AUTHORITY
Itwas late when the jury returned. The dusty end of day completed their dusty deliberations. They settled down in their seats mopping faces, adjusting waistcoats, casting plausible eyes to the ceiling or doubtful ones to the floor. The foreman, it was evident, felt his brief authority. He was clearly sorry that the waiting crowd had perceptibly diminished. He stood, dyed of mustache, mottled of necktie, his hair brushed in the country barber's idea of integrity and truth. The rendering of the verdict was given with his laborious elegance of diction.
And, suddenly, under even his smug sternness, the dimly lighted building became surcharged with fatal things! The old drama of youth and society, the old tragedy was as evident here as in any Greek theatre set in a hillside. Those who waited greedily for the sentence felt a certain awe as it was given. The Judge's machine-like voice had a cold inexorability, very impressive. It was like a clock ticking out the final words evenly:
"Twenty years at hard labor!"
There was a general intake of breath. To some the sentence was disgracefully light; to others gratifyingly merciful. There was a slow rumble of satisfiedcountry virtue. They looked at the prisoner at the bar. Well, did Terry now know what the law was?
Twenty years at hard labor! Something torturing made Sard's heart careen like a badly ballasted boat. She got her first vision of the enigma of life. But with Terry's sentence were they not all sentenced?
Twenty years at hard labor! Watts working for human betterment, for clearer vision in legal things, yet still under the law. Twenty years at hard labor! Dora, working in the kitchen, always shadowed by her brother's fate. Twenty years at hard labor! Colter patiently striving to piece together his lost puzzled life. Twenty years at hard labor! All the patient workers, thinkers, teachers and trail blazers of the great world! Was Terry in such poor company? Were they not all condemned, all held down, suffocated, frustrated, held back by the blind significance of crystallized laws?
Sard stumbled over to the little group near Terry. Dora, now passionately crying, caught at her hand.
"Dora," Sard's voice weakened in her throat, "Dora, don't cry like that. It isn't only you and Terry, don't you see we are all—all under the law?"
And then the little country court-house became something very terrible to her; she stumbled blindly out of it.
For Sard, poor child, knew that the chief issue, the chief point of all the struggle would be missed. How the trial of Terry O'Brien would be turned by the countryside merely into a compliment for itself! How it would be said that Watts Shipman, the greatcontinental lawyer, had been so impressed by the splendid and inexorable quality of the Trout County Justice, that he had tried one of its most sensational cases himself! How the little country paper would gloat over the thing and fairly tumble over its type as it abandoned its usual clipped stories and boiler press jokes about the mother-in-law, the old maid, the unwelcome twins and the absent husband to flare into three sticks of local felicitations! Veritas, Uncle Felix and E Pluribus Unum would write their usual letters. The Grand Old Man of the town would make a speech and everything he said would later be corrected and contradicted by the three Grand Old Women.
The Roman Holiday furnished by Terry's ruined life would obtain, but there would be no sober effort for the understanding and education of future Terrys.
On the way home Sard and her father drove in silence.
The country roads were leafy tunnels through which the lights of their automobile rayed mysteriously. Owls and bats whirred away from them, mists arose from the flats or filtered through the woods. The Judge held his portfolio of carefully fitted papers. In the dusk Sard saw him heavy, immovable, his cigar in the corner of his mouth. Once or twice he turned to his daughter as if expecting her comment on the day's events. But there was no talk between them and the Judge's face grew harder.
As they entered the drive he waved toward thegarage. There gleamed no patch of orange-colored light in the window of the room above; the girl's heart suddenly stood still. As she took her hands from the wheel they trembled.
Again the Judge pointed to the garage. "Leave the car here, don't drive it around; a new man will wash the cars to-morrow. I dismissed Colter this morning."
The Judge did not get down from the car, but sat there smoking and turning his cigar. His gray lips closing on it seemed to be the only thing the girl could look at; she could not look as far as his eyes and the Judge knew that her face became slowly and suffocatingly a scarlet consciousness. He gave a short grunt.
"Exactly; you're not to see him again," he said. Then, "I all but kicked that fellow off the place." As the wild tears rushed to the young eyes: "It's your own behavior, young lady. I've never limited you nor held you back," the Judge said grimly. "I thought you were a lady; I thought you lived under the right laws."
Under the laws——!
Her father did not move from beside her in the seat and Sard dared not press by him out of the driver's seat. She sat, her straight figure dilating, her hands clenched, the red stain on her face seeming to burn down into her body and to make another sort of woman of her—What sort? She could see what sort her father thought she was. The piteous eyes were dense with shame.
At first she thought she could not, must not speak, then a man's kind eyes, understanding, compassionate, rallying, looked again into hers. "Courage!" came Watts' voice. He must have known. The lawyer with his priest's habit of the confessional of reading storm and stress back of faces must have read the new strange agony back of hers.
To do honor to Shipman's belief in her, she must meet this thing calmly and without disrespect or passion. The girl swallowed once; with lifted face, turned on her father a look that might, had he noted it, made him wonder. For the uplifted features were swept clean of resentment. Sard was recognizing the parent's claim on her, trying reasonably to meet it, but the Judge saw only one thing; his hard, old eyes told him he had made his decision just in time and that he must act quickly.
"You—you're letting yourself care for this man." The tones, though not loud, lashed on her; the Judge was deliberately making her ashamed. "I should have thought as my daughter, even if not for yourself, you would have had more pride."
Sard, slowly turning the watch on her wrist round and round, listened. There was only one thing to do, to try to meet the eyes, to meet the accusation with respect. But—but where was the respect due her, to her motives and actions? Had not this man, her own father, been willing to degrade her in her own estimation without hearing her, taking counsel with her?
"Dad," she gave a little helpless shiver, "I don'tthink you know; you don't understand, or you couldn't say such a thing—as—as that!"
But Bogart, taking out the cigar, smiled at it with a shrewd squint. Well, of course, he did know, and she, this untutored young thing, didn't, that was all!
Sard's father knew what would be the plans of a ne'er-do-well who could make an ardent, indulged young person fall in love with him. "Pah!" The Judge's gorge rose at it, also at what he called Sard's "deceit," it being the means of having him employ this man, rose up and condemned her.
He saw her bowed head in the dusk, the girl's cheek white on her blue scarf, and cleared his throat. "It isn't pleasant," he admitted; then with a rasp, "I never expected to speak to you like this any more than I should expect to thrash Dunstan, but," went on the Judge grimly, "under some circumstances I should take pleasure in doing that very thing. Now stop all this nonsense," he assumed that Sard was crying. "I've had a hard morning," the Judge always saw himself as unnerved by his court-room experiences, "but I'm going to be obeyed."
His hand went out; it clenched on the girl's arm; it was not hurtful, only hard, arresting and cold. "You're to have self-control," said the Judge sharply, "and you're to obey me! Understand?"
But she turned a set and stern face on him. That soft echo of Shipman's "Courage!" had sent the flame of all her ancestors in her. "You are not fair," she stammered. "I am ready to—to"—Sard quivered over the hard word, "obey, but I can't be cut off,dried up, stopped in all that I really care about." She stiffened suddenly, flaring on him with hot mouth. "Oh, you can't be my father, not in spirit, or you wouldn't stand off and judge me, condemn me, like this; you'd help me, you'd be," the tortured girl caught her breath, "a friend; you wouldn't be willing to——"
For answer the Judge rose. He cast an eye to the sky and took out his watch. "You have an aunt," he said sententiously, "a woman, and a lady, to talk things over with." He saw the curling lip of rebellion, adding, "Of course, if you have no use for the society of ladies and social equals, if you care only for gutter snipes and wharf rats, that's your own loss. My business," said the Judge, getting heavily down from the car, "my business is to see that you remember you're my daughter, even if I have to use pretty severe means to make you.... My daughter, flirting with a tramp, making herself the comment of the town and the clubs, is a thing I will not allow!" said the magistrate. "That is a little too low!"
The cheap word "flirting," its hopeless connotation, the inhuman density and commonplace acceptance of the whole matter, seemed to goad Sard into a frenzy.
"Ah, I'm not your daughter," burst out the girl wildly. "I'm not the daughter of coarse, narrow, cruel, smug things."
With the familiar eyes slowly turning on her, with their awful arraignment of her as something vulgar,unworthy, she quivered like a frightened animal. "I don't feel like you—Icouldn't!Such disgusting thoughts couldn't stay in my mind—I couldn't be so—so common as you."
It was out now, her condemnation of him. They were pitted against each other, and Sard with a feminine prophetic pang knew to what extent. The only way to influence the Judge would have been her mother's way, the little helpless scented timid lady's way, and the girl knew miserably that hers could never be that way. Yet here she was fighting, not only for her integrity as a dignified woman, but for—for someone who until now, but for her, had been helpless, dazed, a fine sensitive being shut out of all human contacts by his ignorance of what contacts were normally his.
The man turned and faced his daughter; something remorseless came into his eyes. His mouth gripped the cigar. "Either," said the Judge slowly, "either you are my daughter and do as I say, or you don't do as I say—and go——" he muttered doggedly, adding, "I don't care where!"
Then, his eyes professionally piercing, he remarked coolly, over his cigar, "There, that'll do, you've worked yourself up enough, you don't need to be theatrical! Your duty," said the Judge pompously, "is to drop all this poppy-cock about unfortunates, the under-dogs and gutter snipes, whom you affect. Be natural, be normal," said the Judge largely. "Go around with your kind and your own age, though, as far as I can see, they're as addle-pated as yourself. Drop all this nonsense, I say, anddon't seeColter again—do you hear?" For the girl, now that he was out of the car, could turn her face from him.
The Judge slowly fulminated, gradually bulged with authority. He seemed solemn even to himself as he laid down his final command. He took the cigar from his mouth. "Don't see Colter again!" His eyes, reading his daughter's, he was looking mercilessly on her young agony, making it naked and flaying it, saw the writhings of her as she took the lash.
Sard made a slow desperate gesture; she had winced, half shrunk from him, but she seemed resolved now to meet the thing in its entirety.
"I'm sorry," said the girl in a low voice, "I can't promise that. Last week, perhaps, but"—with a strange little sigh of inevitability, "not now, Dad. I'm sorry," Sard looked sadly into his face, "I can't promise."
The Judge was stupefied. "Can't promise?" he queried. "Can't promise? But I gave you my orders! Do you realize what you're saying?"
"Courage!" Shipman's low voice, pleading for human understanding, came to her. And another voice, the calm, thoughtful voice of Colter. She saw and recognized instantly her kinship with this soul that had come to her so strangely; she knew that she read it right and that no matter what its oblivion and dismay, it had come to her, belonged to her. Yet with all youth's insecurity and doubt she realized, too, that she could hardly trust herself. Her eyes widened, deepened; with a sudden strange, wild gesture she threw herself forward. Her arms went half-wayabout her father's neck. "Oh, help me," she begged, "help me! Don't you see that I can't promise? Oh, Father," wept Sard, "why should we two be like this?"
It was perhaps the truest sign, had the girl but known it, of the depth of feeling that had been born in her. When a woman truly loves, her heart goes out to all those with whom she has a relationship under the great new trouble; for her there must be no small meanness, no stabbing dislikes, no impatience. When a woman truly loves, she is tender to the world.
"I can't promise that," the girl wept desperately; "won't you help me, Dad?"
But she might as well have asked help from the automobile. With a strange gesture of disgust and spurning the Judge held her coldly off. What he said was reiterated with majesty. He slowly raised the cigar in his hand and looked at it. Suddenly, with a bitter ejaculation, a short wry shake of the whole body, he flung it away. He passed the slender figure that had thrown itself miserably on the turf at his side and walked rapidly toward the house.
No one saw the Judge that long summer evening; his study was vacant. The talking-machine was silent, his goldfish pool, where he often sat feeding the fishes, was deserted; and yet the whole place, forbidding and shadowed, seemed full of his personality.
So Sard could not go to the house, she could not see Miss Aurelia, discuss the trial, conjecture as to Minga's and Dunstan's whereabouts. The girl, her body aching, her eyes half blind with surgingthoughts, wandered to the little fruit orchard. It seemed to her that the gray ancient trees, like good little crones, welcomed her, and that the long grass and the rifts of leaves and patches of starred sky spoke to her. "You are part of us, Sard; we have struggled and fought, too; we have followed instincts and been smitten and wounded. You are like us, Sard, you have come into our laws."
The part of the orchard where the girl threw herself down was dense and deep and its dimness cooled her heart and mind. Concealed from the murmurings of the house and garden, she lay pondering. The kind little old trees mothered her; she opened young eyes and stared pitifully at them, now clenching her hands and softly crying, now softly opening them and shuddering.
"As if I had done something wrong! As if I had done something wrong!"
Her own sentence beat and hammered into Sard's brain until it seemed as if she had done something wrong. So, sometimes, suspicion and influence can put guilt on a clean creature! Under the strange half-awakeness, the half-conscious struggles of a full-grown woman coming to life, before her there suddenly rose the Gorgon face of Society, of the thing called actual life. It turned her young heart and body to stone. The looks and words of Sard's father had been unmistakable; they had made her warm-hearted interest in the Man on the Place, the slow sense of delighted companionship, the mysterious attraction and trust, something shameful!
"As if I had done something wrong! As if I had done something wrong!"
Sard turned miserably, staring up at the sky. With the fairness, the willingness to face things peculiar to her, she could in a measure understand her father's anger and sense of outrage. The girl hardly rebelled against this, unjust as it was, but her helplessness with her own problem, the impossibility of proceeding on this strange and rare path without shame and mud-flinging, for the very path itself became evident to her.
She remembered Miss Aurelia's twittering and misgivings when once or twice she had gone to read with Colter on a bench under the horse-chestnut tree. She remembered Tawny Troop's cheap scorn; she had been "made ashamed."
Even Watts Shipman, it seemed, had had misgivings. He, too, had endeavored to "make her think," and now it was out. There was no hiding it, no possible explanation; she cared for Colter, cared for him with the marvelous gleaming tide, the dewy garden-like rapture, the vivid, etched, romantic stir and storm of a girl's first feeling. It was out; known, discussed, condemned and made shameful. The scarlet flame that had stained Sard's face brought a blazing fire of pride into her heart. Boldly she cast imagination and self-will on this fire of pride.
"Icare," she breathed. "I care. It is my life, not theirs! I will go before them all with Colter and say—'I care'!"
The gray twilight grew darker in its language andbreathed down to sleep. Roses emptied tiny jars of scent on the night. Lilies burned tall pastilles. Leaves pressed their little hands together in some prayer of darkness. Now and then some small thing like a clock stirred in the long grass near Sard and tried to remind her of time and obligations, but the woe of the whole youthful frame meant nothing to them. They went on in their little ticking way, busy and inevitable.
These things did, however, mean unutterable emotions to the man who came suddenly upon them, who viewed them pitifully in the long grass where long ago the fire-flies had begun to rise and glimmer. To the startled, half-rising girl's face, Colter half groaned. Quickly he tempered his voice and manner. He, it seemed, was in no passion of resentment, and he sought to quell hers.
"I thought I saw you go in here—I waited a long time for you to come out." Colter hesitated. "I wanted to say 'good-bye' before I went. Do you know how late it is?"
For answer she gave a long sigh of relief. "I thought you had gone!" she said. "Is it late?"
The man looked at the girl lying there in the long grass. It was a different Sard Bogart from any he had seen and known since the early spring, since that March day when she had rescued him. He could not look at her thus. Something instinctive and delicate made Colter turn his head away and remain standing. Under the trees he stood immovable, like a statue, thinking with utmost concern upon this prostrate,abandoned grief of youth. He stood, his back to her, looking out toward the slow gathering stars.
His quiet, the absolute calm of him, made Sard wonder. Suddenly she sat up; her hands went to her hair. She was glad he could not see her eyes and wondered if he could have heard her sobbing. Again, inquiringly, she looked at the tall thin form with its broad shoulders and the head, nobly poised, set to a listening attitude.
"If we are very quiet," said Colter at last, "we can hear the wind freshening down the river." Somehow, she knew it was the way he took to quiet her. She was hushed like a storming child.
After a few seconds: "I did not hear you come." She tried to say it naturally, but her relief, the long shuddering sigh, struck into him. The man, his face still turned away, murmured something.
"I did not hear you." Sard rose and went toward him in the dark.
"Perhaps I should not have come," he said. He carefully kept the senses of mistress and employed between them. "But I was very anxious. Shall I go?"
"No." The girl's voice, under his steady leadership, grew clearer. Sard began to get herself together. Here was someone who understood, who needed few words and who, she was convinced, cared. Sard only thought that word "cared." She dared not think the word "love," with its overwhelming waves.
She stood there twisting a piece of grass in nervousfingers. "Father told me!" She said it with a kind of helpless shame. "I am so sorry that you are going, Colter. You seemed so happy lately—and I—I believed that we could help you, take you back to yourself, give you life again."
For answer the man turned and gave her one swift look.
In the summer night Sard saw with wonder that there was a curious competency, a serene purpose in those eyes. In some dumb moment of wild joy she realized that her instinct had taught her true. This was no perplexed "hired man" with no friends nor employment. This was—this was—
"You have helped me more than you know." His voice was grave and restoring. "I have come back further to my own than I dare think of now, and I came by a beautiful path, your sympathy and pure faith. So you must not sorrow like this. You must not distress yourself like this. Things will be clearer."
In the night his clear voice of authority moved the girl strangely. It was an authority and assurance of high character that in her desperately clouded spirit she reached out for. Instinctively, like a wilting plant, the young form straightened and freshened until the man stopped looking at the stars.
He turned toward her and looked long upon the face that had become his star. Colter made a little sorrowful gesture. "I have brought you such pain, and—I can't help!" His hands clenched for a second, the low voice for a second caressed her. "ButI will come back if you wish me to. I can promise you to come back."
Her eyes darkened. "Promise!" she bade him fiercely. "Promise——!"
But he was silent. It seemed that he was determined to get Sard out of this mood, to hold her to her best self, the steady clear-sighted self he had seen.
"I do want you to," breathed Sard without shame. "I have grown used to you——" stammering. There was no immediate answer.
She peered at the tall form standing in the summer night almost curiously. They had seemed to change places, Colter and she. Once she had protected, reassured, stimulated and encouraged a weak and sickly man. Now, what was it that encircled, that from his gentle but firmly disciplined presence, dominated her?
"I think you must have grown better, stronger," faltered the girl. She had a kind of childish awe. "You seem different!"
The dark figure moved toward her. "I am different!" He breathed a little more rapidly. "I found a letter—an old letter stuck into a small Greek book I had, and there were names, places that I remembered. It brought back things—people."
The man's voice suddenly sank into a bottomless pit of thronging memories. He stirred, and took a step toward her, holding out his hand. She put hers quickly into it. The ardent, generous action seemed again to make him a man of inflexible control, for heheld the hand only a moment, raised it to his lips, kissed it and then gently put it down.
"You have always trusted me? You have always known me?" he asked in a sort of wonder.
"I have always known what you were inside your soul better than you knew yourself," she returned vividly. And as the sensitive long face turned on her, "I knew that you wereyou."
"If there were time," he answered, "I could tell you what that letter has brought back,—names, events, associations, a college, but which college I don't know, and outside, some sorrowful things, some shadow that brought my Night. What that shadow is I don't know, and until I am sure it is no shadow on my own life I must not come to you, my dear. I mustn't come to you——"
She was silent.
Colter, an indescribable strength on his face, added, "But outside of that, your father thinks, naturally, that I am unworthy, but I am sure I am worthy of you, as worthy as any man may be! Oh, things keep coming back, coming back!"
From the man's voice one could see that these things that came back were a veritable tide of joy and anguish, but that in any case they were life and sanity.
Suddenly, with uncontrolled tenderness, he moved to her side. "Sard, child, you belong to me," he said gently. She could hear this man's breath, his heart plunging in his chest. She almost waited to be swept to him, to be lost in him, but that did not come. Under his voice and look lay judgment, a guidance that calmed all their passion.
Colter took both her hands; he looked into her quivering face. "I was hungry and ye took me in," he said brokenly, "a stranger and ye ministered unto me."
There was a long silence. The crickets clicked their little time devices; the stars were long ropes of flowers; the trees, in great shapes of withheld tenderness, shadowed and shut them in; and in the little gray fruit orchard a girl's spirit felt its wings brush against another spirit. A girl's courage and fineness leaned with a great gratitude against a firmness and fineness greater than its own.
SUSPICION
Shipman, after the conclusion of the trial of Terry O'Brien, spent most of the time chopping wood. Trees that had been felled during the spring he sawed into lengths. Splitting and piling into neat kindling not only kept his muscles elastic, but somehow, as the wood piles mounted, gave him a primal sense of the old pioneers' fight against the cold and winter. That this wood found its way to the house of a needy widow with a little peaked boy about Pudge's age was one of Shipman's satisfactions. Long afterward, in the winter, the lawyer would wake of cold nights and think of the wind howling around the little valley house and of the center of heat that fed by his hands made it possible for two helpless people to escape that other awful Hand of Cold.
To souls like Watts, intent upon some high conception of honor and goodness, bent upon making themselves into a fit home for the Spirit or some part of Spirit that possesses them, there come moments of awful despair and groping. The lawyer, sawing until his back burned with sore muscles, was knowing this despair to its utmost, for the golden currents, the flowered tides of the Hudson River summer had nearly swamped him. The last weeks on the mountain top had been as those of a starving man surrounded with fruits and delicious spicy drinks—the bleak sense of failure, of dusty loneliness, of hurrying years and barren paths—his dry desert had opened out before him!
The man, with unutterable sense of hungry flesh and spirit, knew himself as one who inevitably had gotten into a barren trail. His inner eyes, panic stricken, got the strange vision of an ending—a going-out-of-the-world with no continuing strain of him left behind. No eyes that should be torched from his eyes; no lips that should turn his stuff of life into better words; no hand that like his should seek in darkness to find the keys to human breasts; no wife-comrade to speak comrade-words in the dark of loneliness and bafflement; no home that should make the abiding spot in a shifting world; no child; no race; no blood sent forward; no continuing city.
Shipman, halting with the perspiration streaming down his bare back, drew on a sweater. "Dear old Bowwow"—the lawyer sat down on his usual log. He pulled the dog over to him. "Tuck, let me pour this last howl into your comfortable and safe ear, and then I'm done. I'm haunted, old chap, haunted with a horrible feeling of ending—and—and—I want to go on——
"You see, Tuck, old beggar, I'm getting old, and when I die there will be no little chap or little sister Shipman to carry on the soul of me, yes, even the foolishnesses of me; I suppose," Watts inquired of his dog, "I suppose you have lots of little puppies somewhere, some blue-ribboned and with kennel degrees that make you pretty proud? But me, Tuck, I don't leave anything, not even a little adopted puppy. Nothing can laugh and say, 'My father was an awful duffer, but he made good salad dressing,' or 'My father licked me once, but we used to go fishing together.' Tuck," whispered the man fiercely, "I want a son, a little young 'un to keep alive the things I dream and hope and believe. I want another me."
The strong fingers in the dog's shaggy hair gripped upon the hateful idea of utter cessation of being, as many another has gripped. Let those who rage against Birth Control face rather this mystery of the man or woman who because of an ideal in the matter of human love dies without issue! Here is a Birth Control of much larger and more significant reach.
"The strange part of it is, Tuck, it's easy enough to get children, but to get children who shall, no matter what befalls them, be parented by high human love and faith, that is another thing." The deep eyes stared into the shallow dog eyes. "Well," sighed Shipman, "it's very seldom that I care like this. It's the beginning of autumn, that's all. You don't suppose, Tuck, that I really care?"
Yet the man knew remorselessly that in the past week things had happened about which he unutterably cared. The chance mingling with the young life of the Willow Roads had shown him to himself in a way that he could not ignore or brush aside. He was a human man, a soul and body undeveloped, unrealized, inorientate in the great human plan. He had blown, like life seed, down the dry roads of philosophy and introspection, and had lain for a while by the springs of youth and action until some hidden principle within him had germinated. Now he craved direction, fruition!
There floated through the mind of the lawyer the pictures of Minga, with her vivid capricious demands on him, her unwitting tempting of him; what would another man have done? Of what worth were his hesitations and restraints, Sard, with her high compulsions and swift fires? Why should he, Shipman, have let these fresh wonders of womanhood flit by like shadows? He groaned, knowing why—because do what he would, think what he would, Eleanor Ledyard held him. The woman of ice, the enshrined mystery of woman whom another man had called "wife," but who, Shipman believed, had never been true soul-wife, controlled his, Shipman's, deepest, most inaccessible self.
Of course, what had come to him was his own choice. There were many ways a man might take to come to grips with active life. Cowardly men, sly men or men who had not thought the thing out had taken these ways. Cynical men took them and then wondered why their lives were forever hurt by smirched and bleared life pictures, pictures that stayed in their minds. The ways of such men were not for him. Passion in its highest, most superb moments, Shipman knew himself to be capable of, but devotion, tenderness, the fair way of the approach of men and women to each other's mystery was what his nature craved. His love principle was not that of a hotmoment of gratification. It was of the long, slow endeared proving of devotion. Plunged in thought, driven to his body's uttermost endurance with the sense of stirred, hungry, unsatisfied, uncompleted things, the lawyer at a footfall angrily raised his head.
"Curse it, can't I be alone?" demanded Watts unreasonably. "Get out, will you?" He did not turn his head. "Get out," he called curtly. "This is private property; can't you read the signs?"
The footfall paused and a voice came quietly, "I am Colter, Judge Bogart's man. Could you see me a few moments?"
With a smothered word the lawyer turned, smiling at his own rudeness, and held out his hand.
"I thought it was some Curiosity Bump climbing up here. I'm not at all sure this sort of life is good for one. It makes one want to hog the very air." Watts, still smiling, looked keenly into the eyes of his visitor. Suddenly he glanced about him for Friar Tuck. "Well, by all pedigreed pups," he breathed, "Tuck viséd you, did he? Let you pass? If he barked, I didn't hear him."
Colter, taking the cigarette from the case held out to him, returned the searching gaze straightly. It was Shipman's method to put any who sought him out instantly on a harmonious social ground. This was Judge Bogart's hired man. It was also Sard's protégé, but more than that it was Shipman's private enigma. The situation was tense with possibilities for both men. Colter answered without self-consciousness.
"Dogs don't always bark at everyone." He wasthoughtful for a moment. Lighting the cigarette and pushing the match end under his worn canvas shoe, he remarked simply, "The only dogs I can remember barking at me are the shepherd dogs of Greece. And," laughingly indicating the little village up the river, "the dogs of Morris when I was tramping it."
Watts, rolling his own cigarette, looked up idly.
"You've been in Greece?" As he asked the question, the lawyer, by what process of intuition he himself could not understand, anticipated the answer. "Excavating?"
Colter nodded. "I think I was with the American School at Athens for a year or two. It would seem that I had some little knowledge about soils." He hesitated in the curious way with which all who had known him had grown familiar. The intense fire-blue eyes concentrated on the placid river as on some clouded crystal of his opaque past. He seemed curiously like a fisherman watching for some bite of memory on his tremulous reaching line, lifting the empty hook time and again.
"Soils," remarked the regardful lawyer, "must have their own poetry."
The other hesitated, then as if quite forgetful where he was or on what errand he had come, Colter responded evenly, "They have an interest like that of a profound book, quite outside of what one assays or digs for. There are enough adventures in soils right around this Hudson River section back through the states of New York and New Jersey to make an Iliad."
"Hum." Shipman inhaled his cigarette smoke, which flowed through his deep nostrils; with a curious lowering of the eyelids over the profound dark of his eyes, he let one hand drop loosely over his knee. It was the lawyer's instinctive relaxed indifferent pose of listening and watching; listening for false voice tones, watching for shifting glimmers and lights of evasion and deceit, for the curious betrayal in eyelids and lip muscles.
"Soils, however, would hardly recommend themselves as exciting to the average man."
The other man smiled for a second and glanced at the lawyer with a free relish of the subject. "They say young men need occasional wars to stimulate their sense of adventure." The quiet voice was ironical, and Colter waved a disparaging hand. "This river," he said; "think of the poetry and adventure of the great minds born on its banks. Think of the poetry and adventure for science and enterprise still to come along its banks as a great Water Road," he indicated a slow train of freight cars on the opposite shore, "and as one of the great verses in the Odyssey of Trade. Why, leaving out the Poem of Hauling, I suspect that back of these hills there are important contributions to history and geology and art. There must be Indian burying grounds filled with the half ossified Indian chiefs, their pottery and tribal implements." Colter, leaning on his arms, apparently lost in some pleasant fancy of his own, smoked dreamily. "To find these things is better adventure than plunging a bayonet into another man's stomach," he smiled.
Shipman's eyes, however, remained half closed. This was all very pretty. The chap had perhaps been a soldier, and attended a military school. He might have taken courses as a war engineer. Yet a clever cracksman or modern safe technician would get up a long lingo like this, especially if he wanted to "put something over," to sound the mental habits, resources and association of the other man, catalogue them for some confidence scheme of his own. Watts crossed one leg over the other and smoked at the sky. His back was to the river which the other man sat facing. His frequent sharp looks were swift and incisive. So far the lawyer had made no effort to find out Colter's errand. There was all the time in the world; meanwhile there was a girl down there with a girl's romantic sense of faith and belief in this man, probably a farceur and trickster. It might be his, Shipman's, bitter job to have to go to this girl as her friend and tell her the truth.
"I can see that you take a good deal of interest in such things." Then, not without some marveling on the part of the lawyer, the two plunged into an absorbed discussion of seeps and sheds, of green marl and sandstone, of clay gravel and sand, of mineral waters and sources of potash and phosphates, the problems of tunneling and boring, the opening up of this and that manufacture and industry, the prophecies of latent oils and resins and cements.
The lawyer, thoroughly enjoying it, yet obstinately fancied that he sensed some insecurity, some too-varied mingling of knowledge back of it. So, he toldhimself, might any high-powered confidence man give the right answers and take the right cues. There were books nowadays, compendiums of knowledge. Just reading modern advertisements made a man's mind agile and slick.
"So you've been in Greece." Shipman was watchful, at the same time smoothly disarming. He gently flicked the ashes from his cigarette. "You must know Gnossus, Crete, Andritsena, and, let's see," warily, "the name of that mountain temple that the French-man discovered."
Colter's face lightened enthusiastically. "Bassae." He looked interestedly into the lawyer's face. The other paused a few moments.
"You remember such things?" remarked the lawyer significantly.
"Yes," with eagerness, "I do. The Greek hasn't gotten away from me." Colter looked almost happily into Shipman's face. "A great deal comes back along academic lines," he faltered.
"Um!" Shipman tossed away his cigarette. He did not light another. He loafed against the back of the tree, his fingers lightly and speculatively tapping on his little silver match-box, his lips half whistling while his mind ran over possible and probable things. He reviewed everything he had ever seen of Colter, particularly the man's eyes that day on the Hackensack, looking into his own with their look of appeal, "Who am I?" Very gently, without turning his head, with voice unemotional, undramatic, the lawyer now asked his own question.
"Who are you? Why do you conceal who you are?"
Colter, who had as he talked been dreamily staring at the river, sprang quickly back to an attitude of attention. Every motion he made, every slightest movement of hand or eyelash or the corners of lips, was under a remorseless observation, that of a genius for reading human beings.
"Who are you?" The question was repeated very quietly, but now it had the note of inexorable authority. It was asked on behalf of Sard, whose trusting face and figure made it on Shipman's lips, stern, uncompromising.
Colter, his face flushing, rose. The man had changed in a deadly sort of way. His head from which he had removed the cap sunk suddenly forward as if his face could not look into that old enigma "Who am I?" The hair, swept back in its curious boy-like wave, was of vital copper under which Shipman noted a very few gray hairs which seemed curiously premature for the face opposite. The white skin, slightly freckled, had a youthful, good modeling; the face bones made it of pure English build. Shipman, puzzled, tried to analyze the curious look of sorrow and patient suffering on it. His gaze went to one or two very small scars as of smallpox.
One or two very small scars, as of smallpox!The lawyer stared at the white teeth showing under a mustached lip set to a gaunt look of bravery and mental struggle.
"I beg your pardon," said the other, "I had forgotten—forgotten myself. You treated me like a friend, and I went along easily. Things came easily—I was remembering," Colter sat up, his hands working at his belt. "Things came to me, but," he shook his head, "you ask who I am."
The man turned the old mask of suffering on his interlocutor and shook his head. If the thing was acting, it was prodigious acting. Shipman told himself that such acting had gotten Sard's soul away from her. It should not, however, have her entire! That face with its strange look of sorrow suddenly maddened the lawyer. He straightened. This mask must be torn off. This charlatan must be shown up. Now an old vulpine habit of the court-room came on the legal face.
"Who are you?" Shipman thrust his chin forward in a curious wolfish way; his mouth grinned while his eyes stared implacably. It was the old terrorizing third degree method. The method of which the lawyer in his better moments was secretly ashamed, but on which he knew any human reserve could be broken. Watts Shipman, with a kind of battle scent, felt himself to be pitted against something too shrewd, too delicately perceptive and elusive, to respond to other methods. And, well, the lawyer was not accustomed to being beaten at his own game! His glance, like a look of dreadful night, a look of knowledge of all human hiding, turned on the man. It was as if with incandescent power he would trace the very vitals, sift the fugitive thought and judgment, drive to the wall all subterfuges, snap handcuffs on the very shadow inthe eyes, see the very juices and chemistry of the living, breathing soul and body before him.
"Who are you?"
The other man, with a man's defiance, some dignity and assurance as of bygone things, had risen. "Of course, you had a right to ask that," he said slowly. "But I wish you had not because—because——" He passed his hand wearily over his forehead. "It is hard for me to keep things clear, to go straight ahead. I came up to you here to ask for work."
"To ask for work?"
"I hoped," said Colter simply, "that you could give me some suggestion. Judge Bogart has asked me to leave."
In the silence that followed the lawyer tried to keep intense curiosity and anxiety from his eyes. Involuntarily Sard's name came to his lips. Stealing a look at the other man, he felt that Colter would also lock his uncertain lips on that name.
On the pause the flood of intelligence that swept through the lawyer brought obstinate anger and resentment. "Hog," he breathed as once before, "hog!" He could see Sard's wild dismay, her sense of shame as of someone who had been untrustworthy, the poor child's friendlessness. "Hog," said the lawyer in the bitter back room of his mind, "animal!"
Yet was not the Judge, the father of the girl, right? Could a man who knew the world allow a thing so radiantly impulsive her instinctive freedoms with an interloper, a rapscallion, someone who dodged on his tracks, played a worn-out game of ignorance as tohis own identity, the responsibility he had in the world?
"Who are you?" repeated Shipman steadily. Then as a thought struck him, "Why did Judge Bogart ask you to leave?" The lawyer bethought himself of the "word test" in psycho-analysis. What word would make this fellow change, cringe, become maudlin, explanatory?
There was a short silence until the other man replied calmly, "I should prefer not going into that."
Suddenly, to the lawyer's enormous surprise, a curious thing happened. Colter, after taking a few nervous steps back and forth, came up to him, holding out his hand, and with an air almost winning in its friendliness, said, "Good-bye, I'm sorry I bothered. You see, I hoped you could help me to get work. If not, I must go."
The lawyer studied him. "What kind of work?" he asked curtly.
"Any kind to get food and lodging while I wait."
"Wait for what?"
"For things to come back to me," said Colter simply. "I think things are beginning to get clearer. Just now when we talked," he waved his hand, "doors opened all around me. I felt myself back in myself. The true me—I—you see, I am in much better health."
The man stood there irresolute, the eyes wavering in their intensity of attempted remembrance, some look of assurance and confidence alternating with the old shifting look of dread and dismay that at moments still swept the fine drawn face. It was this look ofshifting dread that had always kept the lawyer suspicious. What had this man done that could give to strong eyes like that the averted haunted look they sometimes held? His manner changing with a half apologetic smile, he turned to his visitor.
"I take it you've been a scientific man, college-bred. Have you by any chance a degree?" Shipman almost laughed as he asked it.
The other knit his brows, and returned the look earnestly.
"Would you believe me if—if I tell you what I have come to believe, what I think is possible, would you think me crazy?"
Then a slow sense of what had been of the man's horror dawned on the lawyer. "If amnesia were true, if one were dimly conscious of one's life paths and had somehow, somewhere been swept out of these paths, and there were no landmark to help one go back, why then," the grim mouth shut on the doubts. Shipman nodded. There was something in the nod that the other man in his helpless gentleness comprehended. The nod said, "I don't believe you. I don't trust you, but I won't take advantage of you." It was hardly akin to Sard's whole-souled trust.
One arm crossed behind him, Colter began pacing restlessly up and down the small space where the tree-chopping and wood-sawing had made a little theatre. He spoke rapidly, disconnectedly. "I have come to believe that I have been a college man. I even believe that I have had certain honors. There have been achievements along scientific lines. I can so far remember nothing in sequence back of the day Miss Bogart found me. Since that I have a perfect power of memory." The man halted and seemed to wait with a strained patience for things to pour in on the open sensitive plate of his healing memory. At last, fishing in an inner pocket, he held out a little book bound in green vellum. It was very worn and had evidently been constantly read. "I have always had this book, wherever I have been. For months it was the one real thing. It was here, tucked back in a sort of envelope in the cover, that a week ago I found an old letter from a man I once knew. When I try to connect my memories with this man something profoundly horrible sweeps me, and—and I grow full of panic."
Watts, with suspicions he could not control, reached out for the book. At the same time he looked for anything that might further identify this mysterious Colter. He peered almost with anger into a face so fine and tempered in its sad look of opaque visions. Turning the opening leaves, Shipman read in the little book, "Oxford, December 25, 19—to M. L. from his fellow gypsy, Tarrant."
"Tarrant. Tarrant," the name arrested the lawyer. He turned sobered eyes upon Colter. "Who is Tarrant?" he asked. Watts, with an annoyed expression, wrinkled his brows. Where in thunder had he heard that name Tarrant?
"I do not know," said Colter, "yet somehow, I believe it is someone I have known."
Suddenly, as in a lovely picture, the man saw a June garden with the Ramapo Mountains back of it.He saw distant daisy fields, a little white gate, the tall wands of purple and blue canterbury bells; a little boy sat cutting out paper dolls and a woman, whose dark blue eyes were shy with him and whose voice had faltered as she had told him a story and who had shown him a picture in a locket that she had drawn up warm from her white breast. The woman's voice was always dreamily in Shipman's memory. Now it told him a story.
The story of a West African expedition that had ended fatally, disastrously, where the men died like sheep of smallpox, where George Ledyard's brother, the famous biologist, Martin Ledyard, had striven for the lives of the men, but had only been able to save three. Then Dr. Ledyard had rowed down the tropical river with the body of his dearest friend, the surgeon, Tarrant, in a canoe made from a hollow tree. The natives, having deserted them, had left the scientific party without canoes. Tarrant, Martin Ledyard's dearest friend, his brother-in-science!
There was a long silence before the lawyer looked up into the face of that man who walked up and down, his russet head erect, one arm crossed behind him on his back. Colter's face, absorbed, earnest, rational, had yet that curious look of hesitancy and bafflement that the lawyer began to know was the thing in which he had always disbelieved, the thing he had scouted, amnesia. The lawyer's knowledge of shell-shock, of trance, of the results of profound and tragic sorrow, served him now. He could no longer repudiate this evident spiritual and mental submersion.
But what would cause amnesia, apart from trying physical conditions? Not even horrible experiences in West African jungles with one's friends dying consecutively of smallpox. The loss of a man's friend? Not altogether. Illness, exposure? Not altogether. Shock?Shock?
Watts Shipman, plunged in thought, searched in his imagination for the one shock that might have shut the doors of memory. Colter, looking patiently at him, hazarded a suggestion.
"That book," motioning to it, "that book is a sort of talisman. Sometimes it brings back whole sequences of memory, and then that letter that you see speaks of men of science, who are living to-day, as if I and the writer had known them together."
Watts laughed, and turned away with something like a sneer.
"Awfully clever, old chap. I've no doubt you've done this successfully many times, but," the lawyer turned abruptly, "I have seen a good deal, you know." Sharply, "Now drop all this memory-camouflage. Tell me who you are, why you're here, what knocked you out, and I'll give you any old job you want—come," said Watts authoritatively. "You've been a cultivated man, no doubt about that. You've traveled; you're a 'has-been'! You've come a cropper some way—drink, dope, women," he looked narrowly into the still white face. "Some disgrace, perhaps some tragedy—you're ashamed of something."
It was so brutal, so abrupt, that it had its immediate result. There was a long and very curious silence. It was as if the two men staring at each other had been fighting a secret fight under the open one of incredulity and effort to reveal. Both of them under the threshold of intelligence knew what that secret fight was. It was Sard! All harmony had vanished. Something hard and unlovely had taken its place. It was as if the two worked desperately to create a wall between them and the wall was now finished. It was an inevitable wall of a girl's fresh vibrant personality.
But Colter, without emotion, with a murmured apology for having intruded, turned to go. "Perhaps I was mistaken," he said, his face and voice controlled as usual. He had the usual and somewhat helpless courtesy of one unable to fight with another man's weapons of prestige and tradition. But on the riven, sorrow-lined face was an expression of forbearance and pure masculine sweetness such as only fine habits and lofty associations can create. He held out his hand. "Thank you for giving me your time," he said gravely.
Friar Tuck came nosing along the ground, following up some poem of scent of which he had begun the first verse at fiveA. M.Shipman, his hand reaching out for the dog's devoted head, dug deep into the heavy neck fur. Something on the lawyer's face was torn and of queer struggle. He stood there tousling the dog, letting his own body be half swayed this way and that by the slight playful fracas. Suddenly the dark-browed lawyer looked up at the retreatingfigure. He scowled horribly. "Damn it!" he called out explosively, "damn it! Stay where you are!"
At the other's surprised pause, his look of inquiry, Shipman strode forward. He held out his own hand. "Shake." He made the strange awkward picture of ultimate manhood, of the true warrior type who vanquishes himself before any other enemy. The man who will not stand out against the assault of a finer soul. "Colter," said the lawyer sharply, "I'm an ass, a cad, and you are a gentleman."
At the slight quick color on the other's face, Shipman stumbled doggedly on. "Yes, sir, I'll be hanged if I can believe that about the amnesia. I never saw any and I never had any, and I haven't got in all the evidence yet, but I know one thing. You are a gentleman—curse it!" said the lawyer standing there. "If you mustn't think me a yellow dog—now," said Shipman, standing straight, his professional manner returning, his hands on Tuck's neck, "I've been observing something and remembering some things and I can't help wondering——"
There was very little answering interest in the other's face. The wall was still between them, and Colter, some idea driving him, was for getting away. Seeing this, the lawyer, with an inevitable boyish sense of coup, hastily pulled a wallet from the pocket of his coat lying on a log. Taking a long newspaper clipping from it, he placed it before the other's eyes. "Do you know that face?" he asked eagerly. There was a cut of a man's head in the article.
Colter gravely took the clipping. Then, as he readthe headline, he seemed to shrink. His intense blue eyes in awful inquiry went to Shipman's.
"George Ledyard Forges and Embezzles." The man stood there a long while, the paper dropping in his hand. He read no more; his dry lips worked; once or twice he passed his hand over his face. At last, "That is what I saw on the steamer," he muttered slowly. "I saw this heading on the wireless bulletin on the steamer in which I was coming home. It made me ill. I was already weak, had fever. I went to my cabin and can remember no more." Suddenly Colter looked at the lawyer. "You will have to help me," he began in a firm voice; "things are rushing in on me. Tarrant; my brother's death, dishonor, the hospital. I got away from the hospital—I—I—help me," beseeched Colter thickly. He staggered, both hands out toward the lawyer. "I must keep my head clear. I can't let things sweep in too fast. I must keep my head clear," groaned the man. "Oh, for her sake, for her sake," he muttered. "Don't you see—for her sake!"
The man stared with silent appeal. The strong tides of memory poured through his eyes. With hands desperately tossed up, with a body that seemed to snap under one groan, he fell unconscious at Shipman's feet.