Kitabı oku: «The Helpers», sayfa 19

CHAPTER XXXII

For what reason Constance, left alone in the house of the dead, went softly from the lighted room to kneel at the bedside of the sleeping children in the lean-to beyond – to kneel with her face in her hands and her heart swelling with emotions too great for any outlet save that of sorrowful beseechings, – let those adjudge who have passed in some crucial moment from loss to gain, and back to loss again. There was a pitiful heart cry in the prayer for help because she knew now that love, mighty and unreasoning, must be reckoned with in every future thought of this man; love heedless of consequences, clinging first to an imagined ideal, and now to the sorrowful wreck of that ideal; love lashed into being, it may be, by the very whip of shame, acknowledged only to be chained and dungeoned in the Castle of Despair, but alive and pleading, and promising yet to live and plead though hope were dead.

It was thus that Margaret found her an hour later; and in the darkness of the little room the true-hearted Irish girl knelt beside her saint, with her strong arms around the weeping one, and a sob of precious sympathy in the outpouring of words.

"There now – there now, Miss Constance! is it kneeling here and crying for these poor left ones that you are? Sure it's the Holy Virgin herself that'll be mothering them, and the likes of them. And Owen'll be doing his part, too. It's a changed man he is."

Constance shook her head. She was too sincere to let the lesser reason stand for the greater, even with Margaret.

"I do grieve for them, Margaret; but – but it isn't that."

"It isn't that, do you say? Then I know full well what it is, and it's the truth I'm going to tell you, Miss Constance, for all the promisings he made me give him. 'Tis Mr. Jeffard's money that's to go for the funeral, and it was him left it with me to give to Owen. He told me you'd not take it from him, and 'twas his own free gift. Ever since he came back he's been giving me money for the poor ones, and making me swear never to tell you; but it was for your sweet sake, Miss Connie, and not for mine. I'd want to die if you didn't believe that."

"Oh, Margaret! are you telling me the truth? I do so want to believe it!"

Margaret rose and drew her confessor to the half-open door; to the bedside of the sheeted one.

"A little while ago she was alive and talking to you, Miss Constance, and you believed her because you knew she was going fast. If I'd be like that, I'd tell you the same."

"I believe you, Margaret – I do believe you; and, oh, I'm so thankful! It would break my heart to have you go back now!"

"Don't you be worrying for me. Didn't I say once that the devil might fly away with me, but I'd not live to leave him have the good of it? When that time comes, Miss Constance, it's another dead woman you'll be crying over. And now you'll go home and take your rest; the good old father is waiting on the doorstep for you."

Even with his daughter, Stephen Elliott was the most reticent of men; and on the little journey up the river front and across the viaduct he plodded along in silence beside her, waiting for her to speak if she had anything to say. Constance had a heart full to overflowing, but not of the things which lend themselves to speech with any father; and when she broke the silence it was in self-defense, and on the side of the commonplace.

"Have you decided yet where you will go?" she asked, knowing that the arrangements for the prospecting trip were all but completed.

"N – no, not exactly. Except that I never have gone with the rush, and I don't mean to this time. There's some pretty promising country around up back of Dick's mountain, and I've been thinking of that."

"I wish you would go into the Bonanza district," she said. "If I'm to stay with Dick and Myra, it will be a comfort to know that you are not very far away."

The old man plodded another square before he succeeded in casting his thought into words.

"I was wondering if that wasn't the reason why I want to go there. I'm not letting on to anybody about it, but I'm getting sort of old and trembly, Connie; and you're about all I have left."

She slipped her arm an inch or two farther through his. "Must it be, poppa? Can't we get along without it? I'll be glad to live like the poorest of them, if we can only be together."

"I know; you're a good daughter to me, Connie, and you'd go into the hospital on Dr. Gordon's offer to-morrow, if I'd say the word. But I think the last strike I made rather spoiled me. I got sort of used to the flesh-pots, and I haven't got over feeling for my check-book yet. I guess I'll have to try it once more before we go on the county."

She would have said more had there been more to say. But her arguments had all been exhausted when the prospecting fever had set in, and she could only send him forth with words of heartening and a brave God-speed.

"I'm not going to put things in the way," she said; "but I'd go with you and help dig, if you'd let me. The next best thing will be to have you somewhere within reach, and I shall be comforted if you can manage to keep Topeka Mountain in sight. But you won't."

"Yes, I will, daughter; the string pulls about as hard at my end as it does at yours, and I'll tell you what I'll do. The gulches that I had in mind are all up at the head of Myriad Creek, and I'll ship the 'stake' to Dick, and make the Myriad a sort of outfitting camp. How will that strike you?"

"That will be fine," she said; adding, in an upflash of the old gayety: "and when you've located your claim, Myra and I will come and turn the windlass for you."

They were climbing the stairs to the darkened suite on the third floor, and at the door Constance found a telegraph messenger trying to pin a non-delivery notice to the panel. She signed his blank by the hall light, and read the message while her father was unlocking the door and lighting the lamp.

"It is from Myra," she explained; "and it's good news and bad. Do you remember what Dick was telling us the other evening about his drunken blacksmith?"

"The fellow that went into the blast-choke after the dead man?"

"Yes. He is down with mountain fever, and Myra says nothing but good nursing will save him. Dick has got his story out of him at last; he is Margaret Gannon's father."

"Humph! what a little world this is! I suppose you will send Margaret right away?"

"I shall go with her to-morrow morning. I'll tell Dick what you are going to do, and you can come when you are ready."

The old man nodded acquiescence. "It'll be better for you to go along; she'll be all broke up. Want me to go and wire Dick?"

"If you will. I should have asked the boy to wait, but he was gone before I had opened the envelope. Tell Dick to keep him alive at any cost, and that we'll be there to-morrow evening."

When her father was gone, Constance sat down to piece out the discoveries, comforting and harrowing, of the foregone hour, and to set them over against each other in a field which was as yet too near to be retrospective. She tried to stand aside for herself, and to see and consider only those to whom her heart went out in loving compassion and sympathy; but it was inevitable that she should finally come to a re-reading of the letter taken from its hiding-place in the photograph frame. She dwelt upon it with a soft flush spreading slowly from neck to cheek, reading it twice and yet once again before she laid it in the little wall-pocket of a grate and touched a match to it.

"For his sake and for mine," she said softly, as she watched it shrivel and blacken in the flame. "That is what I must do – burn my ships so that I can't go back."

The charred wraith of the letter went up the chimney in the expiring gasp of the flame, and there was the sound of a familiar step in the corridor. She went quickly to open the door for the late visitor. It was Lansdale, come to say what must be said on the eve of parting, and to ask for his answer to a conditional plea made in a moment when the consumptive's optimism had carried him off his feet.

CHAPTER XXXIII

The periods of the scene-shifter, in life as in life's mimicking on any stage, have fallen into disesteem. In any flight of fancy or plodding journey of fact these are flat countries to be traversed; interregnums which, however replete with incident for the actors themselves, are deemed alike unworthy of the playwright's outworking or the chronicler's recording. To the audience waiting beyond the footlights these are mere breathing spaces of music-hastened minutes standing for whatever lapses of days, weeks or months the story of the play involves; but for the scene-shifter they are gaps toil-filled, with fierce strivings and wrestlings and doughty compellings of the animate and inanimate perversities.

None the less, for the toiler behind the scenes there are compensations, for the audience, the entr'acte is a solution of continuity, more or less skillfully bridged, according to the playwright's gift; but the worker of transformations knows no break in the action. For him the story of the play is complete, marching evenly to its climax through spoken line and drop-curtained interregnum.

The curtain has rung down upon an interior in an apartment house. It is to rise upon a flashlight picture of a summer night scene in a mountain-girt valley. The walls of the homelike interior vanish, and in their stead dim reaches of the forest-clad mountains suggest themselves. A stream tumbles over the boulders in its bed with a hollow roar hinting at canyoned plungings above; and on the margin of it a quaking aspen blinks its many-lidded eyes in the light of a camp fire.

Against the pillared background of forest, primeval firs whose sombre greens become murky black in the firelight, a campers' wagon is drawn up; and the picket pins of the grazing horses are driven in a grass grown extension of the glade to the right. There is a silken whisper abroad in the night, rising and falling upon the sound waves of the tumbling stream: the voices of the trees as they call to each other in the night wind pouring softly down from the sky-pitched peaks.

The scene is set and the actors are in their places. They are two men clad in flannel shirts and brown duck overalls and shooting-coats. One of them is bearded and bronzed, with the well-knit figure of conscious strength. The other is of slighter frame, and on his clean-shaven face the prolonged holiday in the open is but now beginning to impress the stamp of returning health and vigor. The bearded man is on his back beside the fire, with his clasped hands for a pillow and an extinct pipe between his teeth. The clean-shaven one is propped against the bole of a tree; his eyes are closed, and his pipe has slipped from his fingers.

A brand falls into the glowing mass of embers, and the sparks fly upward in a crackling shower. It is the prompter's call-bell. The man reclining at the tree-foot opens his eyes, and the bearded one sits up and feels mechanically for the tobacco pouch.

"Here it is," says Lansdale. "I was just about to fill up again when the realities slipped away. It's astonishing how one can sleep overtime in these upper levels."

The athletic one rises and stretches till his joints crack. "Been asleep, have you? So have I. There's no opiate in the world like a day's tramping in the altitudes. Freshen you up any?"

"As to body, yes. But I've had a curious dream – if it were a dream." Silence while the sob of the river rises and falls on the night wind, and then a half-hesitant query. "Jeffard, do you believe in presentiments?"

The bearded one is on his knees before the fire, pressing a live coal into the bowl of his pipe, and the answer is delayed.

"I don't know whether I do or not; I have never had one."

"But you have known of others having them, haven't you?"

"Of one other: but in that instance it was foreknowledge rather than a foreboding. The presentiment should have been mine; and I had none."

"Would you mind telling me about it?"

"No. It was while I was making the survey for a logging railway in Quebec. I expected to be out all summer, but in the middle of it the company called a halt and I went home. I hadn't wired or written, but when I reached Hinsdale my father was at the station to meet me. For three days my mother had been insisting that I would come, and to quiet her they had been meeting the trains. She died the next evening."

"And you had no premonition?"

"None whatever. For a month or more I had been beyond the reach of the mails; and I had left her in her usual health. It was a bolt out of a clear sky."

Again the brawling stream and the whispering leaves fill the gap of silence; and as before, Lansdale is the first to speak.

"I have always scouted such things, as sanity seems to demand. Stories with any element of the supernatural in them have never appealed to me because, however well authenticated, they were always stories, and never actual happenings in which I had any part. But for the last day or two I've had a growing sense of impending calamity, and I can't shake it off."

There is the brusquerie of heartening in Jeffard's rejoinder.

"Nonsense! It's only the imaginative part of you kicking against the pricks of a longish holiday."

"That is ingenious, but I can't quite accept it. I've eaten and slept with the imaginative fiend long enough to be pretty well acquainted with his vagaries. This is altogether different. It is precisely the feeling you have had just before a storm; a sense of depression as intangible as darkness, but quite as real. It was with me a few minutes ago when I fell asleep, and the dream seemed to be a part of it."

"Oh, dreams," says the scoffer; "I thought they had been accounted for by the dietists. I told you that last batch of panbread held possibilities. But go on and unload your dream. I'm shudder-proof."

Lansdale tells it circumstantially, keeping his pipe alight in the periods.

"It didn't seem like a dream; at least, not in the beginning of it. I was sitting here just as I am now, and you were on your back over there, with the pipe in your mouth. The surroundings were the same, except that the fire was burning low. I remember thinking that you must have fallen asleep, and wondering why the pipe didn't fall and wake you. After a time the roar of the stream seemed to quiet down, and I heard the clink of horseshoes upon stone. The sound came from across the stream, and as I looked I saw a trail and a horseman coming down it. It was all so real that I wondered why I hadn't noticed the trail before. The man rode down to the water's edge and made as if he would cross. I saw him quite distinctly, and thought it curious, because the fire was too low to give much light. He merely glanced at the stream, and then turned his horse's head and rode down the opposite bank. He passed out of sight among the trees, and a moment later I heard the horse's hoofs again, this time as if he were on a bridge of poles."

Jeffard has been listening with attention no more than decently alert, but at this point he breaks in to say: "You've been walking in your sleep. Go on."

"It was just here that the supernatural came in. I told you that the man had passed out of sight, but all at once I seemed to see him again. He was on a corduroy bridge crossing the stream, and I saw plainly what he did not, – that the bridge was unsafe, and that a step or two would plunge him into the torrent. I don't remember what followed, save that I tried to call out, first to him and then to you; but my voice seemed to be swallowed up in the thunder of the water. There was a little gap filled with fierce strugglings, and then I seemed to be here again, lying by the wagon with a blanket over me; and you were walking up and down with another man, – a stranger. That is all; except that I tried to tell you that you were wet through and would take cold, – tried and couldn't, and awoke."

Jeffard has risen to put another log on the fire.

"It's the panbread," he says, with the air of one who sweeps the board for a resetting of the pieces. But after a little he adds: "I was wondering how you came to know about the bridge. That is the only unaccountable twist in it."

"Is there a bridge?"

"Yes; it's just below that farther clump of aspens. But there is nothing the matter with it that I could see. I noticed it while I was picketing the horses."

"And is there a trail on the other side of the stream?"

"There is. There used to be a ford just here, but it was dangerous, and we built the bridge."

"Then you have been here before?"

"Yes, many times. I spent the better half of a summer and all of one winter in this valley. The Midas is just below here. I meant to surprise you to-morrow morning."

Lansdale's gaze is in the heart of the fire and his voice is low. "Do you know, Henry, I'm rather glad you didn't wait? Don't ask me why, because I can't tell you in terms divisible by the realities. But somehow the to-morrows don't seem to be assured."

"Oh, pshaw! that's your dream – and the panbread its father. If you had talked that way a month ago, when you were really living from hand to mouth" —

Lansdale spreads his hands palms down and looks at them.

"You promised me a new lease of life, Henry, and you've given it me, – or the key to it. I didn't believe it could be done, and my chief trouble in those first days was the thought that you'd have to bury me alone. And when we camped in a particularly rocky spot, I used to wonder how you would manage it."

Jeffard's smile is of grimness. "If you had mentioned it, I could have helped you off with that burden. These mountains are full of graves, ready-made; prospect holes, where the better part of many a man lies buried. Do you see that heap of earth and stone over yonder?"

Lansdale shades his eyes from the firelight and looks and sees.

"That is one of them. Just behind that heap there is a shaft with a windlass across it, and for six weeks two men worked early and late digging a hole, – which turned out to be an excellent well when the water came in and stopped them."

"And the water was bitter," says Lansdale. "Did you drink of it, Henry?"

"No; but the other man did, and he went mad."

Once more the stream and the sighing night wind share the silence. For many days Lansdale has been assuring himself that the golden moment for speech of the helpful sort must ultimately be made and not waited for. In the hour when he had consented to Bartrow's urgings he had been given to see his opportunity and had determined to grasp it, – had made the determination the excuse for sharing Jeffard's hospitality. He can look back upon that resolve now and see that it was perfunctory; that the prompting had been of duty and not at all of love for the man. But the weeks of close companionship have wrought more miracles than one, and not the least among them is a great amazement builded upon the daily renewal of Jeffard's loving-kindnesses. For the man with the world-quarrel has been a brother indeed; nurse, physician, kinsman, and succoring friend; with the world-quarrel put aside from the moment of outsetting, and with apparently no object in life less worthy than that of fighting a vicarious battle for a sick man. The summary of it is humanizing, and the last upholdings of the crust of reserve break down in the warmth of it.

"May I speak as the spirit moves, Henry?"

"If you think I deserve it. Why shouldn't you?"

"It is a question of obligations rather than of deservings, – my obligations. No brother of my own blood could have done more for me than you have."

"And you want to even it up?"

"No; but I want to tell you while I may that it has come very near to me in these last few days. At first I was inclined to make another query of it, and to speculate as to your probable motive; but latterly I've come to call it by its right name."

Jeffard shakes his head slowly, and removes his pipe to say: "Don't make any more mistakes, Lansdale. I'm neither better nor worse than I was that night when I told you the story of the man and his temptation. I know what you mean and what you would say; but this experiment and its results – the twenty odd pounds of flesh you have put on, and the new lease of life they stand for – mean more to me than they do to you."

"I don't begin to understand the drift of that," says Lansdale.

"No? I wonder if you would understand and believe if I should tell you the truth; if I should confess that my motive, so far as you are concerned, is entirely selfish?"

"Since understanding implies belief, I shall have to say no to that. But you might try, – for your own satisfaction."

"It's altogether unprofitable; but perhaps it's your due. I'll have to go back a little to make it clear. In the old days we were pretty good friends, but I think you will admit that there have always been reservations. You haven't known me and I haven't known you as friends of the David and Jonathan sort know each other. Isn't that so?"

Lansdale is constrained to say "Yes," wishing it were otherwise.

Jeffard refills his pipe and fishes for another live coal in the fire-fringe. The g-r-r-rh of the grazing horses comes from the near-by glade, and again the silence begins to grow. Suddenly he says: "Let's drop it, Lansdale, and talk about something else."

"No, go on; nothing you can say will efface the brotherly fact."

"Very well, – if you will have it. You said you were inclined to question my motive. It was more than questionable; it was frankly selfish."

"Selfish? You'll have to spell it out large for me. From my point of view it seems rather the other way about. What had you to gain by saddling yourself with the care of a sick man?"

"I can't put it in words – not without laying myself open to the charge of playing to the gallery. But let me state a fact and ask a question. A year ago you thought it was all up with you, and you didn't seem to care much. A few months later I found you fighting for your life like a shipwrecked sailor with land in sight. What did it?"

That the lava-crust of reserve is altogether molten is evinced in Lansdale's straightforward reply.

"Love, – love for a woman. I think you must have known that."

"I did. That was why you were making the desperate fight for life; and that is why we are here to-night, you and I. I love the woman, too."

Lansdale shakes his head slowly, and an ineffable smile is Jeffard's reward.

"And yet you call it selfishness, Henry. Man, man! you have deliberately gone about to save my life when another might have taken it!"

"I shall reap where I have sown," says Jeffard steadily. "Latterly I have been living for one day, – the day when I can take you back to her in the good hope that she will forget what has been for the sake of what I have tried to make possible."

Once more Lansdale's gaze is in the glowing heart of the fire, and the light in his eyes is prophetic.

"Verily, you shall reap, Henry; but not in a field where you have sown. Don't ask me how I know. That's my secret. But out of all this will come a thing not to be measured by your prefigurings. You shall have your reward; but I crave mine, too. Will you give it me?"

"If it be mine to give."

"It is. Do justice and love mercy, Henry. That is the thing I've been trying to find words to say to you all these weeks."

Jeffard lays the pipe aside and does not pretend to misunderstand.

"Tell me what you would like to have me do."

"I think you must know: find the man who drank of the bitter waters and went mad, and give him back that which you have taken from him."

"Isn't there a possibility that I can do neither?"

"I can help you to do the first, – and for the other I can only plead. I know what you would say: that the man had forfeited his right; that he tried to kill you; that by all the laws of man's inventing this money is yours. But God's right and your debt to your own manhood are above all these. As your poor debtor, I'm privileged to ask large things of you; can't you break the teeth of it and shake yourself free of the money-dragon?"

Jeffard is afoot, tramping a monotonous sentry beat between the wagon and the fire. His rejoinder is a question.

"Do you know where James Garvin is to be found?"

"I don't, but Bartrow does."

"Why didn't he tell me?"

"Because Dick is merciful. The man is a criminal, and you could send him to the penitentiary."

"And Dick thought – and you have thought – that I would prosecute him. It was the natural inference, I suppose, – from your point of view. The man who would rob his partner wouldn't stumble over a little thing like that. Will it help you to sleep the sounder if I say that vengeance isn't in me? – wasn't in me even in the white heat of it?"

Lansdale nods assent. "I'm on the asking hand, and any concession is grateful. If you were vindictive about it, I'm afraid the major contention would be hopeless."

"But as it is you do not despair?"

"I am very far from despairing, Henry. You spoke lightly of our friendship a little while ago, and one time I should have agreed with you. But I know you better now, and the incredibility of this thing that you have done has been growing upon me. It's the one misshapen column in a fair temple. Won't you pull it down and set up another in its place, – a clean-cut pillar of uprightness, which will harmonize with the others?"

Jeffard stops short at the tree-bole, with his hand on Lansdale's shoulder.

"It has taken me five weeks to find out why you consented to come afield with me," he says. "It was to say this, wasn't it?"

"Just that," says Lansdale, and his voice is the voice of one pleading as a mother pleads. "Say you will do it, Henry; if not for your own sake or mine, for the sake of that which has brought us together here."

Jeffard has turned away again, but he comes back at that to stand before Garvin's advocate.

"It is a small thing you have asked, Lansdale," he says, after a time; "much smaller than you think. The pillar isn't altogether as crooked as it looks; there is something in the perspective. You know how the old Greek builders used to set the corner column out of the perpendicular to make it appear plumb. We don't always do that; sometimes we can't do it without bringing the whole structure down about our ears. But in this case your critical eye shall be satisfied. We'll go down to the mine in the morning and use Denby's wire. If Bartrow can find Garvin, you shall see how easily the dragon's teeth may be broken. Is that what you wanted me to say?"

Lansdale's answer is a quotation.

"'And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking … that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.' I've seen my reward and felt of it; and yours will come a little later, – in a way you little dream of. Pass the tobacco, and let's have another whiff or two before we turn in. I'm too acutely thankful to be sleepy."

For a peaceful half-hour they sit before the glowing embers, smoking placidly while their talk drifts hither and yon over the spent sea of boyhood and youth. It is a heartening half-hour, and at the end of it Jeffard rises to get the blankets from the wagon. Lansdale elects to sleep at his tree-root, and he is rolling himself in his blanket when Jeffard says:

"How about the presentiment? Have we tired it out?"

Lansdale laughs softly. "It's gone," he says. "Perhaps it was nothing more than an upheaval of conscience. I'm subject to that when I've anything on my mind. Good-night, and God bless you, Henry."

And so the curtain goes down upon the summer night scene in the mountain-girt valley, with the two men sleeping peacefully before the fire, and the stars shining softly in the patch of velvety sky overhead. The midnight ebb of the snow-fed stream has set in, and the throbbing roll of the water drum is muffled. The fire burns low. The whispering leaves are stilled, and the wind slipping down from the snow coifs, sinks to a sigh. The pinions of the night are folded, and darkness and murmurous silence wrap the mantle of invisibility around the camp in the glade.