Dark was falling keen and cool, for frost was in the air, touching the fall foliage on the hills to crimson and amber, silvering the long curving road that skirted the river bluff, and etching delicate hoar tracery on the spidery framework of the long black railroad bridge that hung above "the hole." The warning light from a signal-post threw a crimson splash on the ground. Its green pane cast a pallor on a bearded face turned out over the gloomy water.
The man who had paused there had come from far, and his posture betokened weariness, but his features were sharp and eager. He turned and paced back along the track to the signal-post.
"It was here," he said aloud. He stood a moment, his hands clenched. "The new life began here. Here, then, is where the old life ended." From where he stood he could see blossoming the yellow lights of the little city, five miles away. He set his shoulders, whistled to the small dog that nosed near-by, and set off at a quick pace down the road.
What had brought him there? He scarcely could have told. Partly, perhaps, a painful curiosity, a flagellant longing to press the iron that had seared him to his soul. So, after a fortnight of drifting, the dark maelstrom of his thoughts had swept him to its dead center. This was the spot that held the key to the secret whose shame had sent him hither by night, like a jailbird revisiting the haunts that can know him no more. He came at length to a fork in the road; he mechanically took the right, and it led him soon to a paved road and to more cheerful thoroughfares.
Once in the streets, a bar to curious glances, he turned up his coat collar and settled the brim of his felt hat more closely over his eyes. He halted once before a shadowed door with a barred window set in its upper panel—the badge of a gambling-house. As he had walked, baffling hints of pictures, unfilled outlines like a painter's studies had been flitting before him, as faces flit noiselessly across the opaque ground of a camera-obscura. Now, down the steps from that barred door, a filmy, faded, Chesterfieldian figure seemed to be coming toward him with outstretched hand—one of the ghosts of his world of shadows.
He walked on. He crossed an open square and presently came to the gate of a Gothic chapel, set well backfrom the street. Its great rose-window was alight, for on this evening was to be held a memorial service for the old man whose money had built the pile, who had died a fortnight before in a distant sanatorium. A burnished brass plate was set beside the gate, bearing the legend: "St. James Chapel. Reverend Henry Sanderson, Rector." The gaze with which the man's eye traced the words was as mechanical as the movement with which his hand, in his pocket, closed on the little gold cross; for organ practice was beginning, and the air, throbbing to it, was peopled with confused images—but no realization of the past emerged.
He turned at the sound of wheels, and the blur shocked itself apart to reveal a kindly face that looked at him for an instant framed in the window of a passing carriage. With the look a specter plucked at the flesh of the wayfarer with intangible fingers. He shrank closer against the palings.
Inside the carriage Bishop Ludlow settled back with a sigh. "Only a face on the pavement," he said to his wife, "but it reminded me somehow of Harry Sanderson."
"How strange it is!" she said—the bishop had no secrets from his wife—"never a word or a sign, and everything in his study just as he left it. What can youdo, John? It is four months ago now, and the parish needs a rector."
He did not reply for a moment. The question touched the trouble that was ever present in his mind. The whereabouts of Harry Sanderson had caused him many sleepless hours, and the look of frozen realization which had met his stern and horrified gaze that unforgetable night—a look like that of a tranced occultist waked in the demon-constrained commission of some rueful impiety—had haunted the good man's vigils. He had knowledge of the by-paths of the human soul, and the more he reflected the less the fact had fitted. The wild laugh of Hugh's, as he had vanished into the darkness, had come to seem the derisive glee of the tempter rejoicing in his handiwork. Recollection of Harry's depression and the insomnia of which he had complained had deepened his conviction that some phase of mental illness had been responsible. In the end he had revolted against his first crass conclusion. When the announced vacation had lengthened into months, he had been still more deeply perplexed, for the welfare of the parish must be considered.
"I know," he said at length. "I may have failed in my whole duty, but I haven't known how to tell David Stires, especially since we heard of his illness. I hadwritten to him—the whole story; the ink was not dry on the paper when the letter came from Jessica telling us of his death."
Behind them, as they talked, the man on the pavement was walking on feverishly, the organ music pursuing him, the dog following with a reluctant whine.
At last he came to a wide, dark lawn set thick with aspens clustering about a white house that loomed grayly in the farther shadow. He hesitated a moment, then walked slowly up the broad, weed-grown garden path toward its porch. In the half light the massive silver door-plate stood out clearly. He had known instinctively that that house had been a part of his life, and yet a tremor caught him as he read the name—STIRES. The intuition that had bent his steps from the street, the old stirring of dead memory, had brought him to his past at last. This house had been his home!
He stood looking at it with trouble in his face. He seemed now to remember the wide colonnaded porch, the tall fluted columns, the green blinds. Clearly it was unoccupied. He remembered the scent of jasmin flowers! He remembered—
He started. A man in his shirt-sleeves was standing by a half-open side door, regarding him narrowly.
"Thinking of buying?" The query wasgood-humoredly satiric. "Or maybe just looking the old ranch over with a view to a shake-down!"
The trespasser smiled grimly. It was not the first time he had seen that weather-beaten face. "You have given up surgery as a profession, I see," he said.
The other came nearer, looked at him in a puzzled way, then laughed.
"If it isn't the card-sharp we picked up on the railroad track!" he said, "dog and all! I thought you were far down the coast, where it's warmer. Nothing much doing with you, eh?"
"Nothing much," answered the man he addressed. Others might recognize him as the black sheep, but this nondescript watchman whom chance had set here could not. He knew him only as the dingy vagabond whose broken head he had bandaged in the box-car!
"I'm in better luck," went on the man in shirt-sleeves. "I struck this about two months ago, as gardener first, and now I'm a kind of a sort of a watchman. They gave me a bunk in the summer-house there"—he jerked his thumb backward over his shoulder—"but I know a game worth two of that for these cold nights. I'll show you. I can put you up for the night," he added, "if you like."
The wayfarer shook his head. "I must get away to-night, but I'm much obliged."
"Haven't done anything, have you?" asked his one-time companion curiously. "You didn't seem that sort."
The bearded face turned away. "I'm not 'wanted' by the police, no. But I'm on the move, and the sooner I take the trail the better. I don't mind night travel."
"You'd be better for a rest," said the watchman, "but you're the doctor. Come in and we'll have a nip of something warm, anyhow."
He led the way to the open door and beckoned the other inside, closing it carefully to. "It's a bully old hole," he observed, as he lit a brace of candles. "It wasn't any trick to file a key, and I sleep in the library now as snug as a bug in a rug." He held the light higher. "You look a sight better," he said. "More flesh on your bones, and the beard changes you some, too. That scar healed up fine on your forehead—it's nothing but a red line now."
His guest followed him into a spacious hall, scarce conscious of what he did. A double door to the left was shut, but he nevertheless knew perfectly that the room it hid had a tall French window, letting on to a garden where camelias had once dropped like blood. The open door to the right led to the library.
There the yellow light touched the dark wainscoting, the marble mantelpiece, dim paintings on the wall, anda great brass-bound Korean desk in a corner. What black thing had once happened in that room? What face had once looked at him from that wheel-chair? It was an old face, gray and lined and passionate—his father, doubtless. He told himself this calmly, with an odd sense of apartness.
The other's glance followed his pridefully. "It's a fine property," he said. "The owner's an invalid, I hear, with one leg in the grave. He's in some sanatorium and can't get much good of it. Nice pictures, them," he added, sweeping a candle round. "That's a good-looker over there—must be the old man's daughter, I reckon. Well, I'll go and get you a finger or two to keep the frost out of your lungs. It'll be cold as Billy-be-dam to-night. Make yourself at home." The door closed behind him.
The man he left was trembling violently. He had scarcely repressed a cry. The portrait that hung above the mantelpiece was Jessica's, in a house-dress of soft Romney-blue and a single white rose caught in her hair. "The old man's daughter!"—the words seemed to echo and reëcho about the walls, voicing a new agony without a name. Then Jessica was his sister!
The owner of the house, his father, an invalid in a sanatorium? It was a sanatorium on the ridge of SmokyMountain where she had stayed, into which he had broken that stormy night! Had his father been there then, yearning in pain and illness over that evil career of his in the town beneath? Was relationship the secret of Jessica's interest, her magnanimity, that he had dreamed was something more? A dizzy sickness fell upon him, and he clenched his hands till the nails struck purple crescents into the palms.
As he stared dry-eyed at the picture in the candle-light, the misery slowly passed. He mustknow. Who she was, what she was to him, he must learn beyond peradventure. He cast a swift glance around him; orderly rows of books stared from the shelves, the mahogany table held only a pile of old magazines. He strode to the desk, drew down its lid and tried the drawers. They opened readily and he rapidly turned over their litter of papers, written in the same crabbed hand that had etched the one damning word on the draft he had found in the cabin on Smoky Mountain.
This antique desk, with its crude symbols and quaint brass-work, a gift to him once upon a time from Harry Sanderson, had been David Stires' carry-all; he had been spending a last half-hour in sorting its contents when the bank-messenger, on that fateful day, had brought him the slip of paper that had told his son's disgrace.Most of the papers the searcher saw at a glance were of no import, and they gave him no clue to what he sought. Then, mysteriously guided by the subtle memory that seemed of late to haunt him, though he was but half conscious of its guidance, his nervous fingers suddenly found and pressed a spring—a panel fell down, and he drew out a folded parchment.
Another instant and he was bending over it with the candle, his fingers tracing familiar legal phrases of a will laid there long ago. He read with the blood shrinking from his heart:
"To my son Hugh, in return for the care and sorrow he has caused me all the days of his life, for his dissolute career and his graceless desertion, I do give and bequeath the sum of one thousand dollars and the memory of his misspent youth. The residue of my estate, real and personal, I do give and bequeath to my ward, Jessica Holme—"
The blood swept back to his heart in a flood. Ward, not daughter! He could still keep the one sweet thing left him. His love was justified. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he laid the parchment back and closed the desk. He hastily brushed the drops away, as the rough figure of the watchman entered and set down two glasses and a bottle with a flourish.
"There you are; that'll be worth five miles to you!" He poured noisily. "Here's how!" he said.
His guest drank, set down the glass and held out his hand. "Good luck," he said. "You've got a good, warm berth here; maybe I shall find one, too, one of these days."
The dog thrust a cold muzzle into his hand as he walked down the gravel path slowly, feeling the glow of the liquor gratefully, with the grudging release it brought from mental tension. He had not consciously asked himself whither now. In some subconscious corner of his brain this had been asked and answered. He was going to his father. Not to seek to change the stern decree; not to annul those bitter phrases:his dissolute career—the memory of his misspent youth!Only to ask his forgiveness and to make what reparation was possible, then to go out once more to the world to fight out his battle. His way was clear before him now. Fate had guided him, strangely and certainly, to knowledge. He was thankful for that. He had come a silent shadow; like a shadow he would go.
He retraced his steps, and again stood on the square near where the rose-window of the Gothic chapel cast a tinted luster on the clustering shrubbery. The audience-room was full now, a string of carriages waited at thecurb, and as he stood on the opposite pavement the treble of the choir rose full and clear:
"Lead, kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom,Lead Thou me on;The night is dark, and I am far from home,Lead Thou me on!Keep Thou my feet! I do not care to seeThe distant scene; one step enough for me."
"Lead, kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom,Lead Thou me on;The night is dark, and I am far from home,Lead Thou me on!Keep Thou my feet! I do not care to seeThe distant scene; one step enough for me."
"Lead, kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on;
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet! I do not care to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me."
He drew his hat-brim over his eyes, and mingled with the hurrying street.
The bell was tapping in the steeple of the little Catholic church on the edge of the town, and the mellow tone came clearly up the slope of the mountain where once more the one-time partner of Prendergast stood on the threshold of the lonely cabin, sentinel over the mounds of yellow gravel that marked his toil.
The returned wanderer had met with a distinct surprise in the town. As he passed through the streets more than one had nodded, or had spoken his name, and the recognition had sent a glow to his cheek and a lightness to his step.
Since the daring feat in the automobile, the tone of the gossip had changed. His name was no longer connected with the sluice robberies. The lucky find, too, constituted a material boom for Smoky Mountain and bettered the stock in its hydraulic enterprises, and this had been written on the credit side of the ledger. Opinion, so all-powerful in a new community, had altered. Devlin had abruptly ordered from his place one who haddone no more than to repeat his own earlier gibes, and even Michael Halloran, the proprietor of the Mountain Valley House, had given countenance to the more charitable view championed by Tom Felder. All this he who had been the outcast could not guess, but he felt the change with satisfaction.
As he gazed up the slope, all gloriously afire with the marvellous frost-hues of the autumn—dahlia crimsons, daffodil golds and maple tints like the flames of long-sought desires—toward the glass roof that sparkled on the ridge above, one comfort warmed his breast. If it had been the subtle stirring of blood kinship, the blind instinct of love, that had drawn him to that nocturnal house-breaking, not the lawless appetence of the natural criminal! Whether his father was indeed there he must discover.
Till the sun was low he sat in the cabin thinking. At length he called the dog and fastened it in its accustomed place, and began slowly to climb the steep ascent. When he came to a certain vine-grown trail that met the main path, he turned aside. Here lay the spot where he had first spoken with her, face to face. Here she had told him there was nothing in his past which could not be buried and forgotten!
As he parted the bushes and stepped into the narrowspace beside the jutting ledge, he stopped short with an exclamation. The place was no longer a tangle of vines. A grave had been lately made there, and behind it, fresh-chiseled in the rock, was a statue: a figure seated, chin on hand, as if regarding the near-by mound. As in a dream he realized that its features were his own. Awestruck, the living man drew near.
It was Jessica's conception of the Prodigal Son, as she had modelled it in Aniston in her blindness, after Hugh's early return to the house in the aspens. That David Stires should have pointed out the distant Knob as a spot in which he would choose to be buried had had a peculiar significance to her, and the wish had been observed. Her sorrow for his death had been deepened by the thought that the end had come too suddenly for David Stires to have reinstated his son. This sorrow had possessed one comfort—that he had known at the last and had forgiven Hugh. Of this she could assure him when he returned, for she could not really believe—so deep is the heart of a woman—that he would not return. In the days of vigil she had found relief in the rough, hard work of the mallet. None had intruded in that out-of-the-way spot, save that one day Mrs. Halloran, led by curiosity to see the grave of the rich man whose whim it had been to be buried on the mountain side,had found her at her work, and her Jessica had pledged to silence. She was no fool, was Mrs. Halloran, and to learn the name of the dead man was to put two and two together. The guess the good woman evolved undershot the mark, but it was more than sufficient to summon all the romance that lurked beneath that prosaic exterior; nevertheless she shut her lips against temptation, and all her motherly heart overflowed to the girl who worked each day at that self-appointed task. Only the afternoon before Jessica had finished carving the words on the base of the statue on which the look of the startled man was now resting:I will arise and go unto my father.
The gazer turned from the words, with quick question, to the mound. He came close, and in the fading light looked at the name on the low headstone. So he had come too late!
And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.Though for him there could have been no robe or ring, or fatted calf or merriment, yet he had longed for the dearer boon of confession and understanding. If he could only have learned the truth earlier! If he might only put back the hands of the clock!
Hours went by. The shadows dreamed themselvesaway and dark fell, cloudless and starry. The half-moon brightened upon him sitting moveless beside the stone figure. At length he rose to his feet, his limbs cramped and stiffened, and made his way back to the lonely cabin on the hillside.
There he found fuel, kindled a blaze in the fireplace and cooked his frugal supper. The shock of surprise past, he realized his sorrow as a thing subjective and cerebral. The dead man had been his father; so he told himself, but with an emotion curiously destitute of primitive feeling. The very relationship was a portion of that past that he could never grasp; all that was of the present was Jessica!
He thought of the losing battle he had fought there once before, when tempest shrieked without—the battle which had ended indébacleand defeat. He thought of the will he had seen, now sealed with the Great Seal of Death. He was the shorn beggar, she the beneficiary. What duty she had owed his father was ended now. Desolate she might be—in need of a hand to guide and guard—but she was beyond the reach of penury. This gave him a sense of satisfaction. Was she there on the mountain at that moment? There came upon him again the passionate longing that had held him in that misty sanatorium room when the odor of the jasmin hadwreathed them both—when she had protected and saved him!
At last he took Old Despair's battered violin from the wall, and, seating himself in the open doorway, looking across the mysterious purple of the gulches to the skyline sown with pale stars, drew the bow softly across the strings. In the long-past days, when he had been the Reverend Henry Sanderson, in the darker moods of his study, he had been used to seek the relief to which he now turned. Never but once since then had he played with utter oblivion of self. Now his struggle and longing crept into the music. The ghosts that haunted him clustered together in the obscurity of the night, and stood between his opening future and her.
Through manifold variations the music wandered, till at length there came from the hollowed wood an air that was an unconscious echo of a forgotten wedding-day—"O perfect love, all human thought transcending." After the fitful medley that had spoken, the placid cadence fell with a searching pathos that throbbed painfully on the empty silence of the mountain.
Empty indeed he thought it. But the light breeze that shook the pine-needles had borne the sound far to an ear that had grown tense with listening—to one on the ridge above to whom it had sounded the supreme call of youthand life. He did not feel her nearer presence as she stole breathless across the dark path, and stood there behind him with outstretched hands, her whole being merged in that mute appeal.
The music died, the violin slipped from beneath his chin, the bow dropped and his head fell on his arms. Then he felt a touch on his shoulder and heard the whisper: "Hugh! Hugh!"
"Jessica!" he cried, and sprang to his feet.
In those three words all was asked and answered. It did not need the low cry with which she flung herself on her knees beside the rough-hewn steps, or the broken sentences with which he poured out the fear and hope that he had battled with.
"I have watched every day and listened every night," she said. "I knew that you would come—that youmustcome back!"
"If I had never gone, Jessica!" he exclaimed. "Then I might have seen my father! But I didn't know—"
She clasped her hands together. "You know now—you remember it all?"
He shook his head. "I have been there"—he pointed to the hillside—"and I have guessed who it is that lies there. I know I sinned against him and against myself, and left him to die unforgiving. That is what thestatue said to me—as he must have said:I am no more worthy to be called thy son."
"Ah," she cried, "he knew and he forgave you, Hugh. His last thought was of your coming! That is why I carved the figure there."
"You carved it?" he exclaimed. She bent her forehead to his hands, as they clasped her own.
"The prodigal is yourself," she said. "I modelled it once before when you came back to him, in the time you have forgotten. But I destroyed it,"—the words were very low now—"on my wedding-day."
His hands released hers, and, looking up, she saw, even in the moonlight, that with the last word his face had gone ghastly white. At the sight, timidity, maidenly reserve, fell, and all the woman in her rushed uppermost. She lifted her arms and clasped his face.
"Hugh," she cried, "can't you remember? Don't you understand? Think! I was blind, dear, blind—a white bandage was across my eyes, and you came to me in a shaded room! Why did you come to me?"
A spark seemed to dart through his brain, like the prickling discharge from a Leyden jar. A spot of the mental blackness visualized, and for an instant sprang out in outlines of red. He smelled the odor of jasmin flowers. He saw himself standing, facing a figure withbandaged eyes. He saw the bandage torn off, felt that yielding body in his arms, heard a voice—her voice—crying, "Hugh—Hugh! My husband!" and felt those lips pressed to his own in the tense air of a darkened room.
A cry broke from his lips: "Yes, yes! I remember! Jessica, my wife!" His arms went round her, and with a little sob she nestled close to him on the doorstep.
The blank might close again about him now! He had had that instantaneous glimpse of the past, like lightning through a rifted pall, and in that glimpse was joy. For him there was now no more consciousless past or remorseful present. No forgery or exile, no Prendergast, or hatred, or evil repute. For her, all that had embittered, all that stood for loss and grieving, was ended. The fire on the hearth behind them domed and sank, and far below the lights of the streets wavered unheeded.
The shadowed silence of the cathedral pines closed them round. Above in the calm sky the great constellations burned on and swung lower, and in that dim confessional she absolved him from all sin.
Keen, morning sunlight, a sky clean as a hound's tooth, and an air cool and tinctured with the wine of perfect autumn! Jessica breathed it deeply as her buoyant step carried her along the mountain trails, brave in the pageant of the passing year. Her face reflected the rich color and her eyes were deep as the sky.
Only last night had been that sweet unfolding in which the past had been swept away for ever. To-day her heart was almost too full to bear, beating to thought of the man to whose arms the violin had called her. That had been the hour of confidence, of love's sacrament, the closure of all her distrust and agony. Now she longed inexpressibly for the further assurance she knew would look from his eyes to hers; yet her joy was so poignant that it was near to pain, and withal was so enwound with maidenly consciousness that, knowing him near, she must have fled from him. She walked rapidly on, losing herself in the windings of blind wood-paths, revelling in the beauty of the silent, empty forest.
The morning had found the man whose image filled her mental horizon no less a prey to conflicting emotions than herself. That hour on the mountain-side, under the stars, had left Harry possessed of a mêlée of perplexing emotions. Dreaming and waking, Jessica's face hung before his eyes, her voice sounded in his ear. Yet over his happiness more than once a chill had fallen, an odd shrinking, an unexplainable sense of flush, of fastidiousness, of mortification. This subtle conflict of feeling, not understood, had driven him, in sheer nervousness, to the peaceful healing of the solitudes.
The future held no longer any doubt—it held only her. Where was that future to be? Back in the city to which his painful curiosity had so lately driven him? This lay no longer in his own choice; it was for her to decide now, Jessica—his wife. He said the word softly, under his breath, to the sweet secret grasses, as something mysterious and sacred. How appealing, how womanly she was—how incommunicably dear, how—
He looked up transfixed, for she stood there before him, ankle-deep in a brown whirlwind of leaves from a frost-stung oak, her hand to her cheek in an adorable gesture that he knew, her lips parted and eager. She said no word, nor did he, but he came swiftly and caught her to him, and her face buried itself on his breast.
As he looked down at her thus folded, the trouble, the sense of vexing complexity vanished, and the primitive demand reasserted its sway. Presently he released her, and drew her gently to a seat on the sprawling oak roots.
"I wanted so to find you," she said. "I have so many, many things to say."
"It is all wonderfully strange and new!" he said. "It is as though I had rubbed Aladdin's lamp, and suddenly had my heart's desire."
"Ah," she breathed, "am I that?"
"More than that, and yet once I—Jessica, Jessica! When I woke this morning in the cabin down there, it seemed to me for a moment that only last night was real, and all the past an ugly dream. How could you have loved me? And how could I have thrown my pearl away?"
"We are not to think of that," she protested, "never, never any more."
"You are right," he rejoined cheerfully; "it is what is to come that we must think of." He paused an instant, then he said:
"Last night, when you told me of the white house in the aspens, I did not tell you that I had just come from there—from Aniston."
She made an exclamation of wonder. "Tell me," she said.
Sitting with her hand in his, he told of that night's experiences, the fear that had held him as he gazed at her portrait in the library, the secret of the Korean desk that had solaced his misery and sent him back to the father he was not to see.
At mention of the will she threw out her hand with a passionate gesture. "The money is not mine!" she cried. "It is yours! He intended to change it—he told me so the day he died. Oh, if you think I—"
"No, no," he said gently. "There is no resentment, no false pride in my love, Jessica. I am thinking of you—and of Aniston. You would have me go back, would you not?"
She looked up smiling and slowly shook her head. "You are a blind guesser," she said. "Don't you think I know what is in your mind? Not Aniston, Hugh. Sometime, but not now—not yet. It is nearer than that!"
His eyes flowed into hers. "You understand! Yes, it is here. This is where I must finish my fight first. Yesterday I would have left Smoky Mountain for ever, because you were here. Now—"
"I will help you," she said. "All the world besidescounts nothing if only we are together! I could live in a cabin here on the mountain always, in a Forest of Arden, till I grow old, and want nothing but that—and you!" She paused, with a happy laugh, her eye turned away.
Illustratio
A log cabin, but a home glorified by her presence! In a dozen words she had sketched a sufficient Paradise. As he did not answer, she faced him with crimsoning cheeks, then reading his look she suddenly threw her arms about his neck.
"Hugh," she cried, "we belong to each other now. There is no one else to consider, is there? I want to be to you what I haven't been—to bear things with you, and help you."
He kissed her eyes and hair. "Youhavehelped, youdohelp me, Jessica!" he urged. "But I am jealous for your love. It must not be offended. The town of Smoky Mountain must not sneer—and it would sneer now."
"Let it!" she exclaimed resentfully. "As if I would care!"
"ButIwould care," he said softly. "I want to climb a little higher first."
She was silent a moment, her fingers twisting the fallen leaves. "You don't want them to know that I am your wife?"
"Not yet—till I can see my way."
She nodded and smiled and the cloud lifted from her face. "You must know best," she said. "This is what I shall do, then. I shall leave the sanatorium to-morrow. The people there are nothing to me, but the town of Smoky Mountain is yours, and I must be a part of it, too. I am going to the Mountain Valley House. Mrs. Halloran will take care of me." She sprang to her feet as she added: "I shall go to see her about it now."
He knew the dear desire her determination masked—to do her part in softening prejudice, in clearing his way—and the thought of her great-heartedness brought a mist to his eyes. He rose and walked with her through the bracken to the road. They came out to the driveway just below the trail that led to the Knob. The bank was high, and leaping first he held up his arms to her and lifted her lightly down. In the instant, as she lay in his arms, he bent and kissed her on the lips.
Neither noted two figures walking together that at that moment rounded the bend of the road a little way above. They were Tom Felder and Doctor Brent, the latter swinging a light suit-case, for he was on his way to the station of the valley railroad. He had chosen to walk that he might have a longer chat with his friend. Both men saw the kiss and instinctively drew back, thelawyer with a sudden color on his face, the doctor with a look of blank astonishment.
The latter, in one way, knew little about the town. Beside Felder and Mrs. Halloran, whose surly husband he had once doctored when the town's practitioner was away—thereby earning her admiration and gratitude—there were few with whom he had more than a nodding acquaintance. He had liked David Stires, and Jessica he genuinely admired, though he had thought her at times somewhat distant. He himself had introduced Felder to her, on one of the latter's visits. He had not observed that the young lawyer's calls had grown more frequent, nor guessed that he had more than once loitered on the mountain trails hoping to meet her.
The doctor noted now the telltale flush on his companion's face.
"We have surprised a romance," he said, as the two unconscious figures disappeared down the curving stretch. "Who is the man?"
"He is the one we have been talking about."
The other stared. "Not your local Jekyll and Hyde, the sneak who lost his memory and found himself an honest man?"
Felder nodded. "His cabin is just below here, on the hillside."
"Good Lord!" ejaculated the doctor. "What an infernal pity! What's his name?"
"Hugh Stires."
"Stires?" the other repeated. "Stires? How odd!" He stood a moment, tapping his suit-case with his stick. Suddenly he took the lawyer's arm and led him into the side-path.
"Come," he said, "I want to show you something."
He led the way quickly to the Knob, where he stopped, as much astonished as his companion, for he had known nothing of the statue. They read the words chiselled on its base. "The prodigal son," said Felder.
"Now look at the name on the headstone," said the physician.
Felder's glance lifted from the stone, to peer through the screening bushes to the cabin on the shelf below, and returned to the other's face with quick comprehension. "You think—"
"Who could doubt it?I will arise and go unto my father.The old man's whim to be buried here had a meaning, after all. The statue is Miss Holme's work—nobody in Smoky Mountain could do it—and I've seen her modelling in clay at the sanatorium. What we saw just now is the key to what might have been a pretty riddle if we had ever looked further than our noses.It's a case of a clever rascal and damnable propinquity. The ward has fallen in love with the black sheep!"
They betook themselves down the mountain in silence, the doctor wondering how deep a hurt lay back of that instant's color on his friend's now imperturbable face, and more than disturbed on Jessica's account. Her care for the cross-grained, likable invalid had touched him.
"A fine old man to own a worthless son," he said at length, musingly. "A gentleman of the old school. Your amiable blackleg has education and good blood in him, too!"
"I've wondered sometimes," said Felder, "if the old Hugh Stires, that disreputable one that came here, wasn't the unreal one, and the Hugh Stires the town is beginning to like, the real one, brought back by the accident that took his memory. You medical men have cases of such double identity, haven't you?"
"The books have," responded the other, "but they're like Kellner's disease or Ludwig's Angina—nobody but the original discoverer ever sees 'em."
As they parted at the station the doctor said: "We needn't take the town into our confidence, eh? Some one will stumble on the statue sooner or later, but we won't help the thing along." He looked shrewdly in the other's face as they shook hands.
"You know the old saying: There's as many good fish in the sea as ever were caught."
The lawyer half laughed. "Don't worry," he said. "If I had been in danger, the signal was hung out in plenty of time!"
Hallelujah Jones was in his element. With his wheezy melodeon, his gasoline flare and his wild earnestness, he crowded the main street of the little mining-town, making the engagement of the "San Francisco Amazons" at the clapboard "opera house" a losing venture. The effete civilization of wealthy bailiwicks did not draw forth his powers as did the open and unveneered debaucheries of less restricted settlements. Against these he could inveigh with surety, at least, of an appreciative audience.
He had not lacked for listeners here, for he was a new sensation. His battered music-box, with its huge painted text, was far and away more attractive than the thumping pianolas of the saloons or the Brobdignagian gramophone of the dance-hall, and his old-fashioned songs were enthusiastically encored. When he lit his flare in the court-house square at dusk on the second evening, the office of the Mountain Valley House wasemptied and the bar-rooms and gaming-tables well-nigh deserted of their patrons.
Jessica had seen the mustering crowd from the hotel entrance. Mrs. Halloran had welcomed her errand that day and given her her best room, a chamber overlooking the street. She had persuaded her visitor to spend the afternoon and insisted that she stay to supper, "just to see how she would like it for a steady diet." Now, as Jessica passed along toward the mountain road, the spectacle chained her feet on the outskirts of the gathering. She watched and listened with a preoccupied mind; she was thinking that on her way to the sanatorium she would cross to the cabin for a good-night word with the man upon whom her every thought centered.
As it happened, however, Harry was at that moment very near her. Alone on the mountain, the perplexing conflict of feeling had again descended upon him. He had fought it, but it had prevailed, and at nightfall had driven him down to the town, where the street preacher now held forth. He stood alone, unnoted, a little distance away, near the court-house steps, where, by reason of the crowd, Jessica could see neither him nor the dog which sniffed at the heels of the circle of bystanders as if to inquire casually of salvation.
Numbers were swelling now, and the street preacher,shaking back his long hair, drew a premonitory, wavering chord from his melodeon, and struck up a gospel song:
"My days are gliding swiftly by,And I, a pilgrim stranger,Would not detain them as they fly,These hours of toil and danger.For Oh, we tread on Jordan's strand,Our friends are passing over,And just before the shining shoreWe may almost discover."
"My days are gliding swiftly by,And I, a pilgrim stranger,Would not detain them as they fly,These hours of toil and danger.For Oh, we tread on Jordan's strand,Our friends are passing over,And just before the shining shoreWe may almost discover."
"My days are gliding swiftly by,
And I, a pilgrim stranger,
Would not detain them as they fly,
These hours of toil and danger.
For Oh, we tread on Jordan's strand,
Our friends are passing over,
And just before the shining shore
We may almost discover."
The song ended, he mounted his camp-stool to propound his usual fiery text.
The watcher by the steps was gazing with a strange, alert intentness. Something in the scene—the spluttering, dripping flame, the music, the forensic earnestness of the pilgrim—held him enthralled. The dormant sense that in the recent weeks had again and again stirred at some elusive touch of memory, was throbbing. Since last night, with its sudden lightning flash of the past that had faded again into blankness, he had been as sensitive as a photographic plate.
Hallelujah Jones knew the melodramatic value of contrast. As his mood called, he passed abruptly from exhortation to song, from prayer to fulmination, and he embellished his harangue with anecdotes drawn from his lifelong campaign against the Arch-Enemy of Souls.Of what he had said the solitary observer had been quite unconscious. It was theensemble—the repetition of something experienced somewhere before—that appealed to him. Suddenly, however, a chance phrase pierced to his understanding.
Another moment and he was leaning forward, his eyes fixed, his breath straining at his breast. For each word of the speaker now was knocking a sledge-hammer blow upon the blank wall in his brain. Hallelujah Jones had launched into the recital of an incident which had become thechef d'ouvreof his repertory—a story which, though the stern charge of a bishop had kept him silent as to name and locality, yet, possessing the vividness of an actual experience, had lost little in the telling. It was the tale of an evening when he had peered through the tilted window of a chapel, and seen its dissolute rector gambling on the table of the Lord.
Back in the shadow the listener, breathless and staring, saw the scene unroll like the shifting slide of a stereopticon—the epitaph on his own dead self. Nerve and muscle and brain tightened as if to withstand a shock, for the man who moved through the pictures was himself! He saw the cards and counters falling on the table, the entrance of the two intruding figures, heard Hugh's wild laugh as he fled, and the grate of the keyin the lock behind him as he stood in his study. He heard the rush of the wind past the motor-car, the rustle of dry corn in the hedges, and felt the mist beating on his bare head—