An hour later the small solitary boat crept up the current of the moonlit river. The weary girl plied her oars, looking carefully for the nook under the roots of the old pine whence she had taken the boat.
She saw the place. She even glanced anxiously about the ground immediately around it, thinking that in the glamour of light she could see everything; and yet in that rapid glance, deluded, no doubt, into supposing the light greater than it was, she failed to see a man who was standing ready to help her to moor the boat.
Bart Toyner watched her with a look of haggard anxiety as she came nearer.
A uniform is a useful thing. It is almost natural to anactor to play his part when he has assumed its dress. A man in any official capacity is often just an actor, and the best thing that he can do at times is to act without a thought as to how his inner self accords with the action, at least till we have attained to a higher level of civilisation. Toyner had no uniform, nor had he mastered the philosophy that underlies this instinct for playing a part; he had an idea that the whole mind and soul of him should be in conscientious accord with all that he did. It was this ideal that made his fall certain.
He had no notion that the girl had not seen him. Before she got out, when she put her hand to tether the boat, she felt his hand gently taking the rope from her and fell back with a cry of fear.
In her wearied state she could have sobbed with disappointment. How much had he discovered? If heknew nothing more than merely that she had returned with the boat, how could it be possible to elude him and come again the next night? She thought of her father, and her heart was full of pity; she thought that her own plans were baffled, and she was enraged. Both sentiments fused into keener hatred of Toyner; but she remembered—yes, even then she remembered quite clearly and distinctly—that if the worst came to the worst and she could save her father in no other way, she had one weapon in reserve, one in which she had perfect faith.
It was for this reason that she sat still for a minute in the boat, looking up at Toyner, trying to pry into his attitude toward her. At the end of the minute he put out his hand to lift her up, and she leaned upon it.
Without hesitation she began to thread her way throughthe wood toward home, and he walked by her side. He might have been escorting her from a dance, so quietly they walked together, except that the question of a man's life or death which lay between them seemed to surround them with a strange atmosphere.
At length Bart spoke. "I don't know where you have been," he said. "I have been patrolling the shore all night." He paused awhile. "I thought you were safe at home."
She stopped short and turned upon him. "Look here! what are you going to do now? It's a pretty mean sort of business this you've taken to, sneaking round your old friends to do them all the harm you can."
"It's the first time I knew that you'd ever been a friend of mine, Ann." He said this in a sort of sad aside, and then: "You've sense enoughto know that when a man shoots another man he's got to be found and shut up for the good of the country and for his own good too. It's the kindest thing that can be done to a man sometimes, shutting him up in jail." He said this last quite as much by way of explanation to himself as to her.
"Or hanging him," she suggested sarcastically.
He paused a moment. "I hope he won't come to that."
"But you'll do all you can to catch him, knowing that it's like to come to that. What's the good of hoping?"
He had only said it to soothe her. He had another self-justification.
"I can only do what I have to do: it is not me that will decide whether Walker dies or not. At any rate, it ain't no use to justify it to you. It's natural that you should look upon me as an enemy just now; but all the police inthe country are more your enemies than I am. You've got him off now, I suppose; however you've done it I don't pretend to know. It'll be some one else that catches him if he's caught."
She wondered if he was only saying this to try her, or if he really believed that Markham had gone far; yet there was small chance even then that he would cease to watch her the next night and the next. He had shown both resolution and diligence in this business—qualities, as far as she knew, so foreign to his character that she smiled bitterly.
"A nice sort of thing religion is, to get out of the mire yourself and spend your time kicking your old friends further in!"
Now the fugitive had been never a friend to Toyner, except in the sense that he had done more than any one else to lead him into low habits and keep him there.He had, in fact, been his greatest enemy; but that, according to Toyner's new notions, was the more reason for counting him a friend, not the less.
"Well, I grant 'tain't a very grand sort of business being constable," he said; "to be a preacher 'ud be finer perhaps; but this came to hand and seemed the thing for me to do. It ain't kicking men in the mire to do all you can to stop them making beasts of themselves."
He stood idling in the moonlight as he justified himself to this woman. Surely it was only standing by his new colours to try to make his position seem right to her. He had no hope in it—no hope of persuading her, least of all of bringing her nearer to him; if he had had that, his dallying would have seemed sinful, because it would have chimed so perfectly with all his natural desires.
Ann took up her theme again fiercely. "Look here, Bart Toyner; I want to know one thing, honour bright—that is," scornfully, "if you care about honour now that you've got religion."
He gave a silent sarcastic smile, such as one would bestow upon a naughty, ignorant child. "Well, at least as much as I did before," he said.
"Well, then, I want to know if you're a-going to stop spying on me now that father has got well off? There ain't no cause nor reason for you to hang about me any longer. You know what my life has been, and you know that through it all I've kept myself like a lady. It ain't nice, knowing as people do that you came courting once, 'tain't nice to have you hanging round in this way."
He knew quite well that the reason she gave for objecting to his spying was not the true one. He had enough insightinto her character, enough knowledge of her manner and the modulations in her voice, to have a pretty true instinct as to when she was lying and when she was not; but he did not know that the allusion to the time when he used to court her was thrown out to produce just what it did in him, a tender recollection of his old hopes.
"Until Markham is arrested, you know, and every one else at Fentown knows, that it is my duty to see that you don't communicate with him. You've fooled me to-night, and I'll have to keep closer watch; but if you don't want me to do the watching, I can pay another man."
She had hoped faintly that he would have shown himself less resolute; now there was only one thing to be done. After all, she had known for days that she might be obliged to do it.
"I wouldn't take it so hard,Bart, if it was any one but you," she said softly. She went on to say other things of this sort which would make it appear that there was in her heart an inward softness toward him which she had never yet revealed. With womanly instinct she played her little part well and did not exaggerate; but she was not speaking now to the man of drug-weakened mind and over-stimulated sense whom she had known in former years.
He spoke with pain and shame in his voice and attitude. "There isn't anything that I could do for you, Ann, that I wouldn't do as it is, without you pretending that way."
She did not quite take it in at first that she could not deceive him.
"I thought you used to care about me," she said; "I thought perhaps you did yet; I thought perhaps"—she putwell-feigned shyness into her tone—"that you weren't the sort that would turn away from us just because of what father has done. All the other folks will, of course. I'm pretty much alone."
"I won't help you to break the laws, Ann. Law and righteousness is the same for the most part. Your feeling as a daughter leads you the other way, of course; but it ain't no good—it won't do any good to him in the long run, and it would be wrong for me to do anything but just what I ought to do as constable. When that's done we can talk of being friends if you like, but don't go acting a lie with the hope of getting the better of me. It hurts me to see you do it, Ann."
For the first time there dawned in her mind a new respect for him, but that did not alter her desperate resolve. She had been standing before him in the moonlight withdowncast face; now she suddenly threw up her head with a gesture that reminded him of the way a drowning man throws up his hands.
"You've been wanting to convert me," she said. "You want me to sign the pledge, and to stop going to dances and playing cards, and to bring up Christa that way."
All the thoughts that he had had since his reform of what he could do for this girl and her sister if she would only let him came before his heart now, lit through and through with the light of his love that at that moment renewed its strength with a power which appalled him.
She took a few steps nearer to him.
"Father didn't mean to do any harm," she whispered hastily; "he's got no more sin on his soul than a child that gets angry and fights for what it wants. He's just like a child, father is; but it's beena lesson to him, and he'll never do it again. Think of the shame to Christa and me if he was hanged. And I've striven so to keep us respectable—Bart, you know I have. There's no shame in the world like your father being——" (there was a nervous gasp in her throat before she could go on)—"and he'd be awfully frightened. Oh, you don't know how frightened he'd be! If I thought they were going to do that to him, it would just kill me. I'll do anything; I wouldn't mind so much if they'd take me and hang me instead—it wouldn't scare me so much: but father would be just like a child, crying and crying and crying, if they kept him in jail and were going to do that in the end. And then no one would expect Christa and me to have any more fun, and we never would have any. There's a way that you can get father off, Bart, and give him at leastone more chance to run for his life. If you'll do it, I'll do whatever you want,—I'll sign the pledge; I'll go to church; I'll teach Christa that way. She and I won't dance any more. You can count on me. You can trust me. You know that when I say a thing I'll do it."
He realised now what had happened to him—a thing that of all things he had learned to dread most,—a desperate temptation. He answered, and his tone and manner gave her no glimpse of the shock of opposing forces that had taken place within a heart that for many months had been dwelling in the calm of victory.
"I cannot do it, Ann."
"Bart Toyner," she said, "I'm all alone in this world; there's not a soul to help me. Every one's against me and against him. Don't turn against me; I need your help—oh, I need it! I never professed to care about you; but if your father was in danger of dying an awful death and you came to me for help, I wouldn't refuse you, you know I wouldn't."
He only spoke now with the wish to conceal from her the panic within; for with the overwhelming desire to yield to her had come a ghastly fear that he was going to yield, and faith and hope fled from him. He saw himself standing there face to face with his idea of God, and this temptation between him and God. The temptation grew in magnitude, and God withdrew His face.
"I know, Ann, it sounds hard about your father" (mechanically); "but you must try and think how it would be if he was lying wounded like Walker and some other man had done it. Wouldn't you think the law was in the right then?"
"No!" (quickly). "If father'd got a simple wound,and could be nursed and taken care of comfortably until he died, I wouldn't want any man to be hanged for it. It's an awful, awful thing to be hanged."
She waited a moment, and he did not speak. The lesser light of night is fraught with illusions. She thought that she saw him there quite plainly standing quiet and indifferent. She was so accustomed to his appearance—the carefulness of his dress, the grave eyes, and the thin, drooping moustache—that her mind by habit filled in these details which she did not in reality see; nor did she see the look of agonised prayer that came and went across the habitual reserve of his face.
"Can't you believe what I say, Bart? I say that I will give up dancing and selling beer, and sign the pledge, and dress plain, and go to church. I say I will do it and Christa will do it; and you can teachus all you've a mind to, day in and day out, and we'll learn if we can. Isn't it far better to save Christa and me—two souls, than to hunt one poor man to death? Don't you believe that I'll do what I promise? I'll go right home now and give it to you in writing, if you like."
"I do believe you, Ann." He stopped to regain the steadiness of his voice. He had had training in forcing his voice in the last few months, for he hated to bear verbal testimony to his religious beliefs, and yet he had taught himself to do it. He succeeded in speaking steadily now, in the same strong voice in which he had learnt to pray at meetings. It was not exactly his natural voice. It sounded sanctimonious and ostentatious, but that was because he was forced to conceal that his heart within him was quaking. "I do believe that you would do what you say, Ann; but itisn't right to do evil that good may come."
He did not appeal to her pity; he did not try to tell her what it cost him to refuse. If he could have made her understand that, she might have been turned from her purpose. He realised only the awful weakness and wickedness of his heart. He seemed to see those appetites which, up to a few months before, had possessed him like demons, hovering near him in the air, and he seemed to see God holding them back from him, but only for so long as he resisted this temptation.
To her he said aloud: "I cannot do it, Ann. In God's strength I cannot and will not do it."
Within his heart he seemed to be shouting aloud to Heaven: "My God, I will not do it, I will not do it. Oh, my God!" He turned his back upon her and went quickly to the village, only looking to see that atsome distance she followed him, trudging humbly as a squaw walks behind her Indian, as far as her own door.
When one drops one's plummet into life anywhere it falls the whole length of the line we give it. The man who can give his plummet the longest line is he who realises most surely that it has not touched the bottom.
Bart Toyner betook himself to prayer. He had learned from his friend the preacher that when a man is tempted he must pray until he is given the victory, and then, calm and steadfast, go out to face the world again. If Toyner's had been a smaller soul, the need of his life would have imperatively demanded then that just what he expected to happen to him should happen, and in some mysterious way no doubt it would have happened.
When we quietly observe religious life exactly as it is, without the bias of any theory, there are two constantly recurring facts which, taken together, excite deep astonishment: the fact that small minds easily attain to a certainty of faith to which larger minds attain more slowly and with much greater distress; and also the fact that the happenings of life do actually come in exact accordance to a man's faith—faith being not the mere expectation that a thing is going to take place, but the inner eye that sees into the heart of things, and knows that its desire must inevitably take place, and why. This sort of faith, be it in a tiny or great nature, comes triumphantly in actual fact to what it predicts; but the little heart comes to it easily and produces trivial prayers, while the big heart, thinking to arrive with the same ease atthe same measure of triumph, is beaten back time and time and again.
Probably the explanation is that the smaller mind has not the same germinating power; there is not enough in it to cause the long, slow growth of root and stem, and therefore it soon puts forth its little blossom. These things all happen, of course, according to eternal law of inward development; they are not altered by any force from without, because nothing is without: the sun that makes the daisy to blossom is just that amount of sun that it absorbs into itself, and so with the acorn or the pine-cone. These latter, however, do not produce any bright immediate blossom, though they ultimately change the face of all that spot of earth by the spread of their roots and branches.
After praying a long time Bart Toyner relapsed into meditation, endeavouring tocontemplate those attributes of his God which might bring him the strength which he had not yet attained, and just here came to him the subtlest and strongest reinforcement to all those arguments which were chiming together upon what appeared to him the side of evil. The God in whom he had learned to trust was a God who, moved by pity, had come out of His natural path to give a chance of salvation to wicked men by the sacrifice of Himself. To what did he owe his own rescue but to this special adjustment of law made by God? and how then was it right for him to adhere to the course the regular law imposed on him and to hunt down Markham? If he saved Markham, he would answer to the law for his own breach of duty—this would be at least some sacrifice. Was not this course a more God-like one?
There was one part of Toyner that spoke out clearly andsaid that his duty was exactly what he had esteemed it to be before Ann Markham appealed to him. He believed this part of him to be his conscience.
All the rest of him slowly veered round to thoughts of mercy rather than legal duty; he thought of Ann and Christa with hard, godless hearts, surrounded by every form of folly and sin, and he believed that Ann would keep her promise to him, and that different surroundings would give them different souls. Yet he felt convinced that God and conscience forbade this act of mercy.
One thing he was as certain of now as he had been at the beginning—that if he disobeyed God, God would leave him to the power of all his evil appetites; he felt already that his heart gave out thoughts of affection to his old evil life.
As the hours passed he began to realise that he wouldneed to disobey God. He found himself less and less able to face the thought of giving up this rare opportunity of winning Ann's favour and an influence over her—moralinfluence at least; his mind was clear enough to see that what was gained by disobeying God's law was from a religious point of view nil. In his mind was the beginning of a contempt for God's way of saving him. If he was to win his own soul by consigning Ann and her father to probable perdition, he did not want to win it.
The August morning came radiant and fresh; the air, sharp with a touch of frost from neighbouring hills, bore strength and lightness for every creature. The sunlight was gay on the little wooden town, on its breezy gardens and wastes of flowering weeds, on the descent of the foaming fall, on the clear brown river. Even the sober wood of ashand maple glistened in the morning light, and the birds sang songs that in countries where a longer summer reigns are only heard in spring-time.
Bart Toyner went out of the house exhausted and almost hopeless. The source of his strength had failed within him. He looked forward to defeat.
As it happened Toyner's official responsibility for Markham's arrest was to be lightened. The Crown Attorney for the county had already communicated with the local government, and a detective had been sent, who arrived that morning by the little steamboat. Before Toyner realised the situation he found himself in consultation with the new-comer as to the best means of seeking Markham. Did the perfect righteousness require that he should betray Ann's confidence and state that Markham was in hiding somewhere within reach? Bart looked thequestion for a moment in the face, and trembled before it. Then he set it aside unanswered, resolved on reticence, whether it was right or wrong.
The detective, finding that Toyner had no clue to report, soon went to drink Ann's beer, on business intent. Bart kept sedulously apart from this interview. When it was over the stranger took Toyner by the arm and told him privately that he was convinced that the young woman knew nothing whatever about the prisoner, and as Markham had been gone now forty-eight hours it was his opinion that it was not near Fentown that he would be found.
This communication was made to Toyner in the public-house, where they had both gone the better to discuss their affairs. Toyner had gone in labouring under horrible emotion. He believed that he was going to get drunk, and the result of his fear wasthat he broke his pledge, giving as an excuse to the by-standers that he felt ill. Yet he did not get drunk.
Toyner saw the detective depart by the afternoon boat, and as he walked back upon the bit of hot dusty road in the sun he reeled, not with the spirits he had taken, but with the sickening sense that his battle was lost.
Nothing seemed fair to him, nothing attractive, but to drink one more glass of spirits, and to go and make promises to Ann that would be sweet to her ear. He knew that for him it was the gate of death.
At this point the minister met him, and jumped at once to the conclusion that he was drunk. The minister was one of those good men who found their faith in God upon absolute want of faith in man. His heart was better than his head, as is the case with all small-minded souls that have come into consciouscontact with God, but his opinions ruled his official conduct. "I am afraid you have been drinking, Toyner," he said reproachfully.
The first three words, "I am afraid," were enough for Bart; he was filled himself with an all-pervading fear—a fear of himself, a fear of God, a fear of the devil who would possess him again. He was not drunk; the fact that drunkenness in him appeared so likely to this man, who was the best friend he had, completed in his heart the work of revolt against the minister and the minister's God. What right had God to take him up and clothe him and keep him in his right mind for a little while, just to let him fall at the first opportunity? It was quite true that he had deserved it, no doubt; he had done wrong, and he was going to do wrong; but God, who had gone out of His way to mercifullyconvert him and keep him straight for a while, could certainly have gone on keeping him if He had chosen. His mind was a logical one. He had been taught to praise God for some extraordinary favour towards him; he had been taught that the grace which had changed his life for good was in no degree his own; and why then was he to bear all the disgrace of his return to evil?
In the next hours he walked the streets of the town, and talked to other men when need was, and did a little business on his own account in the agency in which he was engaged, and went home and took supper, watching the vagaries of his father's senile mania with more than common pity for the old man. His own wretchedness gave him an aching heart of sympathy for all the sorrow of others which came across his mind that day.
The whole day was a new revelation to him of what tenderness for others could be and ought to be.
He did not hope to attain to any working out of this higher sympathy and pity himself. The wonderful confidence which his new faith had so long given him, that he was able in God's strength to perform the higher rather than the lower law of his nature, had ebbed away. God's strength was no longer with him; he was going to the devil; he could do nothing for himself, little for others; but he sympathised as never before with all poor lost souls. He was a little surprised, as the day wore to a close, that he had been able to control his craving, that he had not taken more rum. Still, he knew that he would soon be helpless. It was his doom, for he could awake in himself no further feeling of repentance or desire to return to God.
In the long day's struggle, half conscious and half unconscious, his love for Ann—and it was not a bad sort of love either—had triumphed over what principle he had; it had survived the sudden shock that had wrecked his faith. The hell which he was experiencing was intolerable now, because of the heaven which he had seen, and he could not forgive the God who had ordained it. The unreal notion that an omnipotent God can permit what He does not ordain could have no weight with him, for he was grappling with reality. As he brooded bitterly upon his own fate, his heart became enlarged with tenderness for all other poor helpless creatures like himself who were under the same misrule.
His resolution was taken—he would use his sobriety to help Ann. It would not profit himself, but still he would win from her the promise concerning her futurelife and Christa's which she had offered him, and he would go that night and do all that a man could do to help the poor wretch to whom his heart went out with ever-increasing pity. It would not be much, but he would do what he could, and after that he would tell the authorities what he had done and give up his office. He had a very vague notion of the penalties he would incur; if they put him in prison, so much the better—it might save him a little longer from drinking himself to death.
Like an honest man he had given up attempting to pull God round to his own position. He did not now think for a moment that the act of love and mercy which possessed his soul was a pious one; his motive he believed to be solely his pity for Markham and his love for Ann, which, being natural, he supposed to be selfish, and, being selfish, he knew to be unholy.
It had all come to this, then—his piety, his reformation, his prayers, his thanksgiving, his faith. His heart within him gave a sneering laugh. He was terribly to blame, of course—he was a reprobate; but surely God was to blame too!
Ann Markham's thoughts of Bart that day were chiefly wondering thoughts. She tried to think scornfully of his refusal to help her; theoretically she derided the religion that produced the refusal, but in the bottom of her heart she looked at it with a wonder that was akin to admiration. Then there was a question whether he would remain fixed in his resolution. If this man did not love her then Ann's confidence failed her in respect to her judgment of what was or was not; for though she had regarded him always as a person of not much strength or importance, not independent enough to be anything more than the creature of the woman whom he desired to marry, yet, curiouslyenough, she had believed that his love for her had a strength that would die hard. She did not stop to ask herself how it could be that a weak man could love her strongly. Love, in any constant and permanent sense of the word, was an almost unknown quality among her companions, and yet she had attributed it to Bart. Well! his refusal of last night proved that she had been mistaken—that was all. But possibly the leaven of her proposal would work, and he would repent and come back to her. The fact that he had evidently not betrayed her to the detective gave her hope of this. Her thoughts about Toyner were only subordinate to the question, how she was to rescue her father. With the light and strength of the morning, hope in other possibilities of eluding Bart, even if he remained firm, came back to her. She would at least work on; if she wasbaffled in the end, it would be time enough to despair. Her sister was not her confidante, she was her tool.
Ann waited until the shadow of the pear tree, which with ripening fruit overhung the gable of their house, stretched itself far down the bit of weedy grass that sloped to the river. The grass plot was wholly untended, but nature had embroidered it with flowers and ferns.
Ann sat sewing by the table on which she kept her supply of beer. She could not afford to lose her sales to-day, although she knew bitterly that most of those who turned in for a drink did so out of prying curiosity. Even Christa, not very quick of feeling, had felt this, and had retired to lounge on the bed in the inner room with a paper novel. Christa usually spent her afternoon in preparing some cheap finery to wear in the cool of the evening, but she felt the familydisgrace and Ann's severity, and was disheartened. As Ann bided her time and considered her own occupation and Christa's, she marvelled at the audacity of the promise which she had offered to give Bart, yet so awful was the question at stake that her only wish was that he had accepted it.
At four o'clock in the afternoon she roused Christa and apportioned a certain bit of work to her. There was a young man in Fentown called David Brown, a comely young fellow, belonging to one of the richer families of the place. He was good-natured, and an athlete; he had of late fallen into the habit of dropping in frequently to drink Ann's beer. She felt no doubt that Christa was his attraction. Some weeks before he had boasted that he had found the bed of a creek which made its way through the drowned forest, and that by it he had paddledhis canoe through the marsh that lay to the north of the lake. He had also boasted that he had a secret way of finding the creek again. Upon considering his character Ann believed that although the statement was given boastfully it was true. Brown had a trace of Indian blood in him, and possessed the faculties of keen observation and good memory. It was by the help of this secret that she had hoped to extricate her father herself. There was still a chance that she might be able to use it.
"Some men think the world and all of a woman if they can only get into the notion that she is ill-used. David may be more sweet on you than ever," said Ann to Christa. "Put on your white frock: it's a little mussed, so it won't look as if you were trying to be fine; don't put on any sash, but do your hair neatly."
She will look taking enough,thought Ann to herself; she did not despise herself for the stratagem. It was part of the hard, practical game that she had played all her life, for that matter; she was not conscious of loving Christa any more than she was conscious of loving her father. It was merely her will that they should have the utmost advantage in life that she could obtain for them. Nothing short of a moral revolution could have changed this determination in her.
When Christa had performed her toilet, obeying Ann from mere habit, Ann drilled her in the thing she was to do. Brown would of course suspect what this information was to be used for. Christa was to coax him to promise secrecy. Ann went over the details of the plan again and again, until she was quite sure that the shallow forgetful child understood the importance of her mission.
Christa sat with her elbows on the table and cried a little. Her fair hair was curled low over her eyes, the coarse white dress hung limp but soft, leaving her neck bare. With all her motions her head nodded on her slender graceful neck, like a flower which bows on its stalk.
Before this disaster Christa had spent her life laughing; that had been more becoming to her than sullenness and tears. For all that, Ann was not sorry that Christa's eyelids should be red when David Brown was seen slowly lounging toward the window.
He had not been to see them the day before; it was apparent from his air that he thought it was not quite the respectable thing to do to-day. He tried to approach the house with anonchalant, happen-by-chance air, so that if any one saw him they would suppose his stopping merely accidental.
Ann poured out his beer.Christa looked at him with eyes full of reproach. Then she got up and went away to the doorstep, and stood looking out. To the surprise of both of them, David did not follow her there. He stood still near Ann.
"It's hard on Christa," said Ann with a sigh; "she has been crying all day. Every one will desert us now, and we shall have to live alone without friends."
"Oh no" (abruptly); "nobody blames you."
"I don't mind for myself so much; I don't care so much about what people think, or how they treat me." She lifted her head proudly as she spoke. "But" (with pathos) "it's hard on Christa."
"No; you never think of yourself, do you?" David giggled a little as he said it, betraying that he felt his words to be unusually personal. Ann wondered for a minute what could be the cause ofthis giggle, and then she returned to the subject of Christa's suffering.
"Look here," he interrupted, "if there's any little thing I can do to help you, like lending you money if you're left hard up, or anything of that sort, you know" (he was blushing furiously now), "it's for you I'd do it," he blurted out. "I don't care about Christa."
"The silly fellow!" thought Ann. She was six years older than he, and she felt herself to be twenty years older. She entirely scorned his admiration in its young folly; but she did not hesitate a moment to make use of it. All her life had been a long training in that thrift which utilised everything for family gain. She was a thorough woman of society, this girl who sat in her backwoods cottage selling beer.
She looked at the boy, and a sudden glow of sensibilityappeared in her face. "Oh, David!" she said; "I thought it was Christa."
"But it isn't Christa," he stammered, grinning. He was hugely pleased with the idea that she had accepted his declaration of courtship.
Half an hour later and Ann had the secret of the new track through the north of the drowned forest, and Brown had the wit not to ask her what she wanted to do with it. He had done more—he had offered to row her boat for her, but this Ann had refused.
It was a curious thing, this refusal. It arose purely from principle on her part; she had come to the limit which the average mind sets to the evil it will commit. She deceived and cajoled the boy without scruple, but she did not allow him to break the law. She remembered that he had parents who valued his good name more than he hadas yet learned to value it. He was young; he was in her power; and she declined his further help.
Christa had wandered down the grass to the river-side and stood there pouting meanwhile.
This incident with David Brown and the getting possession of his chart was the one stimulant that helped Ann to endure this long day of inactivity. It was like a small thimbleful of wine to one who longed for a generous draught; there was nothing else to do but to wait, alert for all chances that might help her. Evening closed in; the sisters were left alone. Christa returned indolently to lounging upon the bed and reading her novel. If Ann had had less strength, she would have paced the floor of the outer room in impatience; as it was she sat still by the table which held the beer and stitched her seam diligently. About eight o'clock she heard Toyner's step.
Was he going to haunt the house again in order to keep her from going out of it?
He came up to the door and came in.
She was preparing herself to act just as if she did not know who had come, and did not take much notice of him; but when he came up and she looked at his face in the lamp-light, she saw written in it the struggle that he had gone through. Its exact nature and detail she was incapable of conceiving, but one glance proved to her its reality. She was struck by the consciousness of meeting an element in life which was wholly new to her. When such a thing forces itself upon our attention, however indefinite and unexpressed may be our thought, it is an experience never to be forgotten. Ann fought against her conviction. She began at once, as intelligent humanity always does, to explain away what she did not understand,supposing by that means that she could do away with its existence.
"I think you are ill, Bart," she said quickly. "It looks to me as if you were in for a bout of chills; and enough to give it to you too, hanging about in the woods all night."
He drew a chair close to the table and sat down beside her.
"There isn't any chills in the swamps about here," he said; "they are as wholesome as dry land is." She saw by this that he had no intention of upbraiding her with his fall, or of proclaiming the object of his visit. She wanted to rouse him into telling her something.
"I heard them saying something about you to-day that I didn't believe a bit. I heard you were in the saloon drinking."
He took hold of the end of her seam, passed his finger along it as if examining thefabric and the stitches. "I took one glass," he said, with the curious quiet gravity which lay to-night like a spell upon all his words and actions.
"Well," she said cheerily, "I don't believe in a man making a slave of himself, not to take a glass when he wants it just because he sometimes makes a beast of himself by taking more than he ought."
"If you choose to think black is white, Ann, it will not make it that way."
"That's true," she replied compliantly; "and you've got more call to know than I have, for I've never 'been there.'"
"God forbid!" he said with sudden intensity. All the habits of thought of the last year put strength into his words. "If I thought you ever could be 'there,' Ann, it's nothing to say that I'd die to save you from it."
She let her thought dwell for a moment upon the pictureof herself as a drunkard which had caused such intense feeling in him. "I am not worth his caring what becomes of me in that way," she thought to herself. It was the first time it ever occurred to her to think that she was unworthy of the love he had for her; but at the same moment she felt a shadow extinguish the rays of hope she had begun to feel, for she believed, as Bart did, that his piety was in direct opposition to the help he might otherwise give her. She had begun to hope that piety had loosened its grasp upon him for the time.
"I don't know what's to become of us, Christa and me," she said despairingly; "if we don't take to drink it will be a wonder, everybody turning the cold shoulder on us."
This was not her true thought at all. She knew herself to be quite incapable of the future she suggested, but the theme was excellentlyadapted to work upon his feelings.
"I'm going away to-night, Ann," he said; "perhaps I won't see you again for a long time; but you know all that you said you would promise last night——"
Her heart began to beat so sharply against her side with sudden hope, and perhaps another feeling to which she gave no name, that her answer was breathless. "Yes," she said eagerly, "if——"
He went on gravely: "I am going to start to-night in a row-boat for The Mills. You can tell me where your father is, and on my way I'll do all I can to help him to get away. It won't be much use perhaps. It is most likely that he will only get away from this locality to be arrested in another, but all that one man can do to help him I will do; but you'll have to give me the promise first, and I'll trust you to keep it."
Ann said nothing. The immediate weight of agonised care for her father's life was lifted off her; but she had a strange feeling that the man who had taken her responsibility had taken upon him its suffering too in a deeper sense than she could understand. It flashed across her, not clearly but indistinctly, that the chief element in her suffering had been the shame of defying law and propriety rather than let her father undergo a just penalty. In some way or other this had been all transferred to Bart, and in the glimmering understanding of his character which was growing within her, she perceived that he had it in him to suffer under it far more intensely than she had suffered. It was very strange that just when she obtained the promise she wanted from him she would have been glad to set him free from it!
Within certain self-pleasing limits Ann had always beena good-natured and generous person, and she experienced a strong impulse of this good nature and generosity just now, but it was only for a moment, and she stifled it as a thing that was quite absurd. Her father must be relieved, of course, from his horrid situation; and, after all, Bart could help him quite easily, more easily than any other man in the world could, and then come back and go on with his life as before. Questions of conscience had never, so far, clouded Ann's mental horizon. A moment's effort to regain her habitual standpoint made it quite clear to her that in this case it was she, she and Christa, who were making the sacrifice; a minute more, and she could almost have found it in her heart to grumble at the condition of the vow which she had so liberally sketched the night before, and only the fact that there was something aboutBart which she did not at all understand, and a fear that that something might be a propensity to withdraw from his engagement, made her submissively adhere to it.
"Christa and I will sign the pledge. We will give up dancing and wearing finery. We will stop being friends with worldly people, and we will go to church and meetings, and try to like them." Ann repeated her vow.
Bart took the pen and ink with which she chronicled her sales of beer and wrote the vow twice on two pages of his note-book; at the bottom he added, "God helping me." Ann signed them both, he keeping one and giving her the other.
This contract on Ann's part had many of the elements of faith in it—a wonderful audacity of faith in her own power to revolutionise her life and control her sister's, and all the unreasoning child-likeness of faith which could launch itself boldly into an unknown future without any knowledge of what life would be like there.
On the part of Toyner the contract showed the power that certain habits of thought, although exercised only for a few months, had over him. Good people are fond of talk about the weakness of good habits compared with the strength of bad ones. But, given the same time to the formation of each, the habits which a man counts good must be stronger than those which he counts evil, because the inner belief of his mind is in unity with them. Toyner believed to-night that he was in open revolt against a rule of life which he had found himself unable to adhere to, and against the God who had ordained it; but, all the same, it was this rule, and faith in the God which he had approached by means of it, thatactuated him during this conference with Ann. As a man who had given up hope for himself might desire salvation for his child, so he gravely and gently set her feet in what he was accustomed to regard as the path of life before he himself left it.
Ann's plan of the way in which Toyner more than any other man could aid her father was simple enough. He who was known to be in pursuit of Markham was to take him as a friend through the town at The Mills and start him on the road at the other side. Markham was little known at The Mills, and no one would be likely to take the companion of the constable to be the criminal for whose arrest he had been making so much agitation; they were to travel at the early hour of dawn when few were stirring. This plan, with such modifications as his own good sense suggested, Toyner was willing to adopt.
He started earlier in the evening than she had done,having no particular desire for secrecy. He told his friends that he was going to row to The Mills by night, and those who heard him supposed that he had gained some information concerning Markham that he thought it best to report. It was a calm night; the smoke of distant burning was still in the air.
He dropped down the river in the dark hours before the moonrise, and began to row with strength, as Ann had done, when he reached the placid water. His boat was light and well built. He could see few yards of dark water in advance; he could see the dark outline of the trees. The water was deep; there were no rocks, no hidden banks; he did not make all the haste he could, but rowed on meditatively—he was always more or less attracted by solitude. To-night the mechanical exercise, the darkness, the absolute loneliness, were greaterrest to him than sleep would have been. In a despairing dull sort of way he was praying all the time; his mind had contracted a habit of prayer, at least if expressing his thoughts to the divine Being in the belief that they were heard may be called prayer.
Probably no one so old or so wise but that he will behave childishly if he can but feel himself exactly in the same relation to a superior being that a child feels to a grown man. Toyner expressed his grievance over and over again with childlike simplicity; he explained to God that he could not feel it to be right or fair that, when he had prayed so very much, and prayers of the sort to which a blessing was promised, he should be given over to the damning power of circumstance, launched in a career of back-sliding, and made thereby, not only an object of greater scorn to all men than if he had never reformed, but actually,as it appeared to him, more worthy of scorn.
He did not expect his complaints to be approved by the Deity, and gained therefore no satisfying sense that the prayer had ascended to heaven.
The moon arose, the night was very warm; into the aromatic haze a mist was arising from the water on all sides. It was not so thick but that he could see his path through it in the darkness; but when the light came he found a thin film of vapour between him and everything at which he looked. The light upon it was so great that it seemed to be luminous in itself, and it had a slightly magnifying power, so that distances looked greater, objects looked larger, and the wild desolate scene with which he was familiar had an aspect that was awful because so unfamiliar.
When Toyner realised what the full effect of the moonlight was going to be, he droppedhis oars and sat still for a few minutes, wondering if he would be able to find the landmarks that were necessary, so strange did the landscape look, so wonderful and gigantic were the shapes which the dead trees assumed. Then he continued his path, looking for a tree that was black and blasted by lightning. He was obliged to grope his way close to the trees; thus his boat bumped once or twice on hidden stumps. It occurred to him to think what a very lonely place it would be to die in, and a premonition that he was going to die came across him.
Having found the blasted tree, he counted four fallen trees; they came at intervals in the outer row of standing ones; then there was a break in the forest, and he turned his boat into it and paused to listen.
The sound that met his ear—almost the strangest sound that could have been heard inthat place—was that of human speech; it was still some distance away, but he heard a voice raised in angry excitement, supplicating, threatening, defying, and complaining.
Toyner began to row down the untried water-way which was opened to his boat. The idea that any one had found Markham in such a place and at such an hour was too extraordinary to be credited. Toyner looked eagerly into the mist. He could see nothing but queer-shaped gulfs of light between trunks and branches. Again his boat rubbed unexpectedly against a stump, and again the strange premonition of approaching death came over him. For a moment he thought that his wisest course would be to return. Then he decided to go forward; but before obeying this command, his mind gave one of those sudden self-attentive flashes the capacity for which marks offthe mind of the reflective type from others. He saw himself as he sat there, his whole appearance and dress; he took in his history, and the place to which that hour had brought him, he, Bart Toyner, a thin, somewhat drooping, middle-aged man, unsuccessful, because of his self-indulgence, in all that he had attempted, yet having carried about with him always high desires, which had never had the slightest realisation except in the one clear shining space of vision and victory which had been his for a few months and now was gone. The light had mocked him; now perhaps he was going to die!
He pushed his boat on, his sensations melting into an excited blank of thought in which curiosity was alone apparent. He was growing strangely excited after his long calm despondency; no doubt the excitement of the other, who was shouting andjabbering not far away in the moonlit night, affected him.
He found his way through the trees of the opening; evidently the splash of his oar was caught by the owner of the noisy voice, for before he could see any one a silence succeeded to the noise, a sudden absolute silence, in itself shocking.
"Are you there, Markham?" cried Toyner.
No answer.
Toyner peered into the silver mist on all sides of him; the sensation of the diffused moonlight was almost dazzling, the trees looked far away, large and unreal. At length among them he saw the great log that had fallen almost horizontal with the water; upon it a solitary human figure stood erect in an attitude of frenzied defiance.
"I have come from your daughter, Markham." Thenin a moment, by way of self-explanation, he said, "Toyner."
The man addressed only flung a clenched fist into the air. The silence of his pantomime now that there was some one to speak to was made ghastly by the harangue which he had been pouring out upon the solitude.
"Have you lost your head?" asked Toyner. "I have come from your daughter—I'm not going to arrest you, but set you down at The Mills—you can go where you will then."
He knew now the answer to his first question. The man before him was in some stage of delirium. Toyner wondered if any one could secretly have brought him drink.
There was nothing to be done but to soothe as best he could the other's fear and enmity, and to bring the boat close to the tree for him to get in it. Whether he wassane or mad, it was clearly necessary to take him from that place. Markham retained a sullen silence, but seemed to understand so far that he ceased all threatening gestures. His only movements were certain turnings and sudden crouchings as if he saw or felt enemies about him in the air.
"Now, get in," said Toyner. He had secured the boat. He pulled the other by the legs, and guided him as he slipped from his low bench. "Sit down; you can't stand, you know."
But Markham showed himself able to keep his balance, and alert to help in pushing off the boat. There was a heavy boat-pole ready for use in shallow water, and Markham for a minute handled it adroitly, pushing off from his tree.
Toyner turned his head perforce to see that the boat was not proceeding towardssome other dangerous obstacle. Then Markham, with the sudden swift cunning of madness, lifted the butt end of his pole and struck him on the head.
Toyner sank beneath the blow as an ox shivers and sinks under the well-aimed blow of the butcher.
Markham looked about him for a moment with an air of childish triumph, looked not alone at the form of the fallen man before him, but all around in the air, as if he had triumphed not over one, but over many.
No eye was there to see the look of fiendish revenge that flitted next over the nervous working of his face. Then he fell quickly to work changing garments with the limp helpless body lying in the bottom of the boat. With unnatural strength he lifted Toyner, dressed in his own coat and hat, to the horizontal log on which hehad lived for so long. He took the long mesh of woollen sheeting that his daughter had brought to be a rest and support to his own body, and with it he tied Toyner to the upright tree against which the log was lying; then, with an additional touch of fiendish satire, he took a bit of dry bread out of the ample bag of food which Ann had hung there for his own needs, and laid it on Toyner's knees. Having done all this he pushed his boat away with reckless rapidity, and rowed it back into the open water, steering with that unerring speed by which a somnambulist is often seen to perform a dangerous feat.
The moonlit mist and the silence of night closed around this lonely nook in the dead forest and Toyner's form sitting upon the fallen log. In the open river, where no line determined the meeting of the placid moonlit water andthe still, moonlit mist, the boat dashed like a dark streak up the white winding Ahwewee toward the green forest around Fentown Falls. The small dark figure of the man within it was working at his oars with a strength and regularity of some powerful automaton. At every stroke the prow shot forward, and the sound of the splashing oars made soft echoes far and wide.
When men have visions the impression left upon their minds is that light from the unseen world of light has in some way broken through into the sphere of their cognizance. The race in its ages of reflection has upon the whole come to the conclusion that that which actually takes place is the gradual growth and the sudden breaking forth of light within the mysterious depths of the man himself. A new explanation of a fact does not do away with the fact.
Toyner was not dead, he was stunned; his head was badly injured. When his consciousness returned, and through what process of inflammation and fever his wounded head went in the struggle of nature towardrecovery, was never clearly known. His body, bound with the soft torn cloths to the upright tree, sagged more and more until it found a rest upon the inclined log. The fresh sweet air from pine woods, the cool vapours from the water beneath him, were nurses of wise and delicate touch. The sun arose and shone warmly, yet not hotly, through the air in which dry haze was thickening. The dead trees stood in the calm water, keeping silence as it were, a hundred stalwart guards with fingers at their lips, lest any sound should disturb the life that, with beneficent patience, was little by little restoring the wounded body from within. Even the little vulgar puffing market-boat that twice a day passed the windings of the old river channel—the only disturber of solitude—was kept at so great a distance by this guard of silent trees that no perception of herpassing, and all the life and perplexity of which she must remind him, entered into Toyner's half-closed avenues of sense.
For two days the sun rose on Bart through the mellow, smoke-dimmed atmosphere. Each night it lay in a red cloud for an hour in the west, tingeing and dyeing all the mirror below the trees with red. No one was there in the desolate lake to see the twice-told glory of that rosy flood and firmament, unless it was this wondrous light that first penetrated the eyes of the prisoner with soothing brightness.
It was at some hour of light—sunset or sunrise, or it might have been in the blending of the mornings and the evenings in that confusion of mind which takes no heed of time—that Toyner first began to know himself. Then it was not of himself that he took knowledge; his heart in its wakingfelt after something else around and beneath and above him, everywhere, something that meant light and comfort and rest and love, something that was very strong, that was strength; he himself, Bart Toyner, was part of this strength, and rested in it with a rest and refreshing which is impossible to weakness, however much it may crave.
It came to him as he lay there, not knowing the where or when of his knowledge—it came to him that he had made a great mistake, as a little child makes a mistake in laughable ignorance. Indeed, he laughed within himself as he thought what a strange, childish, grotesque notion he had had,—he had thought, he had actually thought, that God was only a part of things; that he, Bart Toyner, could turn away from God; that God's power was only with him when he supposed himself to be obedient to Him! Yes, hehad thought this; but now he knew that God was all and in all.
There came to him, trooping with this new joy of knowledge, the sensuous sight and sound and smell of many things that he had known, but had not understood, before. All the spring-times through which he had walked unconscious of their meaning, came to him. There was a sound in his ears of delicate flowers springing to light through dewy moss, of buds bursting, and he saw the glancing of myriad tiny leaves upon the grey old trees. With precisely the same sense of sweetness came the vision of days when autumn rain was falling, and the red and sear leaf, the nut, the pine-cone and the flower-seed were dropping into the cold wet earth. Was life in the spring, and death in the autumn? Was the power and love of God not resting in the dampfallen things that lay rotting in the ground?
There came before him a troop of the little children of Fentown, all the rosy-cheeked faces and laughing eyes and lithe little dancing forms that he had ever taken the trouble to notice; and Ann and Christa came and stood with them—Christa with her dancing finery, with her beautiful, thoughtless, unemotional face, her yellow hair, and soft white hands; and Ann, a thousand times more beautiful to him, with her sun-brown tints and hazel eyes, so full of energy and forethought, her dark neat hair and working-dress and hardened hands—this was beauty! Over against it he saw Markham, blear-eyed, unkempt and dirty; and his own father, a gaunt, idiotic wreck of respectable manhood; and his mother, faded, worn, and peevish; with them stood the hunch-backed baker of Fentown andall the coarse and ugly sons of toil that frequented its wharfs. There was not a child or a maiden among those he saw first who did not owe their life to one of these. With the children and the maidens there were pleasure and hope; with the older men and women there were effort and failure, sin and despair. The life that was in all of them, was it partly of God and partly of themselves? He laughed again at the question. The life that was in them all was all of God, every impulse, every act. The energy that thrilled them through, by which they acted, if only as brutes act, by which they spoke, if only to lie, by which they thought and felt, even when thought and feeling were false and bad, the energy which upheld them was all of God. That devil, too, that he saw standing close by and whispering to them—his form was dim and fading; he wasnot sure whether he was a reality or a thought, but—if he had life, was it his own? Somewhere, he could not remember where or when, he had heard the voice of truth saying, "Thou couldst have no power against me except it were given thee from above."
The strange complexity of dreams, which seems so foolish, brings them nearer to reality than we suppose, for there is nothing real which has not manifold meanings. Before this vision of his townspeople faded, Bart saw Ann slowly walk over from the group in which she had risen to be a queen, to that group whose members were worn with disappointment and age; as she went he saw her perfectly as he had never seen her before, the hard shallow thoughts that were woven in with her unremitting effort to do always the thing that she had set herself to do; and he saw, too, a nature that was beneath thisouter range of activity, a small trembling fountain of feeling suppressed and shut from the light. In some strange way as she stood, having grown older by transition from one group to the other, he saw that this inner fountain of strength was increasing and overflowing all that other part which had before made up almost the entire personality of the woman. This change did not take place visibly in the other people among whom she stood. It was in Ann he saw the change. He felt very glad he had seen this; he seemed to think of nothing else for a long time.
He forgot then all the detail of that which he had seen and thought, and it seemed to him that he spent a long time just rejoicing in the divine life by which all things were, and by which they changed, growing by transformation into a glory which was still indistinct to him, too far off to be seen in anyway except that its light came as the light comes from stars which we say we see and have never really seen at all.
Through this joy and light the details of life began to show again. The two forces which he had always supposed had moulded his life acted his early scenes over again. His young mother, before the shadow of despair had come over her, was seen waiting upon all his boyish footsteps with cheerful love and patience, trying to guide and to help, but trying much more to comfort and to please; and his father, with a strong body and the strength of fixed opinion and formed habits, having no desire for his son except to train and form him as he himself was trained and formed, was seen darkening all the boy's happiness with unreasonable severity, which hardened and sharpened with the opposition of years into selfish cruelty. Toyner hadoften seen these scenes before; all that was new to him now was that they stood in the vivid light of a new interpretation. Ah! the father's cruelty, the irritable self-love, the incapacity to recognise any form of life but his own, it was of God,—not a high manifestation: the bat is lower than the bird, and yet it is of God. Bart saw now the one great opportunity of life! He saw that the whole of the universe goes to develop character, and the one chief heavenly food set within reach of the growing character for its nourishment is the opportunity to embrace malice with love, to gather it in the arms of patience, convert its shame into glory by willing endurance.
Had he, Bart Toyner, then really been given the power in that beginning of life to put out his hand and take this fruit which would have given him such great strength and stature, or had he only hadstrength just for what he had done and nothing more?
The answer seemed to come to him from all that he had read of the growth of things. He looked into the forests, into the life of the creatures that now lived in them; he saw the fish in the rivers and the birds in the air, everywhere now roots were feeling under the dark ground for just the food that was needed, and the birds flew open-mouthed, and the fishes darted here and there, and the squirrels hoarded their nuts. Everywhere in the past the growth of ages had been bringing together these creatures and their food by slowly developing in them new powers to assimilate new foods. What then of those that pined and dwindled when the organism was not quite strong enough and the old food was taken away? Ah, well! they fell—fell as the sparrows fall, not one of them without God. And what ofman rising through ages from beast to sainthood, rising from the mere dominion of physical law which works out its own obedience into the moral region, where a perpetual choice is ordained of God, and the consequences of each choice ordained? Was not the lower choice often inevitable? Who could tell when or where except God Himself? And the higher choice the only food by which character can grow! So men must often fall. Fall to what end? To pass into that boundless gulf of distant light into which everything is passing, passing straight by the assimilation of its proper food, circuitously by weakness and failure, but still coming, growing, reaching out into infinite light, for all is of God, and God is Love.
All Toyner's thought and sense seemed to lose hold again of everything but that first realisation of the surrounding glory and joy and strength, and thefeeling that he himself had to rest for a little while before any new thing was given him to do.
His body lay back upon the grey lifeless branch, wrapped in the ragged, soiled garment that Markham had put upon him; the silence of night came again over the water and the grey dead trees, and nature went on steadily and quietly with her work of healing.