of Charlie Benton and Linda Abbey, save in so far as they naturally furnish a logical sequence in what transpired. Therefore the details of their nuptials is of no particular concern. They were wedded, ceremonially dined as befitted the occasion, and departed upon their hypothetical honeymoon, surreptitiously abbreviated from an extravagant swing over half of North America to seventy miles by rail and twenty by water,—and a month of blissful seclusion, which suited those two far better than any amount of Pullman touring, besides leaving them money in pocket.
When they were gone, Stella caught the next boat for Seattle. She had drawn fresh breath in the meantime, and while she felt tenderly, almost maternally, sorry for Jack Fyfe, she swung back to the old attitude. Even granting, she argued, that she could muster courage to take up the mantle of wifehood where she laid it off, there was no surety that they could do more than compromise. There was the stubborn fact that she had openly declared her love for another man, that by her act she had plunged her husband into far-reaching conflict. Such a conflict existed. She could put her finger on no concrete facts, but it was in the air. She heard whispers of a battle between giants—a financial duel to the death—with all the odds against Jack Fyfe.
Win or lose, there would be scars. And the struggle, if not of and by her deed, had at least sprung into malevolent activity through her. Men, she told herself, do not forget these things; they rankle. Jack Fyfe was only human. No, Stella felt that they could only come safe to the old port by virtue of a passion that could match Fyfe's own. And she put that rather sadly beyond her, beyond the possibilities. She had felt stirrings of it, but not to endure. She was proud and sensitive and growing wise with bitterly accumulated experience. It had to be all or nothing with them, a cleaving together complete enough to erase and forever obliterate all that had gone before. And since she could not see that as a possibility, there was nothing to do but play the game according to the cards she held. Of these the trump was work, the inner glow that comes of something worth while done toward a definite, purposeful end. She took up her singing again with a distinct relief.
Time passed quickly and uneventfully enough between the wedding day and the date of her Granada engagement. It seemed a mere breathing space before the middle of July rolled around, and she was once more aboard a Vancouver boat. In the interim, she had received a letter from the attorney who had wound up her father's estate, intimating that there was now a market demand for that oil stock, and asking if he should sell or hold for a rise in price which seemed reasonably sure? Stella telegraphed her answer. If that left-over of a speculative period would bring a few hundred dollars, it would never be of greater service to her than now.
All the upper reach of Puget Sound basked in its normal midsummer haze, the day Stella started for Vancouver. That great region of island-dotted sea spread between the rugged Olympics and the foot of the Coast range lay bathed in summer sun, untroubled, somnolent. But nearing the international boundary, theCharlottedrove her twenty-knot way into a thickening atmosphere. Northward from Victoria, the rugged shores that line those inland waterways began to appear blurred. Just north of Active Pass, where the steamers take to the open gulf again, a vast bank of smoke flung up blue and gray, a rolling mass. The air was pungent, oppressive. When theCharlottespanned the thirty-mile gap between Vancouver Island and the mainland shore, she nosed into the Lion's Gate under a slow bell, through a smoke pall thick as Bering fog. Stella's recollection swung back to Charlie's uneasy growl of a month earlier. Fire! Throughout the midsummer season there was always the danger of fire breaking out in the woods. Not all the fire-ranger patrols could guard against the carelessness of fishermen and campers.
"It's a tough Summer over here for the timber owners," she heard a man remark. "I've been twenty years on the coast and never saw the woods so dry."
"Dry's no name," his neighbor responded. "It's like tinder. A cigarette stub'll start a blaze forty men couldn't put out. It's me that knows it. I've got four limits on the North Arm, and there's fire on two sides of me. You bet I'm praying for rain."
"They say the country between Chehalis and Roaring Lake is one big blaze," the first man observed.
"So?" the other replied. "Pity, too. Fine timber in there. I came near buying some timber on the lake this spring. Some stuff that was on the market as a result of that Abbey-Monohan split. Glad I didn't now. I'd just as soon haveallmy money out of timber this season."
They moved away in the press of disembarking, and Stella heard no more of their talk. She took a taxi to the Granada, and she bought a paper in the foyer before she followed the bell boy to her room. She had scarcely taken off her hat and settled down to read when the telephone rang. Linda's voice greeted her when she answered.
"I called on the chance that you took the morning boat," Linda said. "Can I run in? I'm just down for the day. I won't be able to hear you sing, but I'd like to see you, dear."
"Can you come right now?" Stella asked. "Come up, and we'll have something served up here. I don't feel like running the gauntlet of the dining room just now."
"I'll be there in a few minutes," Linda answered.
Stella went back to her paper. She hadn't noticed any particular stress laid on forest fires in the Seattle dailies, but she could not say that of this Vancouver sheet. The front page reeked of smoke and fire. She glanced through the various items for news of Roaring Lake, but found only a brief mention. It was "reported" and "asserted" and "rumored" that fire was raging at one or two points there, statements that were overshadowed by positive knowledge of greater areas nearer at hand burning with a fierceness that could be seen and smelled. The local papers had enough feature stuff in fires that threatened the very suburbs of Vancouver without going so far afield as Roaring Lake.
Linda's entrance put a stop to her reading, without, however, changing the direction of her thought. For after an exchange of greetings, Linda divulged the source of her worried expression, which Stella had immediately remarked.
"Who wouldn't be worried," Linda said, "with the whole country on fire, and no telling when it may break out in some unexpected place and wipe one out of house and home."
"Is it so bad as that at the lake?" Stella asked uneasily. "There's not much in the paper. I was looking."
"It's so bad," Linda returned, with a touch of bitterness, "that I've been driven to the Springs for safety; that every able-bodied man on the lake who can be spared is fighting fire. There has been one man killed, and there's half a dozen loggers in the hospital, suffering from burns and other hurts. Nobody knows where it will stop. Charlie's limits have barely been scorched, but there's fire all along one side of them. A change of wind—and there you are. Jack Fyfe's timber is burning in a dozen places. We've been praying for rain and choking in the smoke for a week."
Stella looked out the north window. From the ten-story height she could see ships lying in the stream, vague hulks in the smoky pall that shrouded the harbor.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
"It's devilish," Linda went on. "Like groping in the dark and being afraid—for me. I've been married a month, and for ten days I've only seen my husband at brief intervals when he comes down in the launch for supplies, or to bring an injured man. And he doesn't tell me anything except that we stand a fat chance of losing everything. I sit there at the Springs, and look at that smoke wall hanging over the water, and wonder what goes on up there. And at night there's the red glow, very faint and far. That's all. I've been doing nursing at the hospital to help out and to keep from brooding. I wouldn't be down here now, only for a list of things the doctor needs, which he thought could be obtained quicker if some one attended to it personally. I'm taking the evening train back."
"I'm sorry," Stella repeated.
She said it rather mechanically. Her mind was spinning a thread, upon which, strung like beads, slid all the manifold succession of things that had happened since she came first to Roaring Lake. Linda's voice, continuing, broke into her thoughts.
"I suppose I shouldn't be croaking into your ear like a bird of ill omen, when you have to throw yourself heart and soul into that concert to-morrow," she said contritely. "I wonder why that Ancient Mariner way of seeking relief from one's troubles by pouring them into another ear is such a universal trait? You aren't vitally concerned, after all, and I am. Let's have that tea, dear, and talk about less grievous things. I still have one or two trifles to get in the shops too."
After they had finished the food that Stella ordered sent up, they went out together. Later Stella saw her off on the train.
"Good-by, dear," Linda said from the coach window. "I'm just selfish enough to wish you were going back with me; I wish you could sit with me on the bank of the lake, aching and longing for your man up there in the smoke as I ache and long for mine. Misery loves company."
Stella's eyes were clouded as the train pulled out. Something in Linda Benton's parting words made her acutely lonely, dispirited, out of joint with the world she was deliberately fashioning for herself. Into Linda's life something big and elemental had come. The butterfly of yesterday had become the strong man's mate of to-day. Linda's heart was unequivocally up there in the smoke and flame with her man, fighting for their mutual possessions, hoping with him, fearing for him, longing for him, secure in the knowledge that if nothing else was left them, they had each other. It was a rare and beautiful thing to feel like that. And beyond that sorrowful vision of what she lacked to achieve any real and enduring happiness, there loomed also a self-torturing conviction that she herself had set in motion those forces which now threatened ruin for her brother and Jack Fyfe.
There was no logical proof of this. Only intuitive, subtle suggestions gleaned here and there, shadowy finger-posts which pointed to Monohan as a deadly hater and with a score chalked up against Fyfe to which she had unconsciously added. He had desired her, and twice Fyfe had treated him like an urchin caught in mischief. She recalled how Monohan sprang at him like a tiger that day on the lake shore. She realized how bitter a humiliation it must have been to suffer that sardonic cuffing at Fyfe's hands. Monohan wasn't the type of man who would ever forget or forgive either that or the terrible grip on his throat.
Even at the time she had sensed this and dreaded what it might ultimately lead to. Even while her being answered eagerly to the physical charm of him, she had fought against admitting to herself what desperate intent might have lain back of the killing of Billy Dale,—a shot that Lefty Howe declared was meant for Fyfe. She had long outgrown Monohan's lure, but if he had come to her or written to make out a case for himself when she first went to Seattle, she would have accepted his word against anything. Her heart would have fought for him against the logic of her brain.
But—she had had a long time to think, to compare, to digest all that she knew of him, much that was subconscious impression rising late to the surface, a little that she heard from various sources. The sum total gave her a man of rank passions, of rare and merciless finesse where his desires figured, a man who got what he wanted by whatever means most fitly served his need. Greater than any craving to possess a woman would be the measure of his rancor against a man who humiliated him, thwarted him. She could understand how a man like Monohan would hate a man like Jack Fyfe, would nurse and feed on the venom of his hate until setting a torch to Fyfe's timber would be a likely enough counterstroke.
She shrank from the thought. Yet it lingered until she felt guilty. Though it made no material difference to her that Fyfe might or might not face ruin, she could not, before her own conscience, evade responsibility. The powder might have been laid, but her folly had touched spark to the fuse, as she saw it. That seared her like a pain far into the night. For every crime a punishment; for every sin a penance. Her world had taught her that. She had never danced; she had only listened to the piper and longed to dance, as nature had fashioned her to do. But the piper was sending his bill. She surveyed it wearily, emotionally bankrupt, wondering in what coin of the soul she would have to pay.