On the day following the expulsion of Prendergast, Harry woke restless and unrefreshed. Fleeting sensations mocked him—a disturbing conviction that the struggling memory in some measure had succeeded in reasserting itself in the shadowy kingdom of sleep. Waking, the apparitions were fled again into their obscurity, leaving only the wraiths of recollection to startle and disquiet.
A girl's face hovered always before him—ruling his consciousness as it had ruled his sleeping thought. "Is it only fancy?" he asked himself. "Or is it more? It was there—my memory—in shreds and patches, on my sleep; now when I wake, it is only the fraying mist of dreams.... Dreams!" He drew a deep breath. "Yet the overmastering sense of reality remains. Last night I walked in intimate, forgotten ways—and she was in them—she!" He flushed, an odd, sensitive flush. "Dreams!" he said. "All dreams and fancies!"
At length he took down from its shelf the bottle hehad rescued from Prendergast's intention and emptied it of its glistening grains—enough to replenish his depleted stock of provisions. He paused a moment as he put on his hat, smiling whimsically, a little sadly. He dreaded entering the town. But there could be no remedy in concealment. If he was to live and work there, appear he must on the streets sooner or later. Smoky Mountain must continue to think of him as it might; what he was from that time on, was all that could count to him.
If he had but known it, there was good reason for hesitation to-day. Early that morning an angry rumor had disturbed the town; the sluice of the hydraulic company had been robbed again. Some two months previously there had occurred a series of depredations by which the company had suffered. The boxes were not swept of their golden harvest each day, and in spite of all precautions, coarse gold had disappeared mysteriously from the riffles—this, although armed men had watched all night. There had been much guess-work. The cabin on the hillside was the nearest habitation—the company's flume disgorged its flood in the gulch beneath it—and suspicion had eventually pointed its way. The sudden ceasing of the robberies with the disappearance of Hugh Stires had given focus to thissuspicion. Now, almost coincident with his return, the thievery had recommenced. It had been a red-letter day for Devlin and his ilk who cavilled at the more charitable. Of all this, however, the object of their "I-told-you-so" was serenely ignorant.
As Harry walked briskly down the mountain, a feeling of unreality stole upon him. The bell was ringing in the steeple of the little Catholic church below, and the high metallic sound came to him with a mysterious and potential familiarity. With the first note, his hand in his pocket closed upon an object he always carried—the little gold cross he had found there when he awakened in the freight-car, the only token he possessed of his vanished past. More than once it had been laid for a mascot on the faro-table or the roulette-board with his last coin. Always it had brought the stake back, till he had gained a whimsical belief in its luck.
He drew it out now and looked at it. "Strange that the sound of a bell always reminds me of that," he muttered. "Association of ideas, I fancy, since there is a cross on the church steeple. And what is there in that bell? It is a faint sound even from here, yet night after night, up there in the cabin, that far-off peal has waked me suddenly from sleep. Why is it, I wonder?"
Entering the town, there were few stirring on thesunny streets, but he could not but be aware that those he met stopped to gaze after him. Some, indeed, followed. His first objective point was a jeweler's, where he could turn his gold-dust into readier coin for needful purchases. He saw a sign next the Mountain Valley House, and entered.
The jeweler weighed the dust with a distrustful frown, but Harry's head was turned away. He was reading a freshly printed placard tacked on the wall—an offer of reward for the detection of the sluice thief. He read it through mechanically, for as he read there came from the street outside a sound that touched a muffled chord in his brain. It was the exhaust of a motor-car.
He thrust the money the goldsmith grudgingly handed him into his pocket and turned to the door. A long red automobile had stopped at the curb. Two men whom it carried were just entering the hotel.
Harry had seen many such machines in his wanderings, and they had aroused no baffling instinct of habitude. But the old self was stirring now, every sense alert. Hour by hour he had found himself growing more delicately susceptible to subtle mental impressions, haunted by shadowy reminders of things and places. Something in the sight of the long, low "racer"reminded him—of what? His eye traced its polished lines, noting its cunning mechanism, its build for silent speed, with the eager lighting of a connoisseur. He took a step toward it, oblivious to all about him.
He did not note that men were gathering, that the nearest saloon was emptying of its occupants. Nor did he see a girl on horseback, with a tiny child before her on the saddle, who reined up sharply opposite.
The rider was Jessica; the child, an ecstatic five-year-old she had picked up on the fringe of the town, to canter in with her hands gripping the pommel of the saddle. She saw Harry's position instantly and guessed it perilous. What did the men mean to do? She leaned forward, a swift apprehension in her face.
Harry came back suddenly to a realization of his surroundings. He looked about him, startled, his cheek darkening its red, every muscle instinctively tightening. He saw danger in the lowering faces, and the old lust of daring leaped up instantly to grapple with the rejuvenated character.
Devlin's voice came over the heads of the crowd as, burly and shirt-sleeved, he strode across the street:
"Hand over the dust you've stolen before you are tarred and feathered, Hugh Stires!"
Harry looked at him surprised, his mind instantlyrecurring to the placard he had seen. Here was a tangible accusation.
"I have stolen nothing," he responded quietly.
"Where did he get what he just sold me?" The jeweler's sour query rose behind him from the doorway.
"We'll find that out!" was the rough rejoinder.
In face of his threatening peril, Jessica forgot all else—the restive horse, the child. She sprang to the ground, her face pained and indignant, and started to run across the street. But with a cry of dismay she turned back. The horse had caught sight of the red automobile, and, snorting and wild-eyed, had swung into the roadway.
"It's Devlin's kid!" some one cried out, and Devlin, turning, went suddenly ashen. The baby was the one soft spot in his ruffianly heart. He sprang toward the animal, but the movement and the hands clutching at the bridle sent it to a leaping terror. In another instant it had broken through the ring of bystanders, and, frenzied at its freedom, dashed down the long, level street with the child clinging to the saddle-pommel.
It was all the work of a moment, one of panic and confusion, through which rang Jessica's scream of remorse and fright. Torpor held the crowd—all save one, whose action followed the scream as leap followsthe spur. In a single step Harry gained the automobile. With an instantaneous movement he pushed the lever down and jerked the throttle wide. The machine bounded into its pace, the people rolling back before it, and, gathering headway, darted after the runaway.
The spectators stood staring. "He'll never catch him," said Michael Halloran, who had joined the crowd. "Funeral Hollow's only a mile away." With others he hurried to the hotel balcony, where he could watch the exciting race. Jessica stood stock-still, as blanched as Devlin, wringing her hands.
Harry Sanderson had acted with headlong intention, without calculation, almost without consciousness of mental process. Standing on the pavement, with the subtle lure of the motor creeping in his veins, his whole body responding—as his fingers had tingled at sight of the violin—to the muffled vibrations of that halted bundle of steel, in the sharp exigency he had answered an overmastering impulse. In the same breath he had realized Jessica's presence and the child's peril, both linked in that anguished cry. With the first bound of the car under him, as the crowd was snatched behind, a weird, exultant thrill shot through every nerve. Each bolt and bar he knew as one would tell his fingers. Somewhere, at some time, he had known such flight—throughmellow sunlight, with the air singing past. Where? When?
Not for the fraction of a second, however, did his gaze waver. He knew that the flat on which the town was built fell away in a hollow ravine to the southward—he could see it from the cabin doorway—a stretch of breakneck road only a mile ahead. Could the child hold on? Could he distance those frenzied hoofs in time? The arrow of the indicator stole forward on the dial.
Far behind, as the crowd watched, a cry rose from the hotel balcony. It was Barney McGinn, the freighter, with a glass at his eye. "He's gaining!" he shouted. "He has almost overtaken the horse!"
The horse's first fury of speed was tiring. The steel steed was creeping closer. A thunder of hoofs in pursuit would have maddened the flying animal, but the gliding thing that was now so close to him came on with noiseless swiftness. Harry had reserved, with the nicety of a practised hand, a last increment of speed. With the front wheels at the horse's flank, he drew suddenly on this. As the car responded, he swerved it sharply in, and, holding with one hand, leaned far out from the step, and lifted the child from the saddle.
The automobile halted again before the hotel amid a hush. The men who a little while before had been ripefor violence, now stood in shamefaced silence. It was Jessica who ran forward and took the child, still sobbing a little, from Harry's hands. One long look passed between them—a look on her part brimming with a great gratitude for his lifting of her weight of dread and compunction, and with something besides that mantled her cheeks with rich color. She kissed the child and placed her in her father's arms.
Devlin's countenance broke up. He struggled to speak, but could not, and, burying his face in the child's dress and crying like a baby, he crossed the street hastily to his own door.
Harry stepped to the pavement with a dull kind of embarrassment at the manifold scrutiny. He had misconstrued Jessica's flushing silence, and the inference stung. The fierce zest was gone, and the rankling barb of accusation smarted. He should apologize to the owner, he reflected satirically, for helping himself to the automobile—he who stole gold-dust, he at whose door the town laid its unferreted thieveries! He who was the scapegoat for the town's offenses!
That owner, in very fact, stood just then in the hotel doorway regarding him with interest. He was the sheriff of the county. He was about to step forward, when an interruption occurred. A scuffle and a weakbark sounded, and a lean brown streak shot across the pavement.
"Rummy!" cried Harry. "Rummy!"
Through some chink of the dead wall in his brain the name slipped out, a tiny atom of flotsam retrieved from the wreck of memory. That was all, but to the animal which had just found its lost master, the word meant a sublimation of delight, the clearing of the puzzle of namelessness that had perplexed its canine brain. The dog's heaven was reached!
Down on his knees on the pavement went Harry, with his arms about the starved, palpitating little creature, and his cheek against its shaggy coat. In another moment he had picked it up in his arms and was walking up the street.
Late that night Tom Felder, sitting in his office, heard the story of the runaway from the sheriff's lips. He himself had been in court at the time.
"And the horse?" he asked.
"In the Hollow, with his back broken," said the sheriff.
The lawyer sprang from his chair. "Good God!" he exclaimed. "How can a man like that ever have been a scoundrel?"
The sheriff relit his dead cigar reflectively. "It's acurious thing," he said. "They are saying on the street that he's sent Prendergast packing. He'll have to watch out—the old tarantula will sting him if he can!"
Harry Sanderson went back to his cabin with a strange feeling of exaltation and disappointment—exaltation at the recurrence of something of his old adventures, disappointment at the flushed silence with which Jessica had received the child.
Jessica bore back from the town that afternoon a spirit of tremulous gladness. In the few moments of that thrilling ride and rescue, a mysterious change had been wrought in her.
In the past days her soul had been possessed by a painful agitation which she did not attempt to analyze. At moments the ingrained hatred of Hugh's act, the resentment that had been the result of that year of pain, had risen to battle for the inherent justice of things. At such times she was restless anddistraite, sitting much alone, and puzzling David Stires by meaningless responses.
She could not tell him that the son whose name he never took upon his lips was so near: that he whose crime his father's pride of name had hidden, through all the months since then, had gone down with the current, shunned by honest folk, adding to his one dismal act the weight of persistent repetition! She could not tell him this, even though that son now lived withoutmemory of the evil he had done; though he struggled under a cloud of hatred, reaching out to clean deed and high resolve.
Now, however, all distrust and trepidation had vanished. Strangely and suddenly the complex warfare in her mind had stilled. Standing with Mrs. Halloran, she had listened to the comment with shining eyes. Not that she distinguished any sudden and violentvolte-faceof opinion to turn persecution to popularity and make the reprobate of to-day the favorite of to-morrow. But in its very reserve she instinctively felt a new tension of respect. Suspicion and dislike aside, there was none there who would again hinder the man who had made that race with death!
For her own part, she only knew that she had no longer fear of soul or sense of irrevocable loss, or suffering. What were those old Bible words about being born again? What was that rebirth but a divine forgetting, a wiping out, a "remembering no more?" If it was the memory of his shame that had dragged him down, that memory was gone, perhaps for ever. The Hugh she now loved was not the Hugh who had sinned!
She sat by David Stires that evening chatting gaily—he had been much weaker and more nervous of late and she would not have him told of the runaway—talkingof cheerful things, radiating a glow from her own happiness that warmed the softly-lighted sick-room. All the while her heart was on the hillside where a rough cabin held him who embodied for her all the mystery and meaning of life. By a kind of clairvoyance she saw him sitting in the snug firelight, thinking perhaps of the instant their eyes had met. She did not guess that for him that moment had held an added pang.
So the hours had passed, and the sun, when it rose next day, shone on a freshly created world. The wind no longer moaned for the lost legends of the trees. There was a bloom on every flowering bush, a song in the throat of every bird. She was full of new feelings that yielded in their sway only to new problems that loomed on her mental horizon. As the puzzle of the present cleared, the future was become the all-dominating thing. She knew now that she had never hated, had never really ceased to love. And Hugh? Love was not a mere product of times and places. It was only the memory that was gone, his love lived on underneath. Surely that was what the violin—what the look on his face had said! When the broken chain was welded, he would know her! Would it be chance—some sudden mental shock—that would furnish the clue? She had heard of such things.
But suppose he did not recover his memory. In the very nature of the case, he must sometime learn the facts of his past. Was it not better to know the very worst it contained now, to put all behind him, and face a future that held no hidden menace? She alone could tell him what had clouded his career—the thing whose sign and symbol was the forged draft. She carried the slip of paper in the bosom of her dress, and every day she took it out and looked at it as at some maleficent relic. It was a token of the old buried misery that, its final purpose accomplished, should be forgotten for ever. How to convey the truth with as little pain as might be—this was the problem—and she had found the solution. She would leave the draft secretly in the cabin, where he must see it. It bore his own name, and the deadly word David Stires' cramped fist had written across it, told its significant story. How it got there Hugh would not question; it would be to him only a detail of his forgotten life there.
She was glad when in the late afternoon Doctor Brent came for his chat with David Stires, and the latter sent her out for a walk. It was a garlanded day, a day of clear blue spaces between lavender clouds lolling in the sky, and over all the late summer landscape a dull gold wash of sun. There had long ceased to be for her anydirection save one—down the mountain road to where a rambling, overgrown path led to the little grassy plateau with its jutting rock, which was her point of observation. She did not keep to the main road, but chose a short-cut through the thick underbrush that brought her more quickly to the Knob. There she sat down, and, parting the bushes, peered through them.
All was quiet. No wisp of smoke curled from the cabin chimney, no work was forward; for Harry had climbed far up the mountain, alone with his thoughts. It was a favorable opportunity.
Jessica had the fateful draft in her hand as she ran quickly down the trail and across the cleared space to the cabin door. It was wide open. Peering warily she saw that both rooms were empty, and, with a guilty last glance about her, she entered. A smile curved her lips as she saw the plain neatness of the interior; the scoured cooking-utensils, the coarse Mackinaw clothing hung from wooden pegs, the clean bacon suspended from the rafters. A nail in the wall held an old violin, and beneath it was a shelf of books.
To these, battered and dog-eared novels rescued from the mildewed litter of the cabin, Harry had turned eagerly in the long evenings for lack of mental pabulum. She took one from the meager row, and opened itcuriously. It wasDavid Copperfield, and she saw with kindling interest that heavy lines were drawn along certain of the pages. The words that had been marked revealed to the loving woman something of his soul.
She looked about her. Where should she put the draft? He had left a marker in the book; he would open it again, no doubt. She laid the draft between the printed leaves, beyond the marker. Then, replacing the volume on the shelf, she ran from the door and hastened back up the steep trail to the Knob.
Leaning back against the warm rock, lapped in the serene peacefulness of the spot, Jessica fell into reverie. Never since her wedding-day had she said to herself boldly: "I love him!"—never till yesterday. Now all was changed. Her thought was a tremulous assurance: "I shall stay here near him day after day, watching. Some day his memory will come back, and then my love will comfort him. The town will forget it has hated, and will come to honor him. Sometime, seeing how he is changed, his father will forgive him and take him back, and we shall all three go home to the white house in the aspens. If not, then my place will still be with Hugh! Perhaps we shall live here. Perhaps a cabin like that will be home, and I shall live with him, and work with him, and care for him."
Thus she dreamed—a new day-dream, unravaged by the sordid tests of verity.
So absorbed was she that she did not hear a step approaching over the springy moss—a sharply drawn breath, as the intruder stifled an exclamation. She had drawn her handkerchief across her eyes against the dancing glimmer of sunlight. Suddenly it dropped to her lap, and she half turned.
In the instant of surprise, as Harry's look flashed into hers, a name sprang unbidden to her lips—a name that struck his strained face to sudden whiteness, ringing in his ears like the note of a sunken bell. All that was clamoring in him for speech rushed into words.
"You call my name!" he cried. "You know me! Have I ever been 'Hugh' to you? Is that what your look said to me? Is that why your face has haunted me? Tell me, I pray you!"
She had struggled to her feet, her hands pressed to her bosom. The surprise had swung her from her moorings. Her heart had been so full in her self-communings that now, between the impulse toward revealment and the warning of caution, she stood confused.
"I had never seen you in the town before that day," she said. "I am stopping there"—she pointed to the ridge above, where the roof of the sanatorium glistenedin the sunlight. "I was at the hotel by merest accident when—you played."
The light died in his eyes. He turned abruptly and stared across the foliaged space. There was a moment's pause.
"Forgive me!" he said at length, in a voice curiously dull. "You must think me a madman to be talking to you like this. To be sure, every one knows me. It is not strange that you should have spoken my name. It was a sudden impulse to which I yielded. I had imagined ... I had dreamed ... but no matter. Only, your face—that white band across your eyes—your voice—they came to me like something far away that I have known. I was mistaken. I was crazy to think that you—"
He stopped. A wave of sympathy passed over her. She felt a mad wish to throw all aside, to cry to him: "Youdidknow me! You loved me once! I am Jessica—I am your wife!" So intense was her emotion that it seemed to her as if she had spoken his name again audibly, but her lips had not moved, and the tap of a woodpecker on a near-by trunk sounded with harsh distinctness.
"I have wanted to speak to you," she said, after an instant in which she struggled for self-control. "Youdid a brave thing yesterday—a splendid thing. It saved me from sorrow all my life!"
He put aside her thanks with a gesture. "You saved me also. You found me ill and suffering and your horse carried me to my cabin."
"I want to tell you," she went on hastily, her fingers lacing, "that I do not judge you as others do. I know about your past life—what you have forgotten. I know you have put it all behind you."
His face changed swiftly. To-day the determination with which he had striven to put from his mind the problem of his clouded past had broken down. In the light of the charge which had been flung in his teeth the afternoon before, his imagination had dwelt intolerably on it. "Better to have ended it all under the wheels of the freight-engine," he had told himself. "What profit to have another character, if the old lies chuckling in the shadow, an old-man-of-the-sea, a lurking thing, like a personal devil, to pull me down!" In these gloomy reflections her features had recurred with a painful persistence. He had had a bad half-hour on the mountain, and now, before her look and tone, the ever-torturing query burst its bonds.
"You know!" he said hoarsely. "Yet you say that? They stoned me in the street the day I came back.Yesterday they counted me a thief. It is like a hideous nightmare that I can't wake from. Who am I? Where did I come from? I dare not ask, for fear of further shame! Can you imagine what that means?"
He broke off, leaning an unsteady hand against a tree. "I've no excuse for this raving!" he said, in a moment, his face turned away. "I have seen you but twice. I do not even know your name. I am a man snatched out of the limbo and dropped into hell, to watch the bright spirits passing on the other side of the gulf!"
Pain lay very deep in the words, and it pierced her like a bodily pang, so close did she seem to him in spirit. She felt in it unrest, rebellion, the shrinking sensibility that had writhed in loneliness, and the longing for new foothold on the submerged causeway of life.
She came close to him and touched his arm.
"I know all that you suffer," she said. "You are doing the strong thing, the brave thing! The man in you is not astray now; it was lost, but it has found its way back. When your memory comes, you will see that it is fate that has been leading you. There was nothing in your past that can not be buried and forgotten. What you have been you will never be again. I know that! I saw you fight Devlin and I know why you did it. Iheard you play the violin! Whatever has been, I have faith in you now!"
She spoke breathlessly, in very abandon, carried away by her feeling. As she spoke he had turned toward her, his paleness flushed, his eyes leaping up like hungry fires, devouring her face. At the look timidity rushed upon her. She stopped abruptly and took a startled step from him.
He turned from her instantly, his hands dropped at his sides. The word that had almost sprung to speech had slipped back into the void.
"I thank you for the charity you have for me," he said, "which I in no way deserve. I ... I shall always remember it."
She hesitated an instant, made as if to speak. Then, turning, she went quickly from him. At the edge of the bushes she stopped with a sudden impulse. She looked at the handkerchief she held in her hand. Some tiny lettering was embroidered in its corner, the wordJessica. She looked back—he had not moved. Rolling it into a ball, she threw it back, over the bushes, then ran on hastily through the trees.
After a time Harry turned slowly, his shoulders lifting in a deep respiration. He drew his hand across his brow as though to dispel a vision. This was the firsttime he had hit upon the place. He saw the flat ledge, with the bushes twisted before it for a screen. She had known the place before, then! The white and filmy cambric caught his eye, lying at the base of the great, knob-like rock. He went to it, picked it up, and looked at it closely.
"Jessica!" he whispered. The name clung about him; the very leaves repeated it in music. He had a curious sensation as if, while she spoke, that very name had half framed itself in some curtained recess of his thought. He pressed the handkerchief to his face. The faint perfume it exhaled, like the dust of dead roses, gave him a ghostly impression of the familiar.
He thought of what she had said; she had not known him! And yet that look, the strange dreaming sense of her presence, his name on her lips in the moment of bewilderment!
He struck his forehead sharply with his open hand.
"Fool!" he said, with a bitter laugh. "Fool!"
Over the sanatorium on the ridge sleep had descended. On its broad grounds there was no light of moon or stars, and its chamber windows were dark, save where here and there the soft glow of a night-lamp sifted through a shutter. The evening had closed gloomily, breeding storm. The air was sultry and windless, and now and then sheet-lightning threw into blunt relief the dark bodies of the trees. Inside the building all slumbered, soundly or fitfully as health or illness decreed, carrying the humors of the stirring day into the wider realm of sleep.
Jessica had closed her eyes, thinking of a time when secrecy would all be ended, disguise done, when she would wear again the ring she had taken off in bitterness, when indeed and in name she would be a wife before the world. She had picked a great bowl of wild star-jasmin and set it by her bedside and the room was sweet with the delicate scent. The odor carried her irresistibly back to the far-away mansion that had sinceseemed a haunted dwelling, to the days of her blindness and of Hugh's courtship. Before she extinguished the light she searched in a drawer and found her wedding-ring—the one she had worn for less than an hour. It was folded away in a box which she had not opened since the dreadful day when she had broken in pieces her model of the Prodigal Son. When she crept into bed, the ring was on her finger. She had fallen asleep with her cheek resting on it.
She awoke with a start, with a vague, inexplicable uneasiness, an instinct that the night had voiced an unusual sound. She sat up in bed, staring into the dark depths of the room. Her instant thought had been of David Stires, but the tiny bell on the wall whose wire led to his bedroom was not vibrating. She listened a moment, but there was only a deep silence.
Slipping out of bed, she crossed the room and parted the curtain from before the tall French window. The room was on the ground floor and the window gave directly on the lawn. The wind seemed dead, and the world outside—the broad, cleared expanse of trees and shrubs, and the descending forest that closed it round—was wrapped in a dense blackness. While she gazed there came a sudden yellow flare of lightning and far-distant mutter of thunder spoke behind the hills.
Still with the unreasoning uneasiness holding her, she groped to the door, drew the bolt and looked out into the wide, softly carpeted hall, lighted dimly by a lamp set just at the turn of the staircase. All at once a shiver ran through her. There, a dozen steps away, the light full upon him, stood the man who filled her thoughts.
He stood perfectly still, without movement or gesture, gazing at her. She could see his face distinctly, silhouetted on the pearl-gray wall. It wore an expression of strained concern and of deep helplessness. The instant agitation and surprise blotted the puzzle of his presence there. She forgot that it was the dead of night, that she was in her nightgown. It flashed across her mind that some near and desperate trouble had befallen him. All the protective and maternal in her love welled up. She went quickly toward him.
He did not move or stir, and then she realized that though his eyes seemed to look at her, it was with a passive tranced fixity. They saw nothing. He was asleep.
It was the mind which was conscious, the action of the brain was at rest. The body, through the operation of some irreducible law of the subjective self, was moving in an automatic somnambulism. The intermittentmemory that had begun to emerge in sleep, that had given him on waking the eerie impression of a dual identity, had led him, involuntarily and unerringly, to her.
She halted, a deep compassion and a painful wonderment holding her, feeling with a thrill the power she possessed over him. Then, like a cold wave, surged over her a numbing sense of his position. How had he entered? Had he broken locks like a burglar? The situation was anomalous. What should she do? Waked abruptly, the result might be disastrous. Discovered, his presence there when all slumbered, suspected as he had been, would be ruinous. She must get him away, out of the house, and quickly.
A breath of cool air swept past her, putting out the lamp—an outer door was open. At the same instant she heard steps beyond the curve of the hall, Doctor Brent's voice peremptory and inquiring. Her nerves chilled; he blocked the sole avenue of retreat. No, there was one other, and only one—a single way to shield him. Quiet and resourceful now, though her cheeks were hot, she took the hand of the unconscious man, drew him silent and unresisting into the friendly shadow of her room, closed the door noiselessly and bolted it.
For a moment she stood motionless, her heart beating violently. Had he been seen? Or had the open doorcreated an alarm? Releasing his hand gently, she found her way softly to a stand, lighted a tiny night-taper, and threw a shawl about her. Through its ground-glass the light cast a wan glimmer which showed the shadowy outlines of the room, its white rumpled bed, its scattered belongings eloquent of a woman's ownership, and the pallid countenance of the sleeping man. He had stopped still; a troubled frown was on his face, and his head was bent as if listening.
A sudden confusion tingled through her veins, a sense of maidenly shame that she could be there beside himen déshabille, opposing the sweet reminder of their real relationship—was he not in fact her husband?—that lay ever beneath her thought to justify and explain. He must wake before he left that room. What would he think? She flushed scarlet in the semi-darkness; she could not tell him—that! Not there and then! The blood forsook her heart as footsteps sounded outside the door. They paused, passed on, returned and died away.
Suddenly, in the tense silence of the room, the mantel-clock struck three, a deep chime, like the vibration of a far-off church bell. The tone was not loud—indeed the low roll of the thunder had been well-nigh as loud—but there was in the intrusive metallic cadence a peculiar suggestion to the dormant mind. As the sound of thechurch bell in the town had done so often, it penetrated the crust of sleep; it touched the inner ear of the conscious intelligence that stirred so painfully, throbbing keenly to sights and sounds and odors that to the wakeful mind left only a cloudy impression eddying to some unfamiliar center. Harry started, a shudder ran through his frame, he swayed dizzily, his hand went to his forehead.
In the instant of shocked awakening, Jessica was at his side in an agony of apprehension, her arm thrown about him, her hand pressed across his lips, her own lips at his ear in an agonized warning:
"Hush, do not speak! It is I, Jessica. Make no noise."
She felt her wrist caught in a grasp that made her wince. His whole body was trembling violently. "Jessica!" he said in a painfully articulated whisper. "You? Where am I?"
"This is my room," she breathed. "You have been walking in your sleep. Make no sound. We shall be heard."
A low exclamation broke from his lips. He looked bewilderedly about him, his eyes returning to her face with a horrified realization. "I ... came here ... to your room?" The voice was scarcely audible.
"It was I who brought you here. You were in thehall—you would have been found. The house is roused."
He turned abruptly to the door, but she caught his arm. "What are you going to do? You will be seen!"
"So much the better; it will be at my proper measure—as a prowler, a housebreaker, a disturber of honest sleep!"
"No, no!" she protested in a panic. "You shall not; I will not have you taken for what you are not! I know—but they would not know! No one must see you leave this room! Do you not think of me?"
He caught his breath hard. "Think of you!" he repeated huskily. "Is there ever an hour when I do not think of you? Is there a day when I would not die to serve you? Yet in my very sleep—"
He paused, gazing at her where she stood in the half-light, a misty, uncertain figure. She was curiously happy. The delicious and pangless sense of guilt, however—the guilt of the hidden, not the blameworthy thing—that was tingling through her was for him a shrinking and acute self-reproach.
"Here!" he said under his breath. "To have brought myself here, of all places, for you of all women to risk yourself for me! I only know that I was wandering for years and years in a shadowy desert, searching forsomething that would not be found—and then, suddenly I was here and you were speaking to me! You should have left me to be dragged away where I could trouble no one again."
She was silent. "Forgive me," he said, "if you can. I—I can never forgive myself. How can I best go?"
For answer she moved to the window, slender and wraith-like. He followed silently. A million vague new impressions were clutching at him; the fragrance in the room was like a hypnotic incense veiling shadowy forms. Lines started from the blank:
And I swear, as I thought of her thus, in that hour,And how, after all, old things were best,That I smelt the smell of that jasmin-flowerWhich she used to wear in her breast!
And I swear, as I thought of her thus, in that hour,And how, after all, old things were best,That I smelt the smell of that jasmin-flowerWhich she used to wear in her breast!
And I swear, as I thought of her thus, in that hour,
And how, after all, old things were best,
That I smelt the smell of that jasmin-flower
Which she used to wear in her breast!
As she parted the curtain, a second of bright lightning revealed the landscape, the dark hedges and clustered trees. It blackened, and she drew him back with a hushed word, pointing where a lantern was flashing through the shrubbery.
"It is a watchman," she said. "He will be gone presently."
Looking at her, where she stood in the dim light, half turned away, one hand against her cheek, there welled through him a wave of that hopeless longing which herkiss had awakened in that epoch moment of the Reverend Henry Sanderson. The clinging white gown, with the filmy lace at its throat, the taper's faint glow glimmering to a numbus in her loosened hair, the sweet intangible suggestions of the room—all these called to him potently, through the lines that raced in his brain.
But O, the smell of that jasmin-flower!And O that music! and O the wayThat voice rang out from the donjon tower—
But O, the smell of that jasmin-flower!And O that music! and O the wayThat voice rang out from the donjon tower—
But O, the smell of that jasmin-flower!
And O that music! and O the way
That voice rang out from the donjon tower—
"God help me!" he whispered, the pent passion of his dreams rushing to utterance. "Why did I ever see your face? I was reckless and careless then. I had damned the decent side of me that now is quivering alive! I have tried to blot your face from my memory. But it is useless. I shall always see it."
A rumble of nearer thunder sounded and a tentative dash of rain struck the pane. She was shaken to her depths. She stood in a whirlwind of emotion. She seemed to feel his arms clasping her, his lips on hers, his adjuring words in her ears. The odor of the flowers wreathed them both. The beating of her heart seemed to fill all the silent room.
On the lawn just outside the window, low voices were heard through the increasing rain. They passed, and after a moment he softly unlatched the window.
"Good-by," he said.
She stretched out her hand. He touched it, then drew the window wide. As he stepped noiselessly down on to the springy turf, the lightning flashed again—a pale-green glow that seemed almost before her face. She drew back, and the same instant, through the thunder, the electric bell on the wall rang sharply. She threw on her dressing-gown, thrust her feet into slippers, and hastened from the room.
The same flash that had startled Jessica lighted brightly the physician and the watchman, who stood at the corner of the building, having finished their tour of inspection. It was the latter who had found the open door and who had aroused the doctor, insisting that he had seen a man in the hall. The other had pooh-poohed this, but now by the lightning both saw the figure emerge from the French window and disappear in the darkness.
They ran back, the physician ahead. The window was not locked, and they stepped through it into an empty room.
"To be sure!" said the doctor disgustedly. "He was here all the time—heard us searching the halls, and took the first unlocked door he found. Miss Holme, no doubt, is sitting up with Mr. Stires. Not a word ofthis," he added as they walked along the hall. "Unless she misses something, there is no need of frightening her."
He barred the outer door behind the watchman and went on. As he reached David Stires' room, the door opened and Jessica came out. She spoke to him in a low, anxious voice. "I was coming for you," she said. "I am afraid he is not so well. I can not rouse him. Will you come in and see what you can do?"
The doctor entered, and a glance at his patient alarmed him. Until dawn he sat with Jessica watching. When the early sunlight was flooding the room, however, David Stires opened his eyes and looked upon her quite naturally.
"Where is Harry Sanderson?" he asked. "I thought he was here."
She looked at him with a forced smile. "You have been dreaming," she answered.
He seemed to realize where he was. "I suppose so," he said with a sigh, "but it was very real. I thought he came in and spoke your name."
She stroked his hand. "It was fancy, dear." If he but knew who had really been there that night! If she could only tell him all the happy truth!
He lay silent a moment. Then he said: "If it couldonly have been Harry you married instead of Hugh! For he loved you, Jessica."
She flushed as she said: "Ah, that was fancy, too!"
It was the first time since the day of her marriage that he had spoken Hugh's name.
Dawn had come with an unleashed wind and the crash of thunder. The electric storm, which had muttered and menaced like a Sabbath of witches till daylight, had broken at length and turned the world to a raving turmoil, pitilessly scarring the mountain and deluging the gulches with cloud-burst.
In the cabin on the hillside Harry had watched the rage of the elements with a dull sense of accord; it typified the wild range of feeling in which his soul had been harried. Battle had been the keynote of a series of days and doings of which the tense awakening in Jessica's chamber, with its supreme moment of passion and longing, had been a weird culmination.
As he made his way down the mountain in the blank and heavy dark, correcting his path by the lightning, he had faced squarely the question that in that dim room had become an imminent demand.
"What if I love her!What right have I to love her, with a wretched name like mine? She has refinement,a measure of wealth, no doubt, and I am poor as poverty, dependent on the day's grubbing in the ditch for to-morrow's bacon and flour. Yet that would not stand in the way! I am no venal rogue, angling for the loaves and fishes. Whatever else she cursed me with, Nature gave me a brain, and culture and experience have educated it. With hand or brain I can hew my own niche to stand in! Must I put away the longing that drove me to her in sleep, with her dawning love that shielded me? And if, knowing all, she love me, must the past, that is so unreal to me, block my way to happiness? I am putting it deep underground, and its ghost shall not rise! Time passes, reputations change. Mine will change. And when I have squared my living here, the world is wide. What does it matter who she is, if she is the one woman for me? What does it matter what I have been, if I shall be that no longer?"
So he had argued, but his argument ended always with the same stern and unanswerable conclusion: "To drag her down in order to lift myself! Because she pities me—pity is akin to love!—shall I take advantage of her interest and innocence? Shall I play upon divine compassion and sinister propinquity, like any mean adventurer who inveigles a romantic girl into marrying a rascal to reform him?"
In the cabin, through the long hours till the dawn began to infiltrate the dark hollows of the wood he had lain wide-eyed, thinking. When day came he had cooked his breakfast and thereafter sat watching the havoc of the storm through the window. Hours passed thus before the fury of the wind had spent itself, and with the diminution of the rain, a crouching mist had crept over the range from the west, from which Smoky Mountain jutted like a drenched emerald island. At length he rose, threw open the door and stood looking out upon the wind-whipped foliage and the drab desolation of the fog. Then he threw on his Mackinaw coat, picked up his gold-pan and climbed down the slope. Beneath all other problems must lie the sordid problem of his daily food. He had uncovered a crevice in the bed-rock at the end of his trench the day before, and now he scraped a pailful of the soggy gravel it contained and carried it back to the cabin. A fresh onslaught of rain came just then, and setting the heaped-up pan on the doorstep, he reëntered the room.
With a sigh he took off his damp coat and threw a log on the fire. He abstractedly watched it kindle, then filled and lit his pipe and turned to the book-shelf. He ran his hand absently along the row. Where had been that wide, dim expanse of library walls that hoveredlike a mirage beyond his visual sight? He chose a volume he had been reading, and turned the pages.
All at once his hand clenched. He gave a choked cry. He was staring at a canceled bank-draft bearing his own name—a draft across whose face was written, in the cramped hand resembling the signature, a word that seemed etched in livid characters of shame—Forgery!
"Pay to Hugh Stires"—"the sum of five thousand dollars"—he read the phrases in a hoarse, husky monotone, every vein beating fiercely, his body hot with the heat of a forge. There it was, a hideous chapter of it, the damnable truth from which he had shrunk! "I may be a thief!"—he had said that to himself long ago. His mind had revolted at the idea, yet the thought had clung. It had made him a coward. When the allegation had passed before the jeweler's shop, it had stung the deeper for his dread. He had been the beneficiary of that forgery. He alone could have perpetrated it. The popular suspicion was well grounded: he was a common criminal!
Did the town know? He snatched at the draft and read the date. More than a year ago, and it had been presented for payment in a distant city, the city near which he had been picked up beside the railroad track. The forged name was the same as his own. Who wasDavid Stires? His father? Had that city been his home once, and that infamous act the forerunner of his flight or exile? He looked at the paper again with painful intentness. It was canceled—therefore had been paid without question. Yet the man it had robbed had stamped it with that venomous hall-mark. Clearly the law had not stepped in—for here he was at liberty, owning his name. He had been let go, then, disowned, to carry his badge of crime here into the wilderness! And how had he lived since then? Harry shuddered.
What now? It was no longer a question only of his life and repute here at Smoky Mountain. The trail led infinitely further; it led to the greater world, into which he had fondly dreamed of going. The words Jessica had spoken on the hillside sounded in his ears: "Whatever has beenI have faith in you now." His face lightened. That assurance had swept the past utterly aside, had leaned only on the present. His present, at least, was clean!
He drew a sudden breath and the color faded from his cheek; a baleful suggestion had insinuated itself with a harrowing pain.Wasit clean? He had forced an entrance in the dead of night to tread dark halls like a thief—and he had laid that flattering unction to his soul! Suppose he had not gone there innocent ofpurpose? What if, not alone the memory, but the lusts and vices of the former man were reasserting themselves in sleep? What if the new Hugh Stires, unknown to the waking consciousness, was carrying on the deeds of the old? What if the town was right? What if there was, indeed, good reason for suspecting him?
He stumbled to a chair and sat down, his frame rigid. He thought of the robbed sluice in the gulch below, of his own unhappy adventure of the night. How could he tell what he had done—what he might do? Minutes went by as he sat motionless, his mind catching strange kaleidoscopic pictures that fled past him into the void. At length he rose and went to the window. Far down the hillside, a faint line through the mist spanned the gulch bottom. A groan burst from his lips:
"That is the hydraulic flume," he said aloud. "Gold has been stolen there in the past, again and again. Some was stolen two nights ago.How do I know but that I am the thief?" Was that what Prendergast had meant by the "easier way"? A shiver ran over him. "How do I know!" he thought. "I can see myself—the evil side of me—when the dark had fallen, waking and active ... I see myself creeping down there, stealing from shadow to shadow, to scoop the gold from the riffles when the moon is under a cloud. I see men sitting fromdark to daylight, with loaded rifles across their knees, watching. I see a flash of fire ... I hear a report. I see myself there by the sluice-boxes, dead, shot down in the act of a thief, making good the name men know me by!"
The figure of Jessica came before him, standing in her soft white gown, her hand against her cheek and the jasmin odors about her. The dream he had dreamed could not be—never, never, never! All that was left was surrender, ignominious flight to scenes barren of suggestion.
To a place where he could work and save and repay! He looked at the slip of bank-paper in his hand.
At that instant a shining point caught his eye. It came from the pan of gravel on the doorstep on which the rain had been beating. He thrust the draft into his pocket and seized a double handful of the gravel. He plunged it into a pail of water and held it to the light. It sparkled with coarse, yellow flakes of gold. He dropped the handful with a sharp exclamation, threw on his coat and rushed from the cabin.
All day, alone on the fog-soaked hillside, Harry toiled in the trench without food or rest.
It was a fair, sweet evening, and the room where Jessica sat beside David Stires' bed, reading aloud to him, was flooded with the failing sunlight. The height was still in brightness, but the gulches below were wine-red and on their rims the spruces stood shadow-straight against the golden ivory of the southern sky. Since the old man's seizure in the night he had been much worse and she had scarcely left his room. To-day, however, he had sat propped by pillows, able to read and chat, and the deep personal anxiety that had numbed her had yielded. She was reading now from a life of that poetess whose grave has made a lonely Colorado mountain a place of pilgrimage. She read in a low voice, holding the page to the dimming light:
"The spot she chose was a bare knoll, facing out across the curved chasm, the wide empty gulf on three sides, a plot hounded by a knot of noble trees that whispered softly together. Here above the sky was beautifully blue, the searching fall wind that numbed the fingers in the draw of the gorge was gone, and the warm sunshine was mellow andpleasant. It was a spot to dream in, leaning upon the great facts of God that He teaches best to those who love His Nature. A spot in which to be laid at last for the long sleep, when mortal dreams are over and work is done."
"The spot she chose was a bare knoll, facing out across the curved chasm, the wide empty gulf on three sides, a plot hounded by a knot of noble trees that whispered softly together. Here above the sky was beautifully blue, the searching fall wind that numbed the fingers in the draw of the gorge was gone, and the warm sunshine was mellow andpleasant. It was a spot to dream in, leaning upon the great facts of God that He teaches best to those who love His Nature. A spot in which to be laid at last for the long sleep, when mortal dreams are over and work is done."
"That is beautiful," he said. "I should choose a spot like that." He pointed down the long slope, where a red beam of the sun touched the gray face of the Knob and turned it to a spot of crimson-lake. "That must be such a place."
Her cheeks flushed. She knew what he was thinking. He would not wish to lie in the far-away cemetery that looked down on the white house in the aspens, the theater of his son's downfall! The Knob, she thought with a thrill, overlooked the place of Hugh's regeneration.
A knock came at the door. It was a nurse with letters for him from the mail, and while he opened them Jessica laid aside the book and went slowly down the hall to the sun-parlor, where the doctor stood with the group gathered after the early supper, chatting of the newest "strike" on the mountain.
"We'll be famous if we keep on," he was saying, as she looked out of the wide windows across the haze where the sunlight drifted down in dust of gold. "I've a mind to stake out a claim myself."
"We pay you better," said one of the occupantsgrimly. "Anyway, the whole of Smoky Mountain was staked in the excitement a year ago. There's no doubt about this find, I suppose?"
"It's on exhibition at the bank," the doctor replied. "More than five thousand dollars,cachedin a crevice in the glacial age, as neat as a Christmas stocking!"
"Wish it wasmystocking," grunted the other. "It would help pay my bill here."
The man of medicine laughed and nodded to Jessica where she stood, her cheeks reddened by the crimsoning light. She had scarcely listened to the chatter, or, if she did, paid little heed. All her thoughts were with the man she loved. Watching the luminous purple shadows grow slowly over the landscape, she longed to run down to the Knob, to sit where she had first spoken to him, perhaps by very excess of yearning to call him to her side. She had a keen sense of the compunction he must feel, and longed, as love must, to reassure him.
The talk went on about her.
"Where is the lucky claim?" some one asked.
"Just below this ridge," the doctor replied. "It is called the 'Little Paymaster.'"
The name caught her ear now. The Little Paymaster? That was the name on the tree—on Hugh's claim! At that instant she thought she heard David Stires calling.She turned and ran quickly up the long hall to his open door.
The sight of his face at first startled her, for it was held captive of emotion; but it was an emotion of joy, not of pain. A letter fluttered in his grasp. He thrust it into her hands.
"Jessica!" he exclaimed. "Hugh has paid it! He has sent the five thousand dollars, interest and principal, to the bank, to my account."
For a moment she stood transfixed. The talk she had mechanically heard leaped into significance, and her mind ran back to the hour when she had left the draft at the cabin. She caught the old man's hand and knelt by his chair, laughing and crying at once.
"I knew—oh, I knew!" she cried, and hid her face in the coverlet.
"It is what I have prayed for," he said, after a moment, in a shaking voice. "I said I hoped I would never see his face again, but I was bitter then. He was my only son, after all, and he is your husband. I have thought it all over lying here."
Jessica lifted her eyes, shining with a great thankfulness. During these last few days the impulse to tell all that she had concealed had been almost irresistible; now the barrier had fallen. The secret she had repressed solong came forth in a rush of sentences that left him mute and amazed.
"I should have told you before," she ended, "but I didn't know—I wasn't sure—" She broke down for very joy.
He looked at her with eyes unnaturally bright. "Tell me everything, Jessica!" he said. "Everything from the beginning!"
She drew the shade wider before the open window, where he could look down across the two miles of darkening foliage to the far huddle of the town—a group of toy houses now hazily indistinct—and, seated beside him, his hand in hers, poured out the whole. She had never framed it into words; she had pondered each incident severally, apart, as it were, from its context. Now, with the loss of memory and the pitiful struggle of recollection as a background, the narrative painted itself in vivid colors to whose pathos and meaning her every instinct was alive. Her first view of Hugh, the street fight and the revelation of the violin—the part she and Prendergast had taken—the rescue of the child—the leaving of the draft in the cabin, and the strange sleep-walking that had so nearly found a dubious ending—she told all. She did not realize that she was revealing the depths of her own heart without reserve. If she omitted to tell ofhis evil reputation and the neighborhood's hatred, who could blame? She was a woman, and she loved them both.
Dusk came before the moving recital was finished. The rose of sunset grew over the trellised west, faded, and the gloom deepened to darkness, pricked by stars. The old man from the first had scarcely spoken. When she ended she could hardly see his face, and waited anxiously to hear what he might say. Presently he broke the silence.
"He was young and irresponsible, Jessica," he said. "Money always came so easily. He didn't realize what he was doing when he signed that draft. He has learned a lesson out in the world. It won't hurt his career in the end, for no one but you and I and one other knows it. Thank God! If his memory comes back—"
"Oh, it will!" she breathed. "It must! That day on the Knob he only needed the clue! When I tell him who I am, he will know me. He will remember it all. I am sure—sure! Will you let me bring him to you?" she added softly.
"Yes," he said, pressing her hand, "to-morrow. I shall be stronger in the morning."
She rose and lighted the lamp, shading it from his eyes.
"Do you remember the will, Jessica?" he asked her presently. "The will I drew the day he came back? You never knew, but I signed it—the night of your wedding. Harry Sanderson was right, my dear, wasn't he?
"I wish now I hadn't signed it, Jessica," he added. "I must set it right—I must set it right!" He watched her with a smile on his face. "I will rest now," he said, and she adjusted the pillows and turned the lamp low.
Crossing the room, she stepped through the long window on to the porch, and stood leaning on the railing. From the dark hedges where the brown birds built came a drowsy twitter as from a nest of dreams. A long time she stood there, a thousand thoughts busy in her brain—of Hugh, of the beckoning future. She thought of the day she had destroyed the model that her fingers longed to remold, now that the Prodigal was indeed returned. The words of the biblical narrative flashed through her mind:And he arose and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.So Hugh's father would meet him now! The dewed odors of the jasmin brought the memory of that stormy night when he had come to her in his sleep. She imagined she heard again his last word—his whispered "Good-by" in the sound of the rain.
She thought it a memory, but the word that flashed into her mind was carried to her from the shadow, where a man stood in the shrubbery watching her dim figure and her face white and beautiful in the light from a near-by window, with a passionate longing and rebellion.
Harry was seeing her, he told himself, for the last time. He had made up his mind to this on that stormy morning when he had found the lucky crevice. For days he had labored, spurred by a fierce haste to make requital. Till the last ounce of the rich "pocket" had been washed, and the whole taken to the bank in the town, no one had known of the find. It had repaid the forgery and left him a handful of dollars over—enough to take him far away from the only thing that made life worth the effort. He had climbed to the ridge on the bare chance of seeing Jessica—not of speaking to her. Watching her, it required all his repression not to yield to the reckless desire that prompted him to go to her, look into her eyes, and tell her he loved her. He made a step forward, but stopped short, as she turned and vanished through the window.
Standing on the porch, a gradual feeling of apprehension had come to Jessica—an impression of blankness and chill that affected her strangely. Inside theroom she stood still, frightened at the sudden sense of utter soundlessness.
She caught up the lamp, and, turning the wick, approached the bed. She put out her hand and touched the wasted one on the coverlet. Then a sobbing cry came from her lips.
David Stires was gone. A crowning joy had goldened his bitterness at the last moment, and he had gone away with his son's face in his heart and the smile of welcome on his lips.