She stood leaning against the wall for a moment, then she straightened herself with an effort and pressed the tips of her fingers to her temples.
"What can you get out of your car?" she asked. And the man answered quickly, "As much speed as the roads let me—I have done sixty."
"Please take me home." The words came abruptly and with undisguised wretchedness, "and take mefast."
Twenty minutes later Stuart Farquaharson swung himself to the driver's seat of his low-hung roadster, and threw on the switch, while Billy Stirling and the others stood at the curb, waving farewells and finding nothing suitable to say.
The car went purring through the quiet streets where gabled houses slept under the moon, but having passed the town limits, leaped into a racing pace along the road for Orleans.
Stuart made no effort to talk and Conscience spoke only at long intervals. She was gazing ahead and her eyes were wide and wet with tears.
Once she leaned over to say: "If any of the things I said seemed disloyal, please try to forget them. Of course, I'm only too glad he wants me, and that I can help."
"I understand," he assured her. "I never doubted that."
The moon had set and it wanted only two hours of dawn when Conscience roused herself from her revery to say, "It's the next gate—on the right."
Wheeling the car into the driveway, he had a shadowy impression of an old and gabled place, inky except for the pallid light of a lamp turned low in an upper window.
As the girl hesitated on the verandah, he caught the complaining creak of an old plank, and while she waited for her bag there came to his ears the whining scrape of a tree branch against the eaves. The little voices of the hermitage were giving their mouselike welcome.
With her key fitted in the door, Conscience turned and held out both hands.
"You've been wonderful, Stuart," she said, with tears in her voice. "You've understood everything and I want to thank you while we're here alone. You'll come in, of course? I'm afraid it will be dismal, but the hotel is worse."
The man shook his head. "No," he answered, as he pressed her hands in his own, "I'll go back to the village and rouse up the hostelry, but I'm coming to-morrow—to inquire."
Many dogs were aroused to a noisy chorus before his hammering on the door of the old house which passed for a hotel received official response, and the east was breaking into a pallid rosiness before his thoughts permitted him to leave his seat by the window and stretch himself wearily on his uninviting bed.
But when the sun had waked him at eight o'clock the landscape framed by his window was a smiling one to which the youth in him responded and he dressed clear-eyed and ready for a new day. In the hope that Conscience had been able to sleep late, he meant to defer his visit of inquiry, and in the meantime he breakfasted at leisure and went out to search for a barber. The quest was not difficult, and while he awaited his turn he sat against the wall, mildly amused at the scraps of local gossip that came to his ears couched in homely vernacular.
"I heard that Eben Tollman cal'lates to jam Lige Heman with a foreclosure on his mortgage. It's move out and trust in Providence for Lige and Lige's." This comment came in piping falsetto from a thin youth who had just been shaven raw, but still lingered in the shop, and it met prompt reply from a grizzled old fellow with a wooden leg.
"Pshaw, Seth, that ain't no news. You can't scace'ly get folks excited by a yarn about a shark'sbitin' a cripple—but if you was to give in a yarn about a cripple bitin' a shark—well, there'd be some point to that. If you told where somebody had got a dollar away from Eben, now, we'd call you a liar, I s'pose—and be right at that—but we'd listen."
"If you got a nickel from Tollman," retorted the first speaker, "you couldn't put it in a slot machine. It would be squeezed till it was bent double. Well, you can't blame him, I s'pose. He ain't got more'n a million."
Just at that moment the door was opened by a gentleman entering from the street, and Farquaharson was immensely diverted at the sudden hush in which that particular vein of conversation died. It was an easy guess that this was Eben Tollman himself.
The newcomer bore himself with a cold reserve of conscious superiority. He might have been forty, though the humorless immobility of his face gave him a seeming of greater age. In stature he was above the average height and his eyes were shrewd and piercing. To the salutations of those present, he responded with a slight, stiff inclining of his head—and appeared to withdraw into the shell of self-sufficiency.
When Stuart, later, presented himself at the old manse, he found it a venerable place, whose shingled roof was moss-green and whose gables were honorably gray with age and service. An elderly servant directed him to the garden, and elated at the prospect of a tête-à-tête among the hedge rows, he went with a light step along the mossy path, noting with what a golden light the sun filtered through the fine old trees and flecked the sod. But inside the garden he halted among the flower borders, for a glance told him that Conscience was not alone. She sat leaning toward a wheel-chair, reading aloud from a book which he divined, rather than recognized, to be a Bible. As hehurried forward the girl looked up and rose to meet him with a swift eagerness of welcome.
Because Stuart had catalogued Conscience's father, who was old enough to be her grandfather, as a bigot and an obstructionist standing between her and the sun, he was prepared to dislike him. Yet when he came up he confessed to a sort of astonished admiration. He stood looking at a head which suggested the head of a lion, full maned and white as a snow-cap, shaggy and beetling of brow, and indomitable of eye. Such a man, had he lived in another day, would have gone uncomplaining to the agonies of the Inquisition—or as readily have participated in visiting Inquisitional tortures on another. Yet it was a face capable of kindliness, too, since its wrath was only for sin—or what it regarded as sin.
He held out a hand in greeting.
"Conscience has told me how you rushed her home to me. It was very kind of you. I was hungry to see her, but I hadn't dared to hope for her so soon."
The old man spoke with a smile, but it was unconsciously pathetic. Stuart could see that he was stricken not only in his useless legs but also in his heart, though his eagle-like eyes were steady.
Conscience had been crying, but now she smiled and the two chatted with a forced vivacity, pretending to ignore the thing of which each was thinking and, though vivacity was foreign to his nature, the sufferer joined in their conversation with a grim sort of self-effacement. Soon they saw another figure approaching by the flagged path. It was the figure of Eben Tollman and his manner was full of solicitude—but as he talked with the father, Farquaharson saw him more than once steal covert glances at the daughter. Obviously he bore, here, the relationship of family friend, and though Conscience seemed to regard him as amember of an older generation, he seemed to regard her as a contemporary.
In the days that followed Stuart Farquaharson's car standing at the front of the old manse became a fixture in the landscape. The invalid minister, seeking to accustom himself stoically to a pitiful anticlimax of life, found in the buoyant vitality of this newcomer—of whom he thought rather as a boy than a man—a sort of activity by proxy. He, himself, moved only in a wheel chair, but Stuart could laughingly override his protests and lift him with an easy strength into the seat of the roadster to spin out across the countryside which he had told himself he should hardly see again.
Even the spinster aunt, who had begun by regarding him with suspicion, decided first that he was harmless, then that he was useful and finally that he was charming.
Yet the young Virginian was not altogether beguiled into the hope that this enviable status would be permanent. The talks and drives brought incidental glimpses into the thoughts that had habitation under the white mane and that came militantly out through the unyielding eyes even in silence. Stuart winced often under the sting and irritation of a bigotry which could, without question or doubt, undertake to rule offhand and with absolutism on every question of right or wrong.
He was keeping and meant to keep a constant rein on his speech and conduct, but he foresaw that, with all his restraint, a day might come when the old puritan would divine the wide divergence of their thought and have out upon him for one of the ungodly. Once he voiced something of this to Conscience herself in the question, "How long do you think your father will continue to welcome me here?"
Her eyes widened. "Welcome you? Why shouldn'the? He's leaning on you as if you were a son. He declared his liking for you from the first day."
Stuart shook his head in doubt and his eyes darkened with gravity. "It never pays to blind one's eyes to the chances of the future," he said slowly. "He won't continue to like me, I'm afraid. Just now he thinks of us both as children. I am only your overgrown playmate—but realization will come—and then—"
"You think that he will change?"
"I know it."
"Oh!" she exclaimed, and fell silent, but after a pause she spoke again impulsively, with a note of fear in her voice. "You won't go away and leave me here alone, will you—even if nobody else likes you?"
"No one but you can send me away—" he declared almost fiercely, "and before you can do it you must prove yourself stronger than I."
She gave a little sigh of relief and fell to talking of other things. It was when he rose to go and she walked to his car with him that he asked with seeming irrelevance, "Has this Mr. Tollman ever—made love to you?"
She burst, at that, into a gale of laughter more spontaneous than any he had heard since the telegram had sobered her. It was as though the absurdity of the idea had swept the sky clear of everything but comedy.
"Made love to me!" she mockingly echoed. "Honestly, Stuart, there are times when you are the funniest mortal alive—and it's always when you're most serious. Picture the Sphinx growing garrulous. Picture Napoleon seeking retreat in a monastery—but don't try to visualize Mr. Tollman making love."
"Perhaps I'm premature," announced Farquaharson with conviction. "But I'm not mistaken. If he hasn't made love to you, he will."
"Wherefore this burst of prophecy?"
"I don't have to be prophetic. I saw him look atyou—and I didn't like the way he did it. That man thinks he loves you."
"If so, he hasn't mentioned it to me."
"He will—I say 'thinks' he loves you," Stuart persisted in a level and somewhat contemptuous voice, "because I don't believe he can really love anything but himself and his money. But in a grasping, avaricious way he wants you. His eyes betrayed him. He wants you in the fashion that a miser wants gold. He wants you in the way a glutton wants a peach which he has deliberately watched ripen until finally he says to himself, 'It's about ready to pick now.'"
A more intimate view of Eben Tollman failed to remove the initial dislike, and yet Farquaharson acknowledged that nothing concrete was added to the evidence of sheer prejudice. In his application to the business affairs of the minister, he was assiduous and untiring, and the invalid depended upon his advice as upon an infallible guidance. Stuart told himself that to attribute this service of friendship to a selfish motive was a meanness unworthy of entertainment, yet the suspicion lingered. When they met, Tollman was always courteous and if this courtesy never warmed into actual cordiality neither was it ever tinctured with any seeming of dislike.
The summer had spent its heat and already there was a hint of autumn in the air, but Stuart had kept his promise. There had been no lovemaking.
He and Conscience walked together one afternoon to a hill where they sat with a vista of green country spread before them, just beginning to kindle under the splendid torch of an incendiary autumn. Off beyond was the sea, gorgeously blue in its main scheme, yet varying into subtle transitions of mood from rich purple to a pale and tender green. The sky was cloudless but there was that smoky, misty, impalpable thing like a dust of dreams on the distance. The girl stood withone hand resting on the gnarled bole of a pine. She wore a blue sweater, and her carmine lips were more vivid because these months of anxiety had given to her checks a creamy pallor. The man, standing at her elbow, was devouring her with his eyes. She was gorgeous and wholly desirable and his heart was flaming with emotions that ran the whole gamut of love's completeness from clean passion to worship.
Yet he held his truce of silence and it was she herself who spoke at last.
"The girls are all meeting on the campus—under the big trees about now," she said, and her eyes held a far-away wistfulness. "They are chattering foolishly and delightfully about their summer adventures ... and the dormitories are being allotted. There'll be several new English readers, I guess."
"Does it hurt as badly as that?" he asked, and her answer was a low, rather hysterical little laugh, coming nearer bitterness than anything he had ever heard from her lips before.
"You've been here. You've seen it all. Haven't you stopped instinctively often when you broke into a sudden laugh with a moldy feeling around your heart as if you'd shouted out in church? Haven't you watched yourself and stultified yourself in every conversation, except when we were alone, to keep from treading on the toes of some inch-wide prejudice?"
"I've felt those things, of course—all of them." His reply was grave. "But then, you see, you've been here, and that made the whole thing lyric. The rest was just a somber background. It only made you stand out the more triumphantly in contrast. It's like a Sorolla picture hung against gray."
"We don't stand out against dull backgrounds—not for long," she declared. "We fade into them." But after a moment she wheeled with a sudden impulsiveness and gazed contritely into his face.
"Forgive me," she pleaded. "It's shameful and petty and mean to wreak all my protests against you. You've been splendid. I couldn't have borne it without you."
Stuart Farquaharson's cheeks paled under an emotion so powerful that instead of exciting him it carried a sense of being tremendously sobered—yet shaken and tried to the limit of endurance.
"You've forbidden me to make love to you," he said desperately, "and I'm trying to obey, but God knows, dear, there are times when—" He broke off with an abrupt choke in his throat.
Then Conscience said in a changed and very gentle voice, "You wouldn't have me until I could be utterly, unmistakably sure of myself, would you?"
"No," he replied uncompromisingly, "the very intensity of my love would make it hell for both of us unless you loved me—that way, too—but I wish you were certain. I wish to God you were!"
Again she turned her eyes seaward, and when she spoke her voice was impersonal, almost dead, so that he thought, with a deep misery, she was trying to make it merciful in tempering her verdict.
"I am certain now," she told him, still looking away.
He came a step nearer and braced himself. He could forecast her words, he thought—deep friendship but no more!
"Your mind is—definitely—made up?"
Very abruptly she wheeled, showing him a face transformed and self-revealing. Against her ivory white cheeks her parted lips were crimson and her eyes dilated and softly black. "I think I've known it from the first," she declared, and her voice thrilled joyously. "Only I didn't know that I knew."
There was no need to ask what she knew. Her eyes were windows flung open and back of them was the message of her heart.
"I don't know how you love me," she went on tensely, "but if you don't love me rather madly, it's all one sided."
As his arms closed about her, he knew that he was violently shaken, but he knew that she was trembling, too, through all the magnificent softness and slenderness of her. He knew that the lips against which he crushed his kisses were responsive.
Later he declared, with a ring of triumph, "I told you when you were a little girl that they might take you to the North Pole and surround you with regiments of soldiers—but that I'd come to claim you. I tell you that again.Hewrote our two names in one horoscope and it had to be."
In the library at the old manse that afternoon there was less of sunlight and joy. Shadows hung between the walls and there were shadows, too, in the heart of one of the men who sat by a central, paper-littered table.
It was at best a cheerless room; this study where the minister had for decades prepared the messages of his stewardship—and sternly drawn indictments against sin. In the drawers of the old-fashioned desk those sermons lay tightly rolled and dusty. Never had he spared himself—and never had he spared others. What he failed to see was that in all those sheaves upon sheaves of carefully penned teaching, was no single relief of bright optimism, no single touch of sweet and gracious tolerance, not one vibrating echo of Christ's great soul-song of tenderness.
Now it was ended. He had dropped in the harness and younger men were taking up the relay race. They were men, he feared, who were not to be altogether trusted; men beguiled by dangerous novelties of trend. With worldliness of thought pressing always forward; with atheism increasing, they were compromising and, it seemed to him, giving way cravenly, step by step, to encroachment.
But the conversation just now was not of religion, or even dogma which in this room had so often been confused with religion. Eben Tollman was sitting in a stiff-backed chair across from his host. His face wore the immobile expression of a man who never forgets the oppressive fact that he is endowed with dignity.
"Eben," said the minister, "for years you have advised me on all money matters and carried the adviceinto effect. You have virtually annexed my business to your own and carried a double load."
"You have devoted your life to matters of greater moment, Mr. Williams," unctuously responded the younger man. "Your stewardship has been to God."
"I could have wished," the minister's face clouded with anxiety, "that I might have seen Conscience settled down with a godly husband and a child or two about her before I go. Those are restless days and a girl should have an anchorage."
There was a pause and at its end Tollman said hesitantly, almost tentatively, "There is young Mr. Farquaharson, of course."
"Young Mr. Farquaharson!" The minister's lower jaw shot out pugnaciously and his eyes flashed. "Eben, don't be absurd. The two of them are children. This boy is playing away a vacation. To speak of him as a matrimonial possibility is to talk irresponsibly. You astonish me!"
"Of course, in some respects it seems anomalous." Tollman spoke thoughtfully and with no resentment of his companion's temper. He was quite willing that any objections to Stuart which were projected into the conversation should appear to come from the other. "For example, his people are not our people and the two codes are almost antithetical. Yet his blood is blue blood and, after all, the war is over."
"If I thought that there was even a remote danger of this friendship ever becoming more than a friendship, I'd have Conscience send him away. I'd guard her from it as from a contagion." The announcement came fiercely. "Young Farquaharson's blood is blood that runs to license. His ideas are the ideas of a hard-drinking, hard-gaming aristocracy. But nonsense, Eben, he's a harmless boy just out of college. I like him—but not for my own family. What put such an absurdity into your head?"
"Possibly it is an absurdity." Tollman gave the appearance of a man who, having suggested a stormy topic, is ready to relinquish it. In reality he was making Williams say everything which he wished to have said and was doing it by the simple device of setting up antagonism to play the prompter. "What put it into my head was perhaps nothing more tangible than their constant companionship. They are both young. He has a vital and fascinating personality. There is a touch of Pan and a touch of Bacchus in him that—"
"Those are somewhat pagan advantages," interrupted the minister with a crispness which carried the bite of scorn.
"Pagan perhaps, but worth considering, since it is not upon ourselves that they operate." Tollman rose and went over to the window which gave off across the garden. He presented the seeming of a man whose thought was dispassionate, and because dispassionate impossible to ignore. "This young man has in his blood bold and romantic tendencies which will not be denied. To him much that we revere seems a type of narrowness. His ancestors have made a virtue of the indulgences of sideboard and card table—but the boy is not to blame for that."
Eben Tollman was playing on the prejudices of his host as he might have played on the keys of a piano. He maintained, as he did it, all the semblance of a fair-minded man painting extenuations into his portrait of the absent Farquaharson.
"And you call this predisposition to looseness and license a thing to be condoned, to be mixed with the blood of one's own posterity? Eben, I've never seen you make excuses for ungodliness before." The fierce old face suddenly cleared. "But there—there! This is all an imaginary danger. I'll watch them, but I'm sure that these two have no such reprehensible thought."
Mr. Tollman took up his hat and gloves. "I will see you again to-morrow," he said, as he passed out of the library, leaving the old puritan behind him immersed in a fresh anxiety.
It was not the intention of William Williams to act with unconscientious haste—but he would watch and weigh the evidence. He prided himself on his rigid adherence to justice, and escaped the knowledge that his sense of justice was a crippled thing warped to the shape of casuistry. If he had permitted the affliction, which God had visited upon him, to blind his eyes against duty to his daughter, he must rouse himself and remedy the matter. It was time to put such self-centered sin behind him and make amends. In this self-assumption of the plenary right to regulate the life of his daughter, or any one else, there was no element of self-reproach. He held God's commission and acted for God!
The gradual, almost imperceptible change of manner was observable first to the apprehensive eyes of Stuart Farquaharson himself. The Virginian's standards as to his bearing in the face of hostility were definite and could be summed up in the length of an epigram: Never to fail of courtesy, but never to surrender more than half of any roadway to aggression. Yet here was a situation of intricate bearings and a man whom he could not fight. A brain must be dealt with, too old for plasticity, like sculptor's clay hardened beyond amendment of form. A man whose fighting blood is hot, but whose spirit of sportsmanship is true, can sometimes maintain a difficult peace where another type would fail, and that was the task Stuart set himself. That same spirit of sportsmanship would have meant to Williams only a want of seriousness, a making play out of life. But to Stuart it meant the nearest approach we have to a survival of chivalry's ideals: a readiness to accept punishment without complaint: a willingnessto extend every fair advantage to an adversary: a courage to strive to the uttermost without regard to the material value of the prize—and paramount to all the rest, a scorn for any meanly gained advantage, however profitable. If there was any value in his heritage of gentle blood and a sportsman's training, it should stand him in good stead now, for the sake of the girl he loved.
One evening in the garden Conscience asked him, "Do you think I over-painted the somberness of the picture? But it's a shame for you to have to endure it, too. I think the confinement is making Father more irritable than usual."
The man shook his head and smiled whimsically.
"It's not the confinement. It's me. He's discovered that you and I have grown up, and he's seeking to draw me into a quarrel so that he can tender me my passports."
Conscience laid her hands on his arm and they trembled a little.
"I'm sure it isn't that," she declared, though her words were more confident than her voice. "You've stood a great deal, but please keep it up. It won't"—her voice dropped down the key almost to a whisper—"it won't be for long."
The hills were flaming these days with autumnal splendor. Conscience and Stuart had just returned from a drive, laden with trophies of woodland richness and color. About the cheerless house she had distributed branches of the sugar maple's vermilion and the oak's darker redness, but the fieriest and the brightest clusters of leafage she had saved for the old library where the invalid sat among his cases of old sermons.
"Stuart and I gathered these for you," she told him as she arranged them deftly in a vase.
The old man's face did not brighten with enjoyment.Rather it hardened into a set expression, and after a moment's pause he echoed querulously, "You and Stuart."
His daughter looked up, her attention arrested by his tone. "Why, yes," she smiled. "We went for a drive and got out and foraged in the woods."
"How long has Mr. Farquaharson been here now?"
"Something over six weeks, I believe."
"Isn't it nearer two months?"
The girl turned very slowly from the window and in the dark room her figure and profile were seen, a silhouette against the pane with a nimbus about her hair.
"Perhaps it is. Why?"
For a while the father did not speak, then he said: "Perhaps it's time he was thinking of terminating his visit."
The girl felt her shoulders stiffen, and all the fighting blood which was in her as truly, if less offensively than in himself, leaped in her pulses. Defiant words rushed to her lips, but remained unsaid, because something grotesque about his attempted movement in his chair accentuated his helplessness and made her remember.
"What do you mean?" she asked in a level voice, which since she had suppressed the passion came a little faint and uncertain.
"I had no objection," he replied quietly enough but with that inflexible intonation which automatically arouses antagonism, since it puts into its "I want's" and its "I don't want's" a tyrannical finality, "to this young gentleman visiting us. I extended him hospitality. I even liked him. But it has come rather too much, for my liking, to a thing that can be summed up in your words of a minute ago—'Stuart and I.' It's time to bring it to an end."
"Why should it come to an end, Father?" she asked with a terrific effort to speak calmly.
"Because it might run to silly sentiment—and to such an idea I could never give consent. This young man, though a gentleman by birth, is not our sort of a gentleman. His blood is not the kind of blood with which ours can be mixed: his ideas are the loose ideas that put pleasure above righteousness. In short, while I wish to say good-by to him as agreeably as I said welcome, the time has come to say good-by."
She came over and sat by his chair and let one hand rest on his white hair. "Father," she said in a low voice, tremulously repressed, "you are undertaking to rule offhand on a question which is too vital to my life to be treated with snap judgment. I've tried to meet your wishes and I want to go on trying, but in this you must think well before you take a position so—so absolute that perhaps—"
He shook her hand away and his eyes blazed.
"Ihavethought well," he vehemently declared. "I have not only thought, but I have prayed. I have waited silently and watched in an effort to be just. I have asked God's guidance."
"God's guidance could hardly have told you that Stuart Farquaharson has loose ideas or that he's unrighteous or that his blood could corrupt our blood—because none of those things are true or akin to the truth."
For an instant the old man gazed at her in an amazement which turned quickly to a wrath of almost crazily blazing eyes, and his utterance came with a violence of fury.
"Do you mean that such an unspeakable idiocy has already come to pass—that you and this—this—young amateur jockey and card-player from the South—" He broke suddenly off with a contempt that made his words seem to curl and snap with flame.
The girl rose from her place on the arm of his chair.She stood lancelike in her straightness and her eyes blazed, too, but her voice lost neither its control nor its dignity.
"I mean," she said, "that this gentleman who needs no apologist and no defense, has honored me by telling me that he loves me—and that I love him."
"And his high courage has prevented him from admitting this to me and facing my just wrath?"
"His courage has been strong enough to concede to my wish that I might tell you myself, and in my own time."
The library door stood open and the hall gave out onto the verandah where Stuart Farquaharson sat waiting for Conscience to return.
The minister attempted to rise from his chair and fell back into it, with a groan, as he remembered his helplessness. That helplessness did not, however, abate his anger, and his voice rose as it was accustomed to rise when, pounding the pulpit pillow, he wished to drive home some impassioned utterance, beyond the chance of missing any sleepy ear.
"If what you say is true, this man has abused my hospitality and used my roof as an ambuscade to attack me. He is not, as you say, a man of honor or of courage, but a coward and a sneak! I have more to say, but it had better be said to him direct. Please send him to me."
The girl hesitated, then she wheeled with flaming face toward the chair. "I have been willing," she said, "to smother my life in an effort to meet your ideas, though I knew them to be little ideas. Now I see that in yielding everything one can no more please you than in yielding nothing. If he goes, I go, too. You may take your choice."
But as her words ended Conscience felt a hand laid gently on her shoulder, and a voice whispered in her ear,"Don't, dear; this will always haunt you. Leave it to me." Stuart turned her gently toward the door, then faced the irate figure in the chair. In a voice entirely quiet and devoid of passion he addressed its occupant. "I thought I heard you call for me, sir. I am here."
For a little while the study remained silent, except for the excited panting of the minister, whose face was a mask of fury. The passion in Conscience's eyes was gradually fading into an expression of deep misery. The issue of cruel dilemma had come in spite of every defensive effort and every possible care. It had come of her father's forcing and she knew that he would make no concession. When Williams spoke his voice came chokingly.
"Conscience, leave us alone. What I have to say to this man is a matter between the two of us."
But instead of obeying the girl took her place at Stuart's side and laid her hand on his arm.
"What you have to say to him, Father, is very much my affair," she replied steadily. "My action for the rest of my life depends upon it."
"Dear," suggested the Virginian in a lowered voice, "you can trust me. I'm not going to lose my temper if it's humanly possible to keep it. There's no reason why you should have to listen to things which it will be hard to forget."
"No," she declared with a decisiveness that could not be shaken, "I stay here as long as you stay. When you go, I go, too."
Farquaharson turned to the minister, "I believe you called for me, sir," he repeated, in a tone of even politeness. "You have something to say to me?"
The old man raised a hand that was palsied with rage and his voice shook.
"I fancy you heard what I said of you. I said that you had abused my hospitality and that you are acoward and a sneak. You are worse than that; you are an infamous scoundrel."
Conscience felt the muscles in the forearm upon which her fingers rested grow tense and hard as cables. She saw the face pale to lividness and the lips stiffen, but except for that, the man made no movement, and for some ten seconds he did not speak. They were ten seconds of struggle against an anger as fierce as it was just, but at the end of that time he inquired quietly, "Is that all you meant to say to me?"
"No! There's much more, but for most men that would be enough. To let it go unanswered is a confession of its truth."
"My invariable answer to such words," said Stuart Farquaharson slowly, "is made with a clenched fist. The triple immunity of your cloth, your age and your infirmity denies me even that reply."
"And what immunity makes a denial unnecessary?"
"A denial would dignify a charge which I can afford to ignore as I ignore vulgar talk that I hear in an alley."
The old man bent forward, glaring like a gargoyle, and his first attempts to speak were choked into inarticulate rumblings by his rage. His face reddened with a fever of passion which threw the veins on his temples into purple traceries.
"I repeat with a full responsibility—with the knowledge that the God whom I have tried to serve is listening, that youarewhat I have called you, because you have come into my house and practiced a continuous and protracted deceit. You have abused the freedom granted you as a guest to try to win my daughter away from everything worth holding to and everything she has been taught. I was a blind fool. I was a watchman fallen asleep at the gate—a sentry unfaithful at his post." The voice of the minister settled into a clearer coherence as he went on in deep bitterness."You say I have accused you sternly. I am also accusing myself sternly—but now the scales have fallen from my eyes and I recognize my remissness. God grant I am not too late."
He paused for breath and his fingers clenched rigidly at the carvings of his chair arms. "You know that my daughter is young and inexperienced—an impressionable child not sufficiently seasoned in wisdom to repudiate the gauzy lure of dangerous modernisms."
"Father," broke in Conscience during his accusing pause, "you are starting out with statements that are unjust and untrue. I am not a child and no one has corrupted my righteousness. We simply have different ideas of life."
The minister did not take his eyes from the face of the young man and he ignored the interruption of his daughter.
"I could not blame her: it was the natural spirit of unthinking youth. You, however, did know the consequences. Here in my house—which you must never reënter—you have incited my family against me to serve your own covetous and lustful interests." Again he halted while the young man, still standing as rigid as a bronze figure, his flushed face set and his eyes holding those of his accuser with unblinking steadiness, made no attempt to interrupt him.
"What, indeed, to you were mere questions of right or wrong? You had a world of light and frivolous women to choose from, your own kind of women who could dance and fritter life away in following fads that make for license—but you must come into the household of a man who has tried to fight God's battles; standing against these encroachments of Satan which you advocate—and beguile my only daughter into telling me that I must choose between surrender or the wretchedness of ending my life in deserted loneliness."
Farquaharson, despite the storm which raged in hisheart, answered with every outward show of calmness, even with dignity.
"You accuse me of having made love to your daughter. For that I have no denial. I have loved her since she was a child. I have told her so at every opportunity, but that love has been honorable and free of deceit and I know of no law which forbids a man of decent character to plead his cause. That I should win her love is a marvelous thing, but, thank God, I have it and hope to hold it till death."
"You have filched it! You have it as a thief has another man's purse or another man's wife. You have gained favor by arousing discontent for a Godly home: a home where she is sheltered and where she belongs."
There was a tense silence and Farquaharson's voice was almost gentle when he next spoke.
"There is more than one way of looking at life—and more than one may be right. Conscience wanted the wider scope which college would have given her. She wanted it with all the splendid eagerness of a soul that wishes to grow and fulfill itself. That rightful privilege you denied her—and she has not complained. Why shouldn't she want life's fullness instead of life's meagerness and its breadth instead of its bigotries? Is there greater nobility in the dull existence of a barnacle that hangs to one spot than in the flight of a bird? I have sought no quarrel and I have cruelly set a curb upon my temper, but I have no apologies to make and no intention of giving her up. I should be glad of your consent, but with it or without it I shall continue to urge my love. It would be a pity for you to force a breach."
"There is no question of my forcing a breach." The first words wore spoken sharply, but as they continued they began again to rush and mount into an access of passion. "You are as insolent as your words prove you to be reckless. You have tried to corruptevery idea of righteousness in my daughter's heart. It would almost appear that you have succeeded. But I believe God is stronger than Satan. I believe my prayers and the heritage of Godfearing forefathers will yet save her. As for you, you are to leave my house and henceforth never to cross my threshold."
"Very well," answered Stuart quietly; then he added: "To what extent am I indebted to Mr. Eben Tollman for your sudden discovery that I am a sneak and a coward?"
"That," shouted the invalid, "proves your meanness of spirit. Had Mr. Tollman held a brief for you he could not have defended you more stoutly. He, too, was deceived in you, it seems."
"Stuart," suggested the girl, "it's no use. You can't change him now. Perhaps when he's less angry—"
"Less angry!" screamed the old man. "For almost seventy years my wrath against the machinations of hell has burned hot. If God grants me strength to the end, it will never cool. You, too, have turned to my enemies in my last days. You would leave me for a young wastrel who has sung in your ears the song of a male siren. But before I will surrender my fight for the dictates of the conscience God has given me to be my mentor, I will see you go!"
"Father!" cried the girl. "You don't know what you're saying."
His face had become frenzied and purpled, his hands were shaking. His voice was a thunder, rumbling with its agitation. "I must have sinned deeply—but if the Almighty sees fit to take from me my health, my child, my last days of peace on earth—if He chooses to chastise me as He chastised Job—I shall still fight for His righteous will, and war on the iniquitous chil—"
The last word broke with a choke in his throat.The white head rocked from side to side and the hands clawed the air. Then William Williams hunched forward and lurched from his chair to the floor.
In an instant Farquaharson was at his side and bending over the unconscious form and a few minutes later, still insensible, the figure had been laid on a couch and the roadster was racing for a physician.
When Conscience came out into the yard later, where her lover was awaiting her, her lips were pale and her eyes tortured. She went straight into his outstretched arms and with her head on his shoulder sobbed out a misery that shook her. At last the man asked softly, "What did the doctor say?" And she answered brokenly.
"It seems that—besides the paralysis he has a weak—heart."
The man held her close. "I wish to God it could have been averted. I tried."
"You did all you could," she declared. "But, Stuart, when he came back to consciousness, his eyes were awful! I've never seen such terror in a human face. He couldn't speak at first and when he could ... he whispered in absolute agony, 'Has she gone?' He thought I'd left him lying there—and gone with you."
"Great God!" It was more a groan than an exclamation.
"And when he saw me he stretched out his hands like a child and began crying over me, but even then he said bitterly, 'That man's name must never be mentioned in this house.'... What are we to do?"
"There is only one thing to do," he told her. "We are young enough to wait. You can't desert a dying father."
While they talked the physician came out of the door.
"The patient will pull through this attack," he said briskly. "It's a leaky valve. There is only one rulethat I have to lay upon you. It is absolutely vital that he shall not be excited. A blow with an ax would be no more fatal than another such stroke."
Conscience looked desperately about her, as Stuart with the doctor beside him started the car again down the drive. In a front window her eyes lighted on a flaming branch of maple leaves. Only two hours ago she and her lover had been watching the sunlight spill through the gorgeous filter of the painted foliage. They had carried in their hearts the spirit of carnival. Now the storm had broken and swept them.
She walked unsteadily to the veranda of the house and dropped down on the steps. Her head was swimming and her life was in a vortex.
The days that followed were troubled days and they brought to Conscience's cheeks an accentuated pallor. Under her eyes were smudges that made them seem very large and wistful. The minister was once more in his arm chair, a little more broken, a little more fiercely uncompromising of aspect, but the one normal solution of such a spent and burdensome life: the solution of death, stood off from him. Upon his daughter, whose lips were sealed against any protest by the belief that even a small excitement might kill him, he vented long and bigoted sermons of anathema. In these sermons, possibly, he was guilty of the very heresy of which his daughter had said he was so intolerant. He seemed to doubt himself, these days, that Satan wore a spiked tail and a pair of cloven hoofs. Of late he rather leaned to the belief that the Arch-tempter had returned to walk the earth in the guise of a young Virginian and that he had assumed the incognito of Stuart Farquaharson.
One refrain ran through every waking hour and troubled his sleep with fantastic dreams. God commanded him to strip this tempter of his habiliments of pretense and show the naked wickedness of his soul to the girl's deluded eye. To that fancied command he dedicated himself as whole-heartedly as a bloodhound gives itself to the man hunt.
To Stuart one day, as they walked together in the woods, Conscience confessed her fear that this constant hammering of persecution would eventually batter down her capacity for sane judgment and she ended with a sweeping denunciation of every form of bigotry.
"Dear," he answered with the gravity of deep apprehension, "you say that and you believe it and yet this same instinct of self-martyrdom is the undertow of your life flood. If your given name didn't happen to be Conscience your middle name would be just that."
"I suppose I have a conscience of a sort—but a different, sort, I hope. Is that such a serious fault?" she asked, and because the strain of these days had tired and rubbed her nerves into the sensitiveness of exhaustion, she asked it in a hurt and wounded tone.
"It's an indispensable virtue," he declared. "Your father's conscience was a virtue, too, until it ran amuck and became a savage menace. When you were a child," he went on, speaking so earnestly that his brow was drawn into an expression which she mistook for a frown of disapproval, "your most characteristic quality was an irrepressible sense of humor. It gave both sparkle and sanity to your outlook. It held you immune to all bitterness."
"And now?" She put the query somewhat faintly.
"Now, more than ever, because the life around you is grayer, it's vital that you cling to your golden talisman. To let it go means to be lost in the fog."
They were strolling along a woodland path and she was a few steps in advance of him. He saw her shoulders stiffen, but it was not until he overtook her that he discovered her eyes to be sparkling with tears.
"What is it, dearest?" he contritely demanded, and after a long pause she said:
"Nothing, except that I feel as if you had slapped me in the face."
"I! Slapped you in the face!" He could only reëcho her words in bewilderment and distress. "I don't understand."
Laying a hand on her arm, he halted her in a place where the setting sun was spilling streams of yellow light through the woodland aisles and then her lipstrembled; her eyes filled and she pressed both hands over her face. After a moment she looked up and dashed the tears contemptuously away.
"No, I know you don't understand, dear. It's my own fault. I'm a weak little fool," she said, "But it's all gotten horribly on my nerves. I can't help it."
"For God's sake," he begged, "tell me what I did or said?" And her words came with a weary resignation.
"I think you had better put me out of your life, Stuart. I've just realized how things really are—you've told me. I can't go because I'm chained to the galley. While Father lives my place is here."
She broke off suddenly and his face took on a stunned amazement.
"Out of my life!" exclaimed the man almost angrily. "Abandon you to all this abysmal bigotry and—to this pharisaical web of ugly dogmas! Conscience, you're falling into a melancholy morbidness."
As she looked at him and saw the old smoldering fire in his eyes that reminded her of his boyhood, a pathetic smile twisted the corners of her lips.
"Yes—I guess that's just it, Stuart," she said slowly, "You see, I may have to stay here until, as you put it, I'm all faded out in the fog. If I've changed so much already there's no telling what years of it will turn me into."
Stuart Farquaharson caught her impulsively in his arms and his words came in tumultuous fervor.
"What I said wasn't criticism," he declared. "God knows I couldn't criticize you. You ought to know that. This is the nearest we've ever come to a quarrel, dear, since the Barbara Freitchie days, and it's closer than I want to come. Besides, it's not just your laughter that I love. It's all of you: heart, mind, body: the whole lovely trinity of yourself. I mean to wage unabated war against all these forces that aretrying to stifle your laughter into the pious smirk of the pharisee. There's more of what God wants the world to feel in one peal of your laughter than in all the psalms that this whole people ever whined through their noses. You're one of the rare few who can go through life being yourself—not just a copy and reflection of others. A hundred years ago your own people would probably have burned you as a witch for that. They've discontinued that form of worship now, but the cut of their moral and intellectual jib is, in some essentials, the same. Thank God, you have a different pattern of soul and I want you to keep it."
She drew away from him and slowly her face cleared of its misery and the eyes flashed into their old mischief-loving twinkle. "That's the first real rise I've had out of you," she declared, "since Barbara waved the stars and stripes at you. Then you were only defending Virginia, but now you've assumed the offensive against all New England."
But even in that mild disagreement they had, as he said, come nearer than either liked to a quarrel—and neither could quite forget it. Both felt that the thin edge of what might have been a disrupting wedge had threatened their complete harmony.
Because he could mark the transition of this thing called conscience into an obsession, and because he, too, was worn in patience and stinging with resentment against the injustice of the father, he fought hotly, and his denunciations of various influences were burning and scornful. So slowly but dangerously there crept into their arguments the element of contention. Hitherto Stuart had made no tactical mistakes. He had endured greatly and in patience, but now he was unconsciously yielding to the temptation of assailing an abstract code in a fashion which her troubled judgment might translate into attacks upon her father. Out of that attitude was born for her a hard dilemmaof conflicting loyalties. It was all a fabric woven of gossamer threads, but Gulliver was bound into helplessness by just such Lilliputian fetters.
Late one night, when the moon was at two-thirds of fullness and the air touched with frost, Stuart abandoned the bed upon which he had been restlessly tossing for hours. He kindled a pipe and sat meditating, none too cheerfully, by the frail light of a bayberry candle. Through the narrow corridors and boxed-in stair wells of a ramshackle hotel, came no sounds except the minors of the night. Somewhere far off a dog barked and somewhere near at hand a traveling salesman snored. In the flare and sputter of the charring wick and melting wax shadows lengthened and shortened like flapping flags of darkness.
Then the jangle of the telephone bell in the office ripped the stillness with a discordant suddenness which Farquaharson thought must arouse the household, but the snoring beyond the wall went on, unbroken, and there was no sound of a footfall on the creaking stair. At last Stuart, himself, irritated by the strident urgency of its repetitions, reached for his bath robe and went down. The clapper still trembled with the echo of its last vibrations as he put the receiver to his ear and answered.
Then he started and his muscles grew taut, for the other voice was that of Conscience and it shook with terrified unevenness and a tremulous faintness like the leaping and weakening of a fevered pulse. He could tell that she was talking guardedly with her lips close to the transmitter.
"I had to speak to you without waiting for morning," she told him, recognizing his voice, "and yet—yet I don't know what to say."
Recognizing from the wild note that she was laboring under some unnatural strain, he answered soothingly, "I'm glad you called me, dear."
"What time is it?" she demanded next and when he told her it was well after midnight she gave a low half-hysterical laugh. "I couldn't sleep.... Father spent the afternoon exhorting me ... he was trying to make me promise not to see you again ... and I was trying to keep him from exciting himself." Her voice was so tense now as to be hardly recognizable. "Every few minutes it looked as if he were about to fly into a passion.... You know what that would mean ... and of course I—I—couldn't promise."
She paused for breath, but before he could speak, rushed on.
"It's been an absolute reign of terror. Every nerve in my body is jumping and quivering.... I think I'm going mad."
"Listen." The man spoke as one might to a child who has awakened, terrified, out of a nightmare and is afraid to be alone. "I'm coming out there. You need to talk to some one. I'll leave the car out of hearing in the road."
"No, no!" she exclaimed in a wildly fluttering timbre of protest. "If he woke up it would be worse than this afternoon—it might kill him!"
But Stuart answered her with a quiet note of finality. "Wrap up well—it's cool outside—and meet me on the verandah. We can talk more safely that way than by 'phone. I'm going to obey the doctor implicitly—unless you fail to meet me. If you do that—" he paused a moment before hanging up the receiver—"I'll knock on the door."
The moon had not yet set as he started on foot up the driveway of the manse and the bare trees stood out stark and inky against the silver mists. Before he was more than half-way to the house he saw her coming to meet him, casting backward glances of anxiety over her shoulder.
She was running with a ghostlike litheness throughthe moonlight, her eyes wide and frightened and her whole seeming one of unreasoning panic so that the man, who knew her dauntlessness of spirit, felt his heart sink.
"You shouldn't have done it," she began in a reproachful whisper. "You shouldn't have come!" But he only caught her in his arms and held her so close to his own heart that the wild palpitation of her bosom was calmed against its steadiness. Her arms went gropingly round his neck and clutched him as if he were the one stable thing that stood against an allied ferocity of wind and wave.
"You needed me," he said. "And when you need me I come—even if I have to come like a burglar."
The eyes which she raised to his face were tearless—but hardly sane. She was fear-ridden by ghosts that struck at her normality and she whispered, "Suppose he died by my fault?"
At all costs, the lover resolved, Conscience must leave this place for a time—until she could return with a stabler judgment. But just now he could not argue with her.
"We'll be very quiet," he said reassuringly. "If you hear any sound in the house you can go back. You're overwrought, dearest, and I've only come to be near you. Nobody will see me except yourself, but if at any time before daylight you want me, come to your window and raise the blind. I'll be where I can see."
For a while she clung to him silently, her breath coming fast. About them the moon shed a softness of pale silver and old ivory. The silence seemed to carry a wordless hymn of peace and though they stood in shadow there was light enough for lovers' eyes. The driven restlessness that had made Conscience doubt her sanity was slowly yielding to a sense of repose, as the tautened anguish of a mangled body relaxes to the balm of an anesthetic. Slowly the slenderly curvedand graciously proportioned modeling of her lithe figure quieted from spasmodic unrest and the wild racing measure of her heart-beat calmed. Then she turned up her face. Her eyes cleared and her lips tilted their corners in a smile.
"I'm a horrid little demon," she declared in a voice freighted with self-scorn, but no longer panic-stricken. "I've always hated a coward, and I'm probably the most amazingly craven one that ever lived. I do nothing but call on you to fight my battles for me when I can't hold my own."
"You're an adorable little saint, with an absurd leaning toward martyrdom," he fervently contradicted. "Why shouldn't you call on me? Aren't you fighting about me?"
Her dark eyes were for a moment serene because she was treasuring this moment of moonlight and the respite of love against the chances of to-morrow.
"Anyhow you came—" she said, "and since you did there's at least one more fight left in me." Then her voice grew again apprehensive. "It was pretty bad before ... just hearing you preached against and being afraid to reply because ... of the warning. Now he wants my promise that I'll dismiss you forever ... and the worst of it is that he'll pound on it to the end. What am I to do?"
"Is there any question?" he gravely asked her. "Couldyou make that promise?"
"No—no!" He felt the figure in his arms flinch at the words, "There's no question ofthat, but how am I to keep him from raging himself to death?"
"Hasn't the doctor warned him that he mustn't excite himself?"
The dark head nodded and the fingers of the hands about his neck tightened. "Of course," she said. "But there you have the tyranny of weakness again. I must make the fight to keep him alive. He wouldregard it as going righteously to death for his beliefs. That's just the goodness-gone-wrongness of it all."
"Blessed are the self-righteous," mused Farquaharson half aloud, "for they shall supply their own absolution." To himself he was saying, "The wretched old hellion!"
"And then you see, after all," she added with the martyr's sophistry, "in the fight for you, I'm only fighting for myself and in doing what I can for him I'm trying to be unselfish."
"Listen," the man spoke carefully, "that, too, is the goodness-gone-wrongness as you call it; the sheer perversion of a duty sense. If it were just myself to be thought of, perhaps I couldn't fight you on a point of conscience. But it isn't just me—not if you love me."
"Love you!" He felt the thrilled tremor that ran through her from head to foot, and that made her bosom heave stormily. The moon had sunk a little and the shadow in which they were standing had crawled onward so that on her head fell a gleam of pale light, kindling her eyes and touching her temples under the sooty shadows of her hair. Her lips were parted and her voice trembled with the solemnity of a vow, too sacred to be uttered without the fullest frankness. "In every way that I know how to love, I love you! Everything that a woman can be to a man I want to be to you and all that a woman can give to a man, I want to give to you."
It was he who trembled then and became unsteady with the intoxication of triumph.
"Then I'll fight for you, while I have breath, even if it means fighting with you."
Suddenly she caught at his arm with a spasmodic alarm, and he turned his head as the screeching whine of a window sounded in the stillness. The effort to raise it cautiously was indicated not by anynoiselessness but by the long duration of the sound. Then a woman's head with hair in tight pigtails stood out against the pallid light of a bedroom lamp, turned low, and the whispered challenge came out to them. "Who's out there?"
"Ssh!" cautioned the girl, tensely. "It's I, Auntie. Don't wake Father."
Grudgingly the window creaked down and for seconds which lengthened themselves interminably to the anxious ears of the pair in the shadows, they waited with bated breath. Then Stuart whispered, "You must go to sleep now."
The rest of the far-spent night Stuart stood guard outside the house. Once, a half hour after Conscience had gone in, her blind rose and she stood silhouetted against the lamp-light. The man stepped out of his shadow and raised a hand, and she waved back at him. Then the lamp went out, and he surrendered himself to thought and resolves—and mistakes. This submission to the tyranny of weakness had gone too far. She must go away. He must take up the fight aggressively. He did not realize that he who was fighting for her sense of humor had lost his own. He did not foresee that he was preparing to throw the issue on dangerous ground, pitting his stubbornness against her stubbornness, and raising the old duel of temperaments to combat—the immemorial conflict between puritan and cavalier.