← catalogue

Satan Sanderson

by Hallie Erminie Rives · English · Gutenberg #39689 · 481,752 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Satan Sanderson
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Satan Sanderson

Author: Hallie Erminie Rives

Illustrator: A. B. Wenzell


        
Release date: May 13, 2012 [eBook #39689]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39689

Credits: E-text prepared by David Edwards, Martin Pettit, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (http://archive.org)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SATAN SANDERSON ***


E-text prepared by David Edwards, Martin Pettit, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images
generously made available by Internet Archive (http://archive.org/)



Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
      file which includes the original illustrations.
      See 39689-h.htm or 39689-h.zip:
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/39689/pg39689-images.html)
      or
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39689/39689-h.zip)


      Images of the original pages are available through
      Internet Archive. See
      http://archive.org/details/satansanderson00riverich





SATAN SANDERSON

      *      *      *      *      *

Books by

HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES (Mrs. Post Wheeler)


A FURNACE OF EARTH

HEARTS COURAGEOUS
  Illustrated by A. B. Wenzell

THE CASTAWAY
  Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy

TALES FROM DICKENS
  Illustrated by Reginald B. Birch

SATAN SANDERSON
  Illustrated by A. B. Wenzell

      *      *      *      *      *


[Illustration]


SATAN SANDERSON

by

HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES

Author of
The Castaway, Hearts Courageous, etc.

With Illustrations by A. B. Wenzell







Indianapolis
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
Publishers

Copyright 1907
The Bobbs-Merrill Company

August

Press of
Braunworth & Co.
Bookbinders and Printers
Brooklyn, N. Y.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                      PAGE
      I AS A MAN SOWS                           1

     II DOCTOR MOREAU                          15

    III THE COMING OF A PRODIGAL               20

     IV THE LANE THAT HAD NO TURNING           32

      V THE BISHOP SPEAKS                      47

     VI WHAT CAME OF A WEDDING                 50

    VII OUT OF THE DARK                        60

   VIII "AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?"            68

     IX AFTER A YEAR                           75

      X THE GAME                               85

     XI HALLELUJAH JONES TAKES A HAND          95

    XII THE FALL OF THE CURTAIN               105

   XIII THE CLOSED DOOR                       108

    XIV THE WOMAN WHO REMEMBERED              115

     XV THE MAN WHO HAD FORGOTTEN             125

    XVI THE AWAKENING                         137

   XVII AT THE TURN OF THE TRAIL              147

  XVIII THE STRENGTH OF THE WEAK              155

    XIX THE EVIL EYE                          160

     XX MRS. HALLORAN TELLS A STORY           167

    XXI A VISIT AND A VIOLIN                  171

   XXII THE PASSING OF PRENDERGAST            179

  XXIII A RACE WITH DEATH                     187

   XXIV ON SMOKY MOUNTAIN                     198

    XXV THE OPEN WINDOW                       210

   XXVI LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT             222

  XXVII INTO THE GOLDEN SUNSET                229

 XXVIII THE TENANTLESS HOUSE                  238

   XXIX THE CALL OF LOVE                      250

    XXX IN A FOREST OF ARDEN                  259

   XXXI THE REVELATION OF HALLELUJAH JONES    269

  XXXII THE WHITE HORSE SKIN                  277

 XXXIII THE RENEGADE                          282

  XXXIV THE TEMPTATION                        289

   XXXV FELDER TAKES A CASE                   302

  XXXVI THE HAND AT THE DOOR                  305

 XXXVII THE PENITENT THIEF                    311

XXXVIII A DAY FOR THE STATE                   319

  XXXIX THE UNSUMMONED WITNESS                331

     XL FATE'S WAY                            335

    XLI FELDER WALKS WITH DOCTOR BRENT        339

   XLII THE RECKONING                         344

  XLIII THE LITTLE GOLD CROSS                 353

   XLIV THE IMPOSTOR                          360

    XLV AN APPEAL TO CAESAR                   369

   XLVI FACE TO FACE                          376

  XLVII BETWEEN THE MILLSTONES                384

 XLVIII THE VERDICT                           390

   XLIX THE CRIMSON DISK                      395

      L WHEN DREAMS COME TRUE                 397




SATAN SANDERSON




CHAPTER I

AS A MAN SOWS


"_To my son Hugh, in return for the care and sorrow he has caused me all
the days of his life, for his dissolute career and his desertion, I do
give and bequeath the sum of one thousand dollars and the memory of his
misspent youth._"

It was very quiet in the wide, richly furnished library. The May night
was still, but a faint suspiration, heavy with the fragrance of jasmin
flowers, stirred the Venetian blind before the open window and rustled
the moon-silvered leaves of the aspens outside. As the incisive
professional pronouncement of the judge cut through the lamp-lighted
silence, the grim, furrowed face with its sunken eyes and gray military
mustaches on the pillow of the wheel-chair set more grimly; a girl
seated in the damask shadow of the fire-screen caught her breath; and
from across the polished table the Reverend Henry Sanderson turned his
handsome, clean-shaven face and looked at the old man.

A peevish misogynist the neighborhood labeled the latter, with the
parish chapel for hobby, and for thorn-in-the-flesh this only son Hugh,
a black sheep whose open breaches of decorum the town had borne as best
it might, till the tradition of his forebears took him off to an eastern
university. A reckless life there and three wastrel years abroad, had
sent him back to resume his peccadilloes on a larger scale, to quarrel
bitterly with his father, and to leave his home in anger. In what rough
business of life was Hugh now chewing the cud of his folly? Harry
Sanderson was wondering.

"Wait," came the querulous voice from the chair. "Write in 'graceless'
before the word 'desertion'."

"_For his dissolute career and his--graceless--desertion_," repeated the
lawyer, the parchment crackling under his pen.

The stubborn antagonism that was a part of David Stires' nature flared
under the bushy eyebrows. "As a man sows!" he said, a kind of bitter
jocularity in the tone. "That should be the text, if this sermon of mine
needed any, Sanderson! It won't have as large an audience as your
discourses draw, but it will be remembered by one of its hearers, at
least."

Judge Conwell glanced curiously at Harry Sanderson as he blotted the
emendation. He knew the liking of the cross-grained and taciturn old
invalid--St. James' richest parishioner--for this young man of
twenty-five who had come to the parish only two months before, fresh
from his theological studies, to fill a place temporarily vacant--and
had stayed by sheer force of personality. He wondered if, aside from
natural magnetic qualities, this liking had not been due first of all to
the curious resemblance between the young minister and the absent son
whom David Stires was disinheriting. For, as far as mold of feature
went, the young minister and the ne'er-do-well might have been twin
brothers; yet a totally different manner and coloring made this likeness
rather suggestive than striking.

No one, perhaps, had ever interested the community more than had Harry
Sanderson. He had entered upon his duties with the marks of youth, good
looks, self-possession and an ample income thick upon him, and had
brought with him a peculiar charm of manner and an apparent incapacity
for doing things in a hackneyed way. Convention sat lightly upon Harry
Sanderson. He recognized few precedents, either in the new methods and
millinery with which he had invested the service, or in his personal
habits. Instead of attending the meeting of St. Andrew's Guild, after
the constant custom of his predecessor, he was apt to be found playing
his violin (a passion with him) in the smart study that adjoined the
Gothic chapel where he shepherded his fashionable flock, or tramping
across the country with a briar pipe in his mouth and his brown spaniel
"Rummy" nosing at his heels. His athletic frame and clean-chiselled
features made him a rare figure for the reading-desk, as his violin
practice, the cut of his golf-flannels, the immaculate elegance of his
motor-car--even the white carnation he affected in his buttonhole--made
him for the younger men a goodly pattern of the cloth; and it had
speedily grown to be the fashion to hear the brilliant young minister,
to memorize his classical aphorisms or to look up his latest quotation
from Keats or Walter Pater. So that Harry Sanderson, whose innovations
had at first disturbed and ruffled the sensibilities of those who would
have preferred a fogy, in the end had drifted, apparently without
special effort, into a far wider popularity than that which bowed to the
whim of the old invalid in the white house in the aspens.

Something of all this was in the lawyer's mind as he paused--a
perfunctory pause--before he continued:

"_... I do give and bequeath the sum of one thousand dollars, and the
memory of his misspent youth._"

Harry Sanderson's eyes had wandered from the chair to the slim figure
of the girl who sat by the screen. This was Jessica Holme, the orphaned
daughter of a friend of the old man's early years, who had recently come
to the house in the aspens to fill the void left by Hugh's departure.
Harry could see the contour of throat and wrists, the wild-rose mesh of
the skin against the Romney-blue gown, the plenteous red-bronze hair
uncoiled and falling in a single braid, and the shadowy pathos of her
eyes. Clear hazel eyes they were, wide and full, but there was in them
no depth of expression--for Jessica Holme was blind. As the crisp
deliberate accent pointed the judicial period, as with a subterranean
echo of irrefutable condemnation, Harry saw her under lip indrawn, her
hands clasp tightly, then unclasp in her lap. Pliant, graceful hands, he
thought, which even blindness could not make maladroit. In the chapel
porch stood the figure of an angel which she had modelled solely by the
wonderful touch in the finger-tips.

"Go on," rasped the old man.

"_The residue of my estate, real and personal, I do give and bequeath to
my ward, Jessica Holme, to be and become--_"

He broke off suddenly, for the girl was kneeling by the chair, groping
for the restless hand that wandered on the afghan, and crying in a
strained, agitated voice: "No ... no ... you must not! Please, please! I
never could bear it!"

"Why not?" The old man's irritant query was belligerent. "Why not? What
is there for you to bear, I'd like to know!"

"He is your son!"

"In the eyes of the law, yes. But not otherwise!" His voice rose. "What
has he done to deserve anything from me? What has he had all his life
but kindness? And how has he repaid it? By being a waster and a
prodigal. By setting me in contempt, and finally by forsaking me in my
old age for his own paths of ribaldry."

The girl shook her head. "You don't know where he is now, or what he is
doing. Oh, he was wild and reckless, I have no doubt. But when he
quarrelled and left you, wasn't it perhaps because he was too
quick-tempered? And if he hasn't come back, isn't it perhaps because he
is too proud? Why, he wouldn't be your son if he weren't proud! No
matter how sorry he might be, it would make no difference then. I could
give him the money you had given me, but I couldn't change the fact.
You, his own father, would have disowned him, disinherited him, taken
away his birthright!"

"And richly he'd deserve it!" he snapped, his bent fingers plucking
angrily at the wool of the afghan. "He doesn't want a father or a home.
He wants his own way and a freedom that is license! I know him. You
don't; you never saw him."

"I never saw you either," she said, a little sadly.

"Come," he answered a shade more gently. "I didn't mean your eyes, my
dear! I mean that you never met him in your life. He had shaken off the
dust of his feet against this house before you came to brighten it,
Jessica. I've not forgiven him seven times; I've forgiven him seventy
times seven. But he doesn't want forgiveness. To him I am only 'the old
man' who refused to 'put up' longer for his fopperies and extravagances!
When he left this house six months ago, he declared he would never enter
it again. Very well--let him stay away! He shan't come back when I am in
my grave, to play ducks and drakes with the money he misuses! And I've
fixed it so that you won't be able to give it away either, Jessica. Give
me the pen," he said to the judge, "and, Sanderson, will you ring? We
shall need the butler to witness with you."

As Harry Sanderson rose to his feet the girl, still kneeling, turned
half about with a hopeless gesture. "Oh, won't you help me?" she said.
She spoke more to herself, it seemed, than to either of the men who
waited. Harry's face was in the shadow. The lawyer with careful
deliberation was putting a new pen into the holder.

"Sanderson," said the old man with bitter fierceness, lifting his hand,
"I dare say you think I am hard; but I tell you there has never been a
day since Hugh was born when I wouldn't have laid down my life for him!
You are so like! When I look at you, I seem to see him as he might have
been but for his own wayward choice! If he were only as like you in
other things as he is in feature! You are nearly the same age; you went
to the same college, I believe; you have had the same advantages and the
same temptations. Yet you, an orphan, come out a divinity student, and
Hugh--my son!--comes out a roisterer with gambling debts, a member of
the 'fast set,' one of a dissolute fraternity known as 'The Saints,'
whose very existence, no doubt, was a shame to the institution!"

Harry Sanderson turned slowly to the light. A strange panorama in that
moment had flashed through his brain--kaleidoscopic pictures of an
earlier reckless era when he had not been known as the "Reverend Henry
Sanderson." An odd, sensitive flush burned his forehead. The hand he had
outstretched to the bell-cord dropped to his side, and he said, with
painful steadiness:

"I think I ought to say that I was the founder, and at the time you
speak of, the Abbot of The Saints."

The pen rattled against the mahogany, as the man of law leaned back to
regard the speaker with a stare of surprise whetted with a keen edge of
satiric amusement. The old man sat silent, and the girl crouched by the
chair with parted lips. The look in Harry's face was not now that of the
decorative young churchman of the Sabbath surplice. It held a keen
electric sense of the sharp contrasts of life, touched with a wakeful
pain of conscience.

"I was in the same year with Hugh," Harry went on. "We sowed our wild
oats together--a tidy crop, I fancy, for us both. That page of my life
is pasted down. I speak of it now because it would be cowardly not to. I
have not seen Hugh since college closed four years ago. But then I was
all you have called him--a waster and a prodigal. And I was more; for
while others followed, I led. At college I was known as 'Satan
Sanderson'."

He stopped. The old man cleared his throat, but did not speak. He was
looking at Harry fixedly. In the pause the girl found his gnarled hand
and laid her cheek against it. Harry leaned an elbow upon the
mantelpiece as he continued, in a low voice:

"Colleges are not moral strait-jackets. Men have there to cast about,
try themselves and find their bearings. They are in hand-touch with
temptation, and out of earshot of the warnings of experience. The mental
and moral machine lacks a governor. Slips of the cog then may or may not
count seriously to character in the end. They sometimes signify only a
phase. They may be mere idiosyncrasy. I have thought that it stood in
this case," he added with the glimmer of a smile, "with Satan Sanderson;
he seems to me from this focus to be quite another individual from the
present rector of St. James."

"It is only the Hugh of the present that I am dealing with," interposed
the old man. For David Stires was just and he was feeling a grim respect
for Harry's honesty.

Harry acknowledged the brusque kindliness of the tone with a little
motion of the hand. As he spoke he had been feeling his way through a
maze of contradictory impulses. For a moment he had been back in that
old irresponsible time; the Hugh he had known then had sprung to his
mind's eye--an imitative idler, with a certain grace and brilliancy of
manner that made him hail-fellow-well-met, but withal shallow, foppish
and incorrigible, a cheap and shabby imitator of the outward manner, not
the inner graces, of good-fellowship. Yet Hugh had been one of his own
"fast set"; they had called him "Satan's shadow," a tribute to the
actual resemblance as well as to the palpable imitation he affected.
Harry shivered a little. The situation seemed, in antic irony, to be
reversing itself. It was as if not alone Hugh, but he, Harry Sanderson,
in the person of that past of his, was now brought to bar for judgment
in that room. For the instant he forgot how utterly characterless Hugh
had shown himself of old, how devoid of all desire for rehabilitation
his present reputation in the town argued him. At that moment it seemed
as if in saving Hugh from this condemnation, he was pleading for himself
as he had been--for the further chance which he, but for circumstances,
perhaps, had needed, too. His mind, working swiftly, told him that no
appeal to mere sentiment would suffice--he must touch another note. As
he paused, his eyes wandered to an oil portrait on the wall, and
suddenly he saw his way.

"You," he said, "have lived a life of just and balanced action. It is
bred in the bone. You hate all loose conduct, and rightly. You hate it
most in Hugh for the simple reason that he is your son. The very
relation makes it more impossible to countenance. He should be like
you--of temperate and prudent habit. But did you and he start on equal
terms? Your grandfather was a Standish; your ancestry was undiluted
Puritan. Did Hugh have all your fund of resistance?"

The old man's gaze for the first time left Harry's face. It lifted for
an instant to the portrait at which Harry had glanced--a picture of
Hugh's dark gipsy-like mother, painted in the month of her marriage, and
the year of her death--and in that instant the stern lines about the
mouth relaxed a little. Harry had laid his finger on the deepest cord of
feeling in the old man's gruff nature. The glow that had smoldered in
the cavernous eyes faded and a troubled cloud came to belie their former
wrath.

"'As a man sows,' you say, and you deny him another seeding and it may
be a better harvest. You shut the door;--and if you shut it, it may not
swing open again! With me it was the turning of a long lane. Hugh
perhaps has not turned--yet." A breath of that past life had swept anew
over Harry, the old shuddering recoil again had rushed upon him. It gave
his voice a curious energy as he ended: "And I have seen how far a man
may go and yet--come back!"

There was a pause. The judge had an inspiration. He folded the
parchment, and rose.

"Perhaps it would be as well," he said in a matter-of-fact way, "if the
signing be left open for the present. Last testaments, whatever their
provisions, are more or less serious matters, and in your case,"--he
nodded toward the occupant of the chair--"there is not the element of
necessitous haste. Of course," he added tentatively, "I am at your
service at any time."

He rose as he spoke, and laid the document on the table.

For a moment David Stires sat in silence. Then he said, with a glint of
the old ironic fire: "You should have been a special pleader, Sanderson.
There's no client too bad for them to make out a case for! Well ... well
... we won't sign to-night. I will read it over again when I am more
equal to it."

His visitors made their adieux, and as the door closed upon them, the
girl came to the wheel-chair and wistfully drew the parchment from his
hands.

"You're a good girl, Jessica," he said, "too good to a rascal you've
never known. But there--go to your room, child. I can ring for Blake
when I want anything."

For long the old man sat alone, musing in his chair, his eyes on the
painted portrait on the wall. The image there was just as young and fair
and joyous as though yesterday she had stood in bridal white beside
him, instead of so long ago--so long ago! His lips moved. "In return
for the care and sorrow," he muttered, "all the days of his life!"

At length he sighed and took up a magazine. He was thinking of Harry
Sanderson.

"How like!" he said aloud. "So Sanderson sowed his wild oats, too!...
When he stood there, with the light on his face--when he talked--I--I
could almost have thought it was Hugh!"

[Illustration]




CHAPTER II

DOCTOR MOREAU


Harry Sanderson and the judge parted at the gate, and Harry walked
slowly home in the moonlight.

The youthful follies that he had resurrected when he had called himself
his old nickname of "Satan Sanderson" he had left so far behind him, had
buried so deep, that the ironic turn of circumstance that had dragged
them into view, sorry skeletons, seemed intrusive and malicious. Not
that he was desirous of sailing under false colors; he had brought into
his new career more than a _soupcon_ of the old indifference to popular
estimation, the old propensity to go his own way and to care very little
what others thought of him. The sting was a nearer one; it was his own
present of fair example and good repute that recoiled with a fastidious
sense of abasement from the recollection.

As he stood in the library, his hand on the mantelpiece, he had been
painfully conscious of detail. He remembered vividly the half amused
smile of the lawyer, the silent, listening attitude of the girl
crouched by the wheel-chair. He had seen Jessica Holme scarcely a
half-dozen times, then only at service, or driving behind the Stires
bays. That moment when she had thrown herself beside the old man's chair
to plead for the son she had never seen--an instant revelation wrought
by the strenuous agitation of the moment--had been illuminative; it had
given him a lightning-like glimpse into the unplummeted deeps of womanly
unselfishness and sympathy. He flushed suddenly. He had not realized
that she was so beautiful.

What a tragedy to be blind, for a woman with temperament, talent and
heart! To be sightless to the beauty of such a perfect night, with that
silver bridge of stars, those far hills rising like purple tulips--an
alluring night for those who saw! The picture she had made, kneeling
with the lamplight rosying in her hair, hung before him. The
flower-scent with which the room had been full was in his nostrils, and
verses flashed into his mind:


     And I swear, as I thought of her thus, in that hour,
       And of how, after all, old things were best,
     That I smelt the smell of that jasmin-flower
       Which she used to wear in her breast.


Under his thought the lines repeated themselves in a mystical monotone.

He had saved an old college-mate from possible disinheritance and the
grind of poverty, for David Stires' health was precarious. He thought of
this with a tinge of satisfaction. The least of that peculiar clan, one
who had held his place, not by likable qualities but by a versatile
talent for entertainment, Hugh Stires yet deserved thus much. Harry
Sanderson had never shirked an obligation. "As a man sows"--the old
man's words recurred to him. Did any man reap what he sowed, after all?
Was he, the "Satan Sanderson" that was, getting his deserts?

"If there is a Providence that parcels out our earthly rewards and
penalties," he said to himself, "it has missed me! If there is any
virtue in example, I ought to be the black sheep. Hugh never influenced
anybody; he was a natural camp-follower. I was in the van. All I said
was a sneer, all I did a challenge to respectability. Yet here I am, a
shepherd of the faithful, a brother of Aaron!"

Harry stepped more briskly along the gas-lighted square, nodding now and
then to an acquaintance, and bowing on a crossing to a carriage that
bowled by with the wife of the Very Reverend, the Bishop of the Diocese.
As he passed a darkened entrance, a door with a small barred window in
its upper panel opened, and a man came into the street--a man light and
fair with watery blue eyes and a drooping, blond mustache. He lifted his
silk hat with a faded, Chesterfieldian grace as he came down the steps
with outstretched hand.

"My dear Sanderson!" he said effusively. "In the interest of sweetness
and light, where did you stumble on your new chauffeur? His style is the
admiration of the town. Next to having your gift of eloquence, I can
think of nothing so splendid as possessing such a _tonneau_! The city is
in your debt; you have shown it that even a cleric can be 'fast' without
reproach!"

Harry Sanderson saw the weak features and ingratiating smile, the
clayey, dry-lined skin and restless eyes, but he did not seem to see the
extended hand. He did not smile at the badinage as he replied evenly:

"My chauffeur, Doctor, is a Finn; and his style is his own. I see,
however, that I must decrease his speed-limit."

Doctor Moreau stood a moment looking after him, his womanish hands
clenching and his cynical glance full of an evil light.

"The university prig!" he said under his breath. "Doesn't he take
himself for the whole thing, with his money and his buttonhole bouquet,
and his smug self-righteousness! He thinks I'm hardly fit to speak to
since I've had to quit the hospital! I'd like to take him down a peg!"

He watched the alert, ministerial figure till it rounded the corner. He
looked up and down the street, hesitating; then, shrugging his
shoulders, he turned and reentered the door with the narrow barred
window.




CHAPTER III

THE COMING OF A PRODIGAL


The later night was very still and the moon, lifting like a paper
lantern over the aspen tops, silvered all the landscape. In its placid
radiance the white house loomed in a ghostly pallor. The windows of one
side were blank, but behind the library shade the bulbous lamp still
drowsed like a monster glow-worm. From the shadowy side of the building
stretched a narrow L, its front covered by a rose-trellis, whose pale
blossoms in the soft night air mingled their delicate fragrance with
that of the jasmin.

Save for the one bright pane, there seemed now no life or movement in
the house. But outside, in the moonlight, a lurching, shabbily-clothed
figure moved, making his uncertain way with the deliberation of composed
inebriety. The sash of the window was raised a few inches and he nodded
sagely at the yellow shade.

"Gay old silver-top!" he hiccoughed; "see you in the morning!"

He capsized against an althea bush and shook his head with owlish
gravity as he disentangled himself. Then he staggered serenely to the
rose-trellis, and, choosing its angle with an assurance that betrayed
ancient practice, climbed to the upper window, shot its bolt with a
knife, and let himself in. He painstakingly closed both windows and
inner blinds, before he turned on an electric light.

In the room in which he now stood he had stored his boyish treasures and
shirked his maturer tasks. It should have had deeper human associations,
too, for once, before the house had been enlarged to its present
proportions, that chamber had been his mother's. The _Marechal Niel_
rose that clambered to the window-sill had been planted by her hand. In
that room he had been born. And in it had occurred that sharp, corrosive
quarrel with his father on the night he had flung himself from the house
vowing never to return.

As Hugh Stires stood looking about him, it seemed for an instant to his
clouded senses that the past six months of wandering and unsavory
adventure were a dream. There was his bed, with its clean linen sheets
and soft pillows. How he would like to lie down just as he was and sleep
a full round of the clock! Last night he had slept--where had he slept?
He had forgotten for the moment. He looked longingly at the spotless
coverlid. No; some one might appear, and it would not do to be seen in
his present condition. It was scarcely ten. Time enough for that
afterward.

He drew out the drawer of a chiffonier, opened a closet and gloated over
the order and plenty of their contents. He made difficult selection from
these, and, steadying his progress by wall and chair, opened the door of
an adjoining bath-room. It contained a circular bath with a needle
shower. Without removing his clothing, he climbed into this, balancing
himself with an effort, found and turned the cold faucet, and let the
icy water, chilled from artesian depths, trickle over him in a hundred
stinging needle-points.


It was a very different figure that reentered the larger room a
half-hour later, from the slinking mud-lark that had climbed the
rose-trellis. The old Hugh lay, a heap of soiled and sodden garments;
the new stood forth shaven, fragrant with fresh linen and clean and fit
apparel. The maudlin had vanished, the gaze was unvexed and bright, the
whole man seemed to have settled into himself, to have grown trim,
nonchalant, debonair. He held up his hand, palm outward, between the
electric globe and his eye--there was not a tremor of nerve or muscle.
He smiled. No headache, no fever, no uncertain feet or trembling hands
or swollen tongue, after more than a week of deep potations. He could
still "sober-up" as he used to do (with Blake the butler to help him)
when it had been a mere matter of an evening's tipsiness! And how fine
it felt to be decently clad again!

He crossed to a cheval-glass. The dark handsome face that looked out at
him was clean-cut and aristocratic, perfect save for one blemish--a pale
line that slanted across the right brow, a birth-mark, resembling a
scar. All his life this mark had been an eyesore to its owner. It had a
trick of turning an evil red under the stress of anger or emotion.

On the features, young and vigorous as they were, subtle lines of
self-indulgence had already set themselves, and beneath their
expression, cavalier and caressing, lay the unmistakable stigmata of
inherited weakness. But these the gazer did not see. He regarded himself
with egotistic complacency. Here he was, just as sound as ever. He had
had his fling, and taught "the Governor" that he could get along well
enough without any paternal help if he chose. Needs must when the devil
drives, but his father should never guess the coarse and desperate
expediences that had sickened him of his bargain, or the stringent
calculation of his return. He was no milksop, either, to come sneaking
to him with his hat in his hand. When he saw him now, he would be
dressed as the gentleman he was!

He attentively surveyed the room. It was clean and dusted--evidently it
had been carefully tended. He might have stepped out of it yesterday.
There in a corner was his banjo. On the edge of a silver tray was a
half-consumed cigar. It crumbled between his fingers. He had been
smoking that cigar when his father had entered the room on that last
night. There, too, was the deck of cards he had angrily flung on to the
table when he left. Not a thing had been disturbed--yes, one thing. His
portrait, that had hung over his bed, was not in its place. A momentary
sense of trepidation rushed through him. Could his father really have
meant all he had said in his rage? Did he really mean to disown him?

For an instant he faced the hall door with clenched hands. Somewhere in
the house, unconscious of his presence, was that ward of whose coming he
had learned. Moreau was a good friend to have warned him! Was she part
of a plan of reprisal--her presence there a tentative threat to him?
Could his father mean to adopt her? Might that great house, those
grounds, the bulk of his wealth, go to her, and he, the son, be left in
the cold? He shivered. Perhaps he had stayed away too long!

[Illustration]

As he turned again, he heard a sound in the hall. He listened. A light
step was approaching--the swish of a gown. With a sudden impulse he
stepped into the embrasure of the window, as the figure of a girl paused
at the door. He felt his face flush; she had thrown a crimson kimono
over her white night-gown, and the apparition seemed to part the dusk of
the doorway like the red breast of a robin. She held in her hands a
bunch of the pale _Marechal Niel_ roses, and his eye caught the long
rebellious sweep of her bronze hair, and the rosy tint of bare feet
through the worsted meshes of her night-slippers.

To his wonder the sight of the lighted room seemed to cause her no
surprise. For an instant she stood still as though listening, then
entered and placed the roses in a vase on a reading-stand by the
bedside.

Hugh gasped. To reach the stand the girl had passed the spot where he
stood, but she had taken no note of him. Her gaze had gone by him as if
he had been empty air. Then he realized the truth; Jessica Holme was
blind! Moreau's letter had given him no inkling of that. So this was the
girl with whom his father now threatened him! Was she counting on his
not coming back, waiting for the windfall? She was blind--but she was
beautiful! Suppose he were to turn the tables on the old man, not only
climb back into his good graces through her, but even--

The thin line on his brow sprang suddenly scarlet. What a supple,
graceful arm she had! How adroit her fingers as they arranged the
rose-stems! Was he already wholly blackened in her opinion? What did she
think of him? Why did she bring those flowers to that empty room? Could
it have been she who had kept it clean and fresh and unaltered against
his return? A confident, daring look grew in his eyes; he wished she
could see him in that purple tie and velvet smoking-jacket! What an
opportunity for a romantic self-justification! Should he speak? Suppose
it should frighten her?

Chance answered him. His respiration had conveyed to her the knowledge
of a presence in the room. He heard her draw a quick breath. "Some one
is here!" she whispered.

He started forward. "Wait! wait!" he said in a loud whisper, as she
sprang back. But the voice seemed to startle her the more, and before he
could reach her side she was gone. He heard her flying steps descend the
stair, and the opening and closing of a door.

The sudden flight jarred Hugh's pleasurable sense of novelty. He thrust
his hands deep into his pockets. Now he was in for it! She would alarm
the house, rouse the servants--he should have a staring, domestic
audience for the imminent reconciliation his sobered sense told him was
so necessary. Why could he not slip back into the old rut, he thought
sullenly, without such a boring, perfunctory ceremony? He had intended
to postpone this, if possible, until a night's sleep had fortified him.
But now the sooner the ordeal was over, the better! Shrugging his
shoulders, he went quickly down the stair to the library.

He had known exactly what he should see there--the vivid girl with the
hue of fright in her cheeks, the shaded lamp, the wheel-chair, and the
feeble old man with his furrowed face and gray mustaches. What he
himself should say he had not had time to reflect.

The figure in the chair looked up as the door opened. "Hugh!" he cried,
and half lifted himself from his seat. Then he settled back, and the
sunken, indomitable eyes fastened themselves on his son's face.

Hugh was melodramatic--cheaply so. He saw the girl start at the name,
saw her hands catch at the kimono to draw its folds over the bare white
throat, saw the rich color that flooded her brow. He saw himself
suddenly the moving hero of the stagery, the tractive force of the
situation. Real tears came to his eyes--tears of insincere feeling, due
partly to the cheap whisky he had drunk that day, whose outward
consequences he had so drastically banished, and partly to sheer nervous
excitation.

"Father!" he said, and came and caught the gaunt hand that shook against
the chair.

Then the deeps of the old man's heart were suddenly broken up. "My son!"
he cried, and threw his arms about him. "Hugh--my boy, my boy!"

Jessica waited to hear no more. Thrilling with gladness, and flushing
with the sudden recollection of her bare throat and feet, she slipped
away to her room to creep into bed and lie wide-eyed and thinking.

What did he look like? Of his face she had never seen even a counterfeit
presentment. Through what adventures had he passed? Now that he had come
home, forgiving and forgiven, would he stay? He had been in his room
when she entered it with the roses--must have guessed, if he had not
already known, that she was blind. Would he guess that she had cared for
that room, had placed fresh flowers there often and often?

Since she had come to the house in the aspens Jessica had found the
imagined figure of Hugh a dominant presence in a horizon lightened with
a throng of new impressions. The direful catastrophe of her
blindness--it had been the sudden result of an accident--had fallen like
a thunderbolt upon a nature elastic and joyous. It had brought her face
to face with a revelation of mental agony, made her feel herself the
hapless martyr of that curt thing called Chance; one moment seeing a
universe unfolding before her in line and hue, the next feeling it
thrust rudely behind a gruesome blank of darkness. The two years that
followed had been a period when despair had covered her; when
specialists had peered with cunning instruments into her darkened eyes,
to utter hopeful platitudes--and to counsel not at all. Then into her
own painful self-absorption had intruded her father's death, and the
very hurt of this, perhaps, had been a salving one. It had of necessity
changed her whole course of living. In her new surroundings she had
taken up life once more. Her alert imagination had begun to stir, to
turn diffidently to new channels of exploration and interest. She had
always lived largely in books and pictures, and her world was still full
of ideals and of brave adventures. Gratitude had made her love the
morose old invalid with his crabbed tempers; and the wandering son,
choosing for pride's sake a resourceless battle with the world--the
very mystery of his whereabouts--had taken strong hold of her
imagination. Of the quarrel which had preceded Hugh's departure, she had
made her own version. That he should have come back on this very night,
when the disinheritance she had dreaded had been so nearly consummated,
seemed now to have an especial and an appealing significance.

Presently she rose, slipped on the red kimono, and, taking a key from
the pocket of her gown, stole from the room. She ascended a stairway and
unlocked the door of a wide, bare attic where the moonlight poured
through a skylight in the roof upon an unfinished statue. In this statue
she had begun to fashion, in the imagined figure of Hugh, her conception
of the Prodigal Son; not the battered and husk-filled wayfarer of the
parable, but a figure of character and pathos, erring through youthful
pride and spirit. The unfinished clay no eyes had seen, for those walls
bounded her especial domain.

Carefully, one by one, she unwound the wet cloths that swathed the
figure. In the streaming radiance of the night, the clay looked white as
snow and she a crimson ghost. She passed her fingers lightly over the
features. Was the real Hugh's face like that? One day, perhaps, her own
eyes would tell her, and she would finish it. Then she might show it to
him, but not now.

She replaced the coverings, relocked the door, and went softly down to
her bed.


When Hugh went shamefacedly up the stair from the library, the
artificial glow that had tingled to his finger-tips had faded. The poise
of mind, the certitude of all the faculties of eye and hand that his icy
bath had given him, were yielding. The penalties he had dislodged were
returning reinforced. He was rapidly becoming drunk.

He groped his way to his room, turned out the light, threw himself fully
dressed upon the bed, and slept the deep sleep of deferred intoxication.




CHAPTER IV

THE LANE THAT HAD NO TURNING


On a June day a month later, Harry Sanderson sat in his study, looking
out of the window across the dim summer haze of heat, negligently
smoking. On the distant hill overlooking the town was the cemetery,
flanked by fields of growing corn where sulky, round-shouldered crows
quarrelled and pilfered. He could see the long white marl road, bending
in a broad curve between clover-stippled meadows, to skirt the
willow-green bluff above the river. There, miles away, on the high bank,
he could distinguish the railroad bridge, a long black skeleton spanning
"the hole," a deep, fish-haunted pool, the deepest spot in the river for
fifty miles. From the nearer, elm-shaded streets came the muffled clack
of trade and the discordant treble of a huckster, somewhere a
trolley-bell was buzzing angrily, and the impudent scream of a blue jay
sheared across the monotone. Harry's gaze went past the streets--past
the open square, with its chapel spire lifting from a beryl sea of
foliage--to a white colonial porch, peering from between aspens that
quivered in the tremulous sunlight.

The dog on the rug rose, stretching, and came to thrust an eager
insinuating muzzle into its master's lap. Rummy whined, the stubby tail
wagged, but his master paid no heed, and with dejected ears, he slunk
out into the sunshine. Harry was looking, with brows gathered to a
frown, at the far-away porch. The look was full of a troubled question,
a vague misgiving, an interrogative anxiety. He was thinking of a night
when he had saved the son of that house from the calamity of
disinheritance--to what end?

For since that moonlighted evening of the will-making Harry had learned
that the long lane had had no true turning for Hugh. He had sifted him
through and through. At college he had put him down for a
weakling--unballasted, misdemeanant. Now he knew him for what he really
was--a moral mollusk, a scamp in embryo, a decadent, realizing an ugly
propensity to a deplorable _finale_. A consistent career of loose living
had carried Hugh far since those college days when he had been dubbed
"Satan's Shadow." While to Harry Sanderson the eccentric and agnostical
had then been, as it were, the mask through which his temperament looked
at life, to Hugh it had spelled shipwreck. Harry Sanderson had done
broadly as he pleased. He had entertained whom he listed; had gone
"slumming"; had once boxed to a finish, for a wager, a local pugilist
whose acquaintance he affected, known as "Gentleman Jim." He had been
both the hardest hitter and the hardest drinker in his class, yet withal
its most brilliant student. Native character had enabled him to persist,
as the exasperating function of success which dissipation declined to
eliminate. But the same natural gravitation which in spite of all
aberration had given Harry Sanderson classical honors, had brought Hugh
Stires to the imminent brink of expulsion. And since that time, without
the character which belonged to Harry as a possession, Hugh had
continued to drift aimlessly on down the broad lax way of profligacy.

The conditions he found upon his return, however, had opened Hugh's eyes
to the perilous strait in which he stood. He was a materialist, and the
taste he had had of deprivation had sickened him. In the first
revulsion, when the contrast between recent famine and present plenty
was strong upon him, he had been at anxious pains to make himself secure
with his father--and with Jessica Holme. Harry's mental sight--keen as
the hunter's sight on the rifle-barrel--was sharpened by his knowledge
of the old Hugh, an intuitive knowledge gained in a significant
formative period. He saw more clearly than the townfolk who, in a
general way, had known Hugh Stires all their lives. Week by week Harry
had seen him regain lost ground in his father's esteem; day by day he
had seen him making studious appeal to all that was romantic in Jessica,
climbing to the favor of each on the ladder of the other's regard. Hugh
was naturally a _poseur_, with a keen sense of effect. He could be
brilliant at will, could play a little on piano, banjo and violin, could
sing a little, and had himself well in hand. And feeling the unconscious
cord of romance vibrate to his touch, he had played upon it with no
unskilful fingers.

Jessica was comparatively free from that coquetry by means of which a
woman's instinct experiments in emotion. Although she had been artist
enough before the cloistered years of her blindness to know that she was
comely, she had never employed that beauty in the ordinary blandishments
of girlish fascination. But steadily and unconsciously she had turned in
her darkness more and more to the bright and tender air with which Hugh
clothed all their intercourse. Her blindness had been of too short
duration to have developed that fine sense-perception with which nature
seeks to supplement the darkened vision. The ineradicable marks which
ill-governed living had set in Hugh's face--the self-indulgence and
egotism--she could not see. She mistook impulse for instinct. She read
him by the untrustworthy light of a colorful imagination. She deemed him
high-spirited and debonair, a Prince Charming, whose prideful rebellion
had been atoned for by a touching and manly surrender.

All this Harry had watched with a painful sense of impotence, and this
feeling was upon him to-day as he stared out from the study toward the
white porch, glistening in the sun.

At length, with a little gesture expressive at once of helplessness and
puzzle, he turned from the window, took his violin and began to play. He
began a barcarole, but the music wandered away, through insensible
variations, into a moving minor, a composition of his own.

It broke off suddenly at a dog's fierce snarl from the yard, and the
rattle of a thrown pebble. Immediately a knock came at the door, and a
man entered.

"Don't stop," said the new-comer. "I've dropped in for only a minute!
That's an ill-tempered little brute of yours! If I were you, I'd get rid
of him."

Harry Sanderson laid the violin carefully in its case and shut the lid
before he answered. "Rummy is impulsive," he said dryly. "How is your
father to-day, Hugh?"

The other tapped the toe of his shining patent-leather with his cane as
he said with a look of ill-humor:

"About as well as usual. He's planning now to put me in business, and
expects me to become a staid pillar of society--'like Sanderson,' as he
says forty times a week. How do you do it, Harry? There isn't an old
lady in town who thinks her parlor carpet half good enough for you to
walk on! You're only a month older than I am, yet you can wind the whole
vestry, and the bishop to boot, around your finger!"

"I wasn't aware of the idolatry." Harry laughed a little--a distant
laugh. "You are observant, Hugh."

"Oh, anybody can see it. I'd like to know how you do it. It was always
so with you, even at college. You could do pretty much as you liked, and
yet be popular, too. Why, there was never a jamboree complete without
you and your violin at the head of the table."

"That is a long time ago," said Harry.

"More than four years. Four years and a month to-morrow, since that last
evening of college. Yet I imagine it will be longer before we forget it!
I think of it still, sometimes, in the night--" Hugh went on more
slowly,--"that last dinner of The Saints, and poor Archie singing with
that wobbly smilax wreath over one eye and the claret spilled down his
shirt-front--then the sudden silence like a wet blanket! I can see him
yet, when his head dropped. He seemed to shrivel right up in his chair.
How horrible to die like that! I didn't touch a drink for a month
afterward!" He shivered slightly, and walked to the window.

Harry did not speak. The words had torn the network of the past as
sheet-lightning tears the summer dusk; had called up a ghost that he had
labored hard to lay--a memory-specter of a select coterie whose wild
days and nights had once revolved about him as its central sun. The
sharp tragedy of that long-ago evening had been the awakening. The
swift, appalling catastrophe had crashed into his career at the pivotal
moment. It had shocked him from his orbit and set him to the
right-about-face. And the moral _bouleversement_ had carried him, in
abrupt recoil, into the ministry.

An odd confusion blurred his vision. Perhaps to cover this, he crossed
the room to a small private safe which stood open in the corner, in
which he kept his tithes and his charities. When Hugh, shrugging his
shoulders as if to dismiss the unwelcome picture he had painted, turned
again, Harry was putting into it some papers from his pocket. Hugh saw
the action; his eyes fastened on the safe avidly.

"I say," he said after a moment's pause, as Harry made to shut its door,
"can you loan me another fifty? I'm flat on my uppers again, and the
old man has been tight as nails with me since I came back. I'm sure to
be able to return it with the rest, in a week or two."

Harry stretched his hand again toward the safe--then drew it back with
compressed lips. He had met Hugh with persistent courtesy, and the other
had found him sufficiently obliging with loans. Of late, however, his
nerves had been on edge. The patent calculation of Hugh's course had
sickened, and his flippant cynicism had jarred and disconcerted him. A
growing sense of security, too, had made Hugh less circumspect. More
than once during the past month Harry had seen him issue from the
shadowed door whose upper panel held the little barred window--the door
at which Doctor Moreau had entrance, though decent doors were closed in
his face.

Hugh's lowered gaze saw the arrested movement and his cheek flushed.

"Oh, if it's inconvenient, I won't trouble you for the accommodation,"
he said. "I dare say I can raise it."

The attempt at nonchalance cost him a palpable effort. Comparatively
small as the amount was, he needed it. He was in sore straits. By hook
or crook he must stave off an evil day whose approach he knew not how to
meet.

"It isn't that it is inconvenient, Hugh," said Harry. "It's that I
can't approve your manner of living lately, and--I don't know where the
fifty is going."

The mark on Hugh's brow reddened. "I wasn't aware that I was expected to
render you an accounting," he said sulkily, "if I do borrow a dollar or
two now and then! What if I play cards, and drink a little when I'm dry?
I've got to have a bit of amusement once in a while between prayers. You
liked it yourself well enough, before you discovered a sudden talent for
preaching!"

"Some men hide their talents under a napkin," said Harry. "You drown
yours--in a bottle. You have been steadily going downhill. You are
deceiving your father--and others--with a pretended reform which isn't
skin-deep! You have made them believe you are living straight, when you
are carousing; that you keep respectable company, when you have taken up
with a besotted and discredited gambler!"

"I suppose you mean Doctor Moreau," returned Hugh. "There are plenty of
people in town who are worse than he is."

"He is a quack--dropped from the hospital staff for addiction to drugs,
and expelled from his club for cheating at cards."

"He's down and out," said Hugh sullenly, "and any cur can bite him. He
never cheated me, and I find him better company than your sanctimonious,
psalm-singing sort. I'm not going to give him the cold shoulder because
everybody else does. I never went back on a friend yet. I'm not that
sort!"

A steely look had come to Harry Sanderson's eyes; he was thinking of the
house in the aspens. While he talked, shooting pictures had been
flashing through his mind. Now, at the boast of this eager protester of
loyalty, this recreant who "never went back on a friend," his face set
like a flint.

"You never had a friend, Hugh," he said steadily. "You never really
loved anybody or anything but yourself. You are utterly selfish. You are
deliberately lying, every hour you live, to those who love you. You are
playing a part--for your own ends! You were only a good imitation of a
good fellow at college. You are a poor imitation of a man of honor now."

Hugh rose to his feet, as he answered hotly: "And what are you, I'd like
to know? Just because I take my pleasure as I please, while you choose
to make a stained-glass cherub of yourself, is no reason why I'm not
just as good as you! I knew you well enough before you set up for such a
pattern. You didn't go in much then for a theological diet. Pshaw!" he
went on, snapping his fingers toward the well-stocked book-shelves. "I
wonder how much of all that you really believe!"

Harry passed the insolence of the remark. He flecked a bit of dust from
his sleeve before he answered, smiling a little disdainfully:

"And how much do _you_ believe, Hugh?"

"I believe in running my own affairs, and letting other people run
theirs! I don't believe in talking cant, and posing as a
little-tin-god-on-wheels! If I lived in a glass-house, I'd be precious
careful not to throw stones!"

Harry Sanderson was staring at him curiously now--a stare of singular
inquiry. This shallow witness of his youthful misconduct, then, judged
him by himself; deemed him a mere masquerader in the domino of decorous
life, carrying the reckless and vicious humors of his nonage into the
wider issues of living, and clothing an arrant hypocrisy under the habit
of one of God's ministers!

The elastic weight of air in the study seemed suddenly grown
suffocating. He reached and flung open the chapel door, and stood
looking across the choir, through the mellow light of the duskily tinted
nave, solemn as with the hush of past prayer. On this interior had been
lavished the special love of the invalid, who had given of his riches
that this place for the comfort of souls might be. It was an expanse of
dim colors and dark woodwork. At its eastern end was the high altar,
with tall flowers in stately gilt vases on either side, and a brass
lectern glimmered near-by. In the western wall was set a great
rose-window of rich stained glass--a picture of the eternal tragedy of
Calvary. As Harry stood gazing into the mellow light, Hugh paced moodily
up and down behind him. Suddenly he caught Harry's arm and pointed.

Harry turned and looked.

Above the mantel was set a mirror, and from where they stood, this
reflected Hugh's face. It startled Harry, for some trick of the
atmosphere, or the sunlight falling through the painted glass,
lightening the sallow face and leaving the hair in deeper shade--as a
cunning painter by a single line will alter a whole physiognomy--had for
the instant wiped out all superficial unresemblance and left a weird
likeness. As Hugh's mocking countenance looked from the oval frame,
Harry had a queer sensation as if he were looking at his own face, with
some indefinable smear of attaint upon it--the trail of evil. As he drew
away from the other's touch, his eye followed the bar of amber light to
the rose-window in the chapel; it was falling through the face of the
unrepentant thief.

The movement broke the spell. When he looked again the eerie impression
of identity was gone.

Hugh had felt the recoil. "Not complimented, eh?" he said with a
half-sneer. "Too bad the prodigal should resemble Satan Sanderson, the
fashionable parish rector who waves his arms so gracefully in the
pulpit, and preaches such nice little sermons! You didn't mind it so
much in the old days! Pardon me," he added with malice, "I forgot. It's
the 'Reverend Henry' at present, of course! I imagine your friends don't
call you 'Satan' now."

"No," returned Harry quietly. "They don't call me 'Satan' now!"

He went back to the safe.

The movement set Hugh instantly to regretting his hasty tongue. If he
had only assumed penitence, instead of flying into a passion, he might
have had the money he wanted just as well as not!

"There's no sense in us two quarrelling," he said hastily. "We've been
friends a long time. I'm sure I didn't intend to when I came in. I
suppose you're right about some things, and probably dropping Moreau
wouldn't hurt me any. I'm sorry I said all I did. Only--the money
seemed such a little thing, and I--I needed it."

Harry stood an instant with his hand on the knob, then instead of
closing the door, he drew out a little drawer. He lifted a packet of
crisp yellow-backs and slowly counted out one hundred dollars. "I'm
trying to believe you mean what you say, Hugh," he said.

Hugh's fingers closed eagerly over the crackling notes. "Now that's
white of you, after everything I said! You're a good fellow, Harry,
after all, and I'll always say so. I wish Old Gooseberry was half as
decent in a money way. He seems to think fifty dollars a week is plenty
till I marry and settle down. He talks of retiring then, and I suppose
he'll come down handsomely, and give me a chance to look my debts in the
face." He pocketed the money with an air of relief and picked up his hat
and cane.

Just then from the dusty street came the sound of carriage-wheels and
the click of the gate-latch.

"It's Bishop Ludlow," he said, glancing through the window. "He's coming
in. I think I'll slip out the side way. Thanks for the loan and--I'll
think over what you've said!"

Avoiding the bishop, Hugh stepped toward the gate. The money was in his
pocket. Well, one of these days he would not have to grovel for a
paltry fifty dollars! He would be his own master, and could afford to
let Harry Sanderson and everybody else think what they liked.

"So I'm playing a part, am I!" he said to himself. "Why should your
Holiness trouble yourself over it, if I am! Not because you're so
careful of the Governor's feelings; not by a long shot! It's because you
choose to think Jessica Holme is too good for me! That's where the shoe
pinches! Perhaps you'd like to play at that game yourself, eh?"

He walked jauntily up the street--toward the door with the little barred
window.

"The old man is fond of her. He thinks I mean to settle down and let the
moss grow over my ears, and he'll do the proper thing. It'll be a good
way to put my head above water and keep it there. It must be soon,
though!" A smile came to his face, a pretentious, boastful smile, and
his shining patent-leathers stepped more confidently. "She's the
finest-looking girl in this town, even without her eyes. She may get
back her sight sometime. But even if she doesn't, blindness in a wife
might not be such a bad thing, after all!"




CHAPTER V

THE BISHOP SPEAKS


Inside the study, meanwhile, the bishop was greeting Harry Sanderson. He
had officiated at his ordination and liked him. His eyes took in the
simple order of the room, lingering with a light tinge of disapproval
upon the violin case in the corner, and with a deeper shade of question
upon the jewel on the other's finger--a pigeon-blood ruby in a setting
curiously twisted of the two initial letters of his name.

There came to his mind for an instant a whisper of early prodigalities
and wildnesses which he had heard. For the lawyer who had listened to
Harry Sanderson's recital on the night of the making of the will had not
considered it a professional disclosure. He had thought it a "good
story," and had told it at his club, whence it had percolated at leisure
through the heavier strata of town-talk. The tale, however, had seemed
rather to increase than to discourage popular interest in Harry
Sanderson. The bishop knew that those whose approval had been withheld
were in the hopeless minority, and that even these could not have denied
that he possessed desirable qualities--a manner by turns sparkling and
grave, picturesqueness in the pulpit, and the unteachable tone of
blood--and had infused new life into a generally sleepy parish. He had
dismissed the whisper with a smile, but oddly enough it recurred to him
now at sight of the ruby ring.

"I looked in to tell you a bit of news," said the bishop. "I've just
come from David Stires--he has a letter from Van Lennap, the great
eye-surgeon of Vienna. He disagrees with the rest of them--thinks
Jessica's case may not be hopeless."

The cloud that Hugh's call had left on Harry's countenance lifted.

"Thank God!" he said. "Will she go to him?"

The bishop looked at him curiously, for the exclamation seemed to hold
more than a conventional relief.

"He is to be in America next month. He will come here then to examine,
and perhaps to operate. An exceptional girl," went on the bishop, "with
a remarkable talent! The angel in the chapel porch, I suppose you know,
is her modelling, though that isn't just masculine enough in feature to
suit me. The Scriptures are silent on the subject of woman-angels in
Heaven; though, mind you, I don't say they're not common on earth!" The
bishop chuckled mildly at his own epigram.

"Poor child!" he continued more soberly. "It will be a terrible thing
for her if this last hope fails her, too! Especially now, when she and
Hugh are to make a match of it."

Harry's face was turned away, or the bishop would have seen it suddenly
startled. "To make a match of it!" To hide the flush he felt staining
his cheek, Harry bent to close the safe. A something that had darkled in
some obscure depth of his being, whose existence he had not guessed, was
throbbing now to a painful resentment. Jessica was to marry Hugh!

"A handsome fellow--Hugh!" said the bishop. "He seems to have returned
with a new heart--a brand plucked from the burning. You had the same
_alma mater_, I think you told me. Your influence has done the boy good,
Sanderson!" He laid his hand kindly on the other's shoulder. "The fact
that you were in college together makes him look up to you--as the whole
parish does," he added.

Harry was setting the combination, and did not answer. But through the
turmoil in his brain a satiric voice kept repeating:

"No, they don't call me 'Satan' now!"




CHAPTER VI

WHAT CAME OF A WEDDING


The white house in the aspens was in gala attire. Flowers--great banks
of bloom--were massed in the hall, along the stairway and in the
window-seats, and wreaths of delicate fern trembled on the prim-hung
chandeliers. Over all breathed the sweet fragrance of jasmin. Musicians
sat behind a screen of palms in a corridor, and a long scarlet carpet
strip ran down the front steps to the driveway, up which passed bravely
dressed folk, arriving in carriages and on foot, to witness the
completion of a much-booted romance.

For a fortnight this afternoon's event had been the chat of the town,
for David Stires, who to-day retired from active business, was its
magnate, the owner of its finest single estate and of its most important
bank. From his scapegrace boyhood Hugh Stires had made himself the
subject of uncomfortable discussion. His sudden disappearance after the
rumored quarrel with his father, and the advent of Jessica Holme, had
furnished the community sufficient material for gossip. The wedding had
capped this gossip with an appropriate climax. Tongues had wagged over
its pros and cons--for Hugh's past had induced a wholesome skepticism of
his future. But the carping were willing to let bygones be bygones, and
the wiseacres, to whose experience marriage stood as a sedative for the
harum-scarum, augured well.

There was an additional element of romance, too, in the situation; for
Jessica, who had never yet seen her lover, would see her husband. The
great surgeon on whose prognostication she had built so much, had
arrived and had operated. He was not alone an eminent consultant in
diagnosis, but an operator of masterly precision, whose daring of
scalpel had made him well-nigh a last resort in the delicate
adventurings of eye surgery. The experiment had been completely
successful, and Jessica's hope of vision had become a sure and certain
promise.

To see once again! To walk free and careless! To mold the plastic clay
into the shapes that thronged her brain! To finish the statue which she
had never yet shown to any one, in the great sky-lighted attic! To see
flowers, and the sunset, the new green of the trees in spring, and the
sparkle of the snow in winter, and people's faces!--to see Hugh! That
had been at the core of her thought when it reeled dizzily back from
the merciful oblivion of the anesthetic, to touch the strange gauze
wrappings on her eyes--the tight bandage that must stay for so long,
while nature plied her silent medicaments of healing.

Meanwhile the accepted lover had become the importunate one. The
operation over, there had remained many days before the bandages could
be removed--before Jessica could be given her first glimpse of the world
for nearly three years. Hugh had urged against delay. If he had
stringent reasons of his own, he was silent concerning them. And
Jessica, steeped in the delicious wonder of new and inchoate sensations,
had yielded.

So it had come about that the wedding was to be on this hot August
afternoon, although it would be yet some time before the eye-bandages
might be laid aside, save in a darkened room. In her girlish, passionate
ideality, Jessica had offered a sacrifice to her sentiment. She had
promised herself that the first form her new sight should behold should
be, not her lover, but her husband! The idea pleased her sense of
romance. So, hugging the fancy, she had denied herself. She was to see
Hugh for the first time in a shaded room, after the glare and nervous
excitement of the ceremony.

Gossip had heard and had seized upon this tidbit with relish. The blind
marriage--a bride with hoodwinked eyes, who had never seen the man she
was to marry--the moment's imperfect vision of him, a poor dole for
memory to carry into the honeymoon--these ingredients had given the
occasion a titillating sense of the extraordinary and romantic, and
sharpened the buzz of the waiting guests, as they whiled away the
irksome minutes.

It was a sweltering afternoon, and in the wide east parlor, limp
handkerchiefs and energetic fans fought vainly against the intolerable
heat. There, as the clock struck six, a hundred pairs of eyes galloped
between two centers of interest: the door at which the bride would
enter, and the raised platform at the other end of the room where,
prayer-book in hand, in his wide robes and flowing sleeves, Harry
Sanderson had just taken his stand. Perhaps more looked at Harry than at
the door.

He seemed his usual magnetic self as he stood there, backed by the
flowers, his waving brown hair unsmoothed, the ruby-ring glowing
dull-red against the dark leather of the book he held. Few felt it much
a matter of regret that the humdrum and less personable Bishop of the
Diocese should be away at convocation, since the young rector furnished
the final esthetic touch to a perfectly appointed function. But Harry
Sanderson was far from feeling the grave, alien, figure he appeared. In
the past weeks he had waged a silent warfare with himself, bitterer
because repressed. The strange new thing that had sprung up in him he
had trampled mercilessly under. From the thought that he loved the
promised wife of another, a quick, fastidious sense in him recoiled
abashed. This painful struggle had been sharpened by his sense of Hugh's
utter worthlessness. To that rustling assemblage, the man who was to
make those solemn promises was David Stires' son, who had had his fling,
turned over his new leaf becomingly, and was now offering substantial
hostages to good repute. To him, Harry Sanderson, he was a _flaneur_, a
marginless gambler in the futures of his father's favor and a woman's
heart. He had shrunk from the ceremony, but circumstances had
constrained him. There had been choice only between an evasion--to which
he would not stoop--and a flat refusal, the result of which would have
been a footless scandal--ugly town-talk--a sneer at himself and his
motives--a quietus, possibly, to his whole career.

So now he stood to face a task which was doubly painful, but which he
would go through with to the bitter end!

Only a moment Harry stood waiting; then the palm-screened musicians
began the march, and Hugh took his place, animated and assured, looking
the flushed and expectant bridegroom. At the same instant the
chattering and hubbub ceased; Jessica, on the arm of the old man, erect
but walking feebly with his cane, was advancing down the roped lane.

She was in simple white, the point-lace on the frock an heirloom. Her
bronze hair was drawn low, hiding much of the disfiguring bandage, under
which her lips were parted in a half-smile, human, intimate and eager,
full of the hope and intoxication of living.

Harry's eyes dropped to the opened book, though he knew the office by
heart. He spoke the time-worn adjuration with clear enunciation, with
almost perfunctory distinctness. He did not look at Hugh.

"_If any man can show just cause why they may not lawfully be joined
together, let him speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace._" In
the pause--the slightest pause--that turned the page, he felt an insane
prompting to tear off his robes, to proclaim to this roomful of heated,
gaping, fan-fluttering humanity, that he himself, a minister of the
gospel, the celebrant of the rite, knew "just cause"!

The choking impulse passed. The periods rolled on--the long white glove
was slipped from the hand, the ring put on the finger, and the pair,
whom God and Harry Sanderson had joined together, were kneeling on the
white satin prie-dieu with bowed heads under the final invocation. As
they knelt, choir voices rose:


     "O perfect love, all human thought transcending,
     Lowly we kneel in prayer before Thy throne--"


Then, while the music lingered, the hush of the room broke in a confused
murmur; the white ribbon-wound ropes were let down, and a voluble wave
of congratulators swept over the spot. In a moment more Harry found
himself laying off his robes in the next room.

With a sigh of relief, he stepped through the wide French window into
the garden, fresh with the scent of growing things and the humid odors
of the soil. The twitter and bustle he had left came painfully out to
him, and a whiff of evening coolness breathed through the oppressive
air. The strain over, he longed for the solitude of his study. But David
Stires had asked him to remain for a final word, since bride and groom
were to leave on an early evening train; the old man was to accompany
them a part of the journey, and "the Stires place" was to be closed for
an indefinite period. Harry found a bench and sat down, where camelias
dropped like blood.

What would Jessica suffer in the inevitable awakening, when the tinted
petals of her dreams were shattered and strewn? For the first time he
looked down through his sore sense of outrage and protest to deeps in
himself--as a diver peers through a water-glass to the depths of a river
troubled and opaque, dimly descrying vague shapes of ill. Poetry,
passion and dreams had been his also, but he had dreamed too late!

It was not long before the sound of gay voices and of carriage-wheels
came around the corner of the house, for the reception was to be
curtailed. There had been neither bridesmaids nor groomsmen, and there
was no skylarking on the cards; the guests, who on lesser occasions
would have lingered to throw rice and old shoes, departed from the house
in the aspens with primness and dignity.

One by one he heard the carriages roll down the graveled driveway. A
bicycle careened across the lawn from a side-gate, carrying a bank
messenger--the last shaft of commerce before old David Stires washed his
tenacious mind of business. A few moments later the messenger reappeared
and rode away whistling. A last chime of voices talking together--Harry
could distinguish Hugh's voice now--and at length quiet told him the
last of the guests were gone. Thinking that he would now see his old
friends for a last farewell, he rose and went slowly back through the
French window.

The east room was empty, save for servants who were gathering some of
the cut flowers for themselves. He stood aimlessly for a few moments
looking about him. A white carnation lay at the foot of the dais, fallen
from Jessica's shower-bouquet. He picked this up, abstractedly smelled
its perfume, and drew the stem through his buttonhole. Then, passing
into the next room, he found his robes leisurely and laid them by--he
had now only to embellish the sham with his best wishes!

All at once he heard voices in the library. He opened the door and
entered.

Harry Sanderson stopped stock-still. In the room sat old David Stires in
his wheel-chair opposite his son. He was deadly pale, and his fierce
eyes blazed like fire in tinder. And what a Hugh! Not the indolently gay
prodigal Harry had known in the past, nor the flushed bridegroom of a
half-hour ago! It was a cringing, a hang-dog Hugh now; with a slinking
dread in the face--a trembling of the hands--a tense expectation in the
posture. The thin line across his brow was a livid pallor. His eyes
lifted to Harry's for an instant, then returned in a kind of fascination
to a slip of paper on the desk, on which his father's forefinger rested,
like a nail transfixing an animate infamy.

"Sanderson," said the old man in a low, hoarse, unnatural voice, "come
in and shut the door. God forgive us--we have married Jessica to a
common thief! Hugh--my son, my only child, whom I have forgiven beyond
all reckoning--has forged my name to a draft for five thousand dollars!"




CHAPTER VII

OUT OF THE DARK


For a moment there was dead silence in the room. In the hall the tall
clock struck ponderously, and a porch blind slammed beneath a
caretaker's hand. Harry's breath caught in his throat, and the old man's
eye again impaled his hapless son.

Hugh threw up his head with an attempt at jauntiness, but with furtive
apprehension in every muscle--for he could not solve the look he saw on
his father's face--and said:

"You act as if it were a cool million! I'm no worse than a lot who have
better luck than I. Suppose I did draw the five thousand?--you were
going to give me ten for a wedding present. I had to have the money
then, and you wouldn't have given it to me. You know that as well as I
do. Besides, I was going to take it up myself and you would never have
been the wiser. He promised to hold it--it's a low trick for him to
round on me like this. I'll pay him off for it sometime! I don't see
that it's anybody else's business but ours, anyway," he continued, with
a surly glance at Harry.

Harry had been staring at him, but with a vision turned curiously
backward--a vision that seemed to see Hugh standing at a carpeted dais
in a flower-hung room, while his own voice said out of a lurid shadow:
"_Wilt thou have this man to be thy wedded husband...._"

"Stay, Sanderson," said the old man; then turning to Hugh: "Who advanced
you money on this and promised to 'hold it'?"

"Doctor Moreau."

"He profited by it?"

"He got his margin," said Hugh sullenly.

"How much margin did he get?"

"A thousand."

"Where is the rest?" David Stires' voice was like a whip of steel.

Hugh hesitated a moment. He had still a few hundreds in pocket, but he
did not mention them.

"I used most of it. I--had a few debts."

"Debts of honor, I presume!"

Hugh's sensibility quivered at the fierce, grating irony of the inquiry.

"If you'd been more decent with spending-money," he said with a flare of
the old effrontery, "I'd have been all right! Ever since I came home
you've kept me strapped. I was ashamed to stick up any more of my
friends. And of course I couldn't borrow from Jessica."

"Ashamed!" exclaimed the old man with harsh sternness. "You are without
the decency of shame! If you were capable of feeling it, you would not
mention her name now!"

Hugh thought he saw a glimmer through the storm-cloud. Jessica was his
anchor to windward. What hurt him, would hurt her. He would pull
through!

"Well," he said, "it's done, and there's no good making such a row about
it. She's my wife and she'll stand by me, if nobody else does!"

No one had ever seen such a look on David Stires' face as came to it
now--a sudden blaze of fury and righteous scorn, that burned it like a
brand.

"You impudent blackguard! You drag my name in the gutter and then try to
trade on my self-respect and Jessica's affection. You thought you would
take it up yourself--and I would be none the wiser! And if I did find it
out, you counted on my love for the poor deluded girl you have married,
to make me condone your criminality--to perjure myself--to admit the
signature and shield you from the consequences. You imagine because you
are my son, that you can do this thing and all still go on as before!
Do you suppose I don't consider Jessica? Do you think because you have
fooled and cheated her--and me--and married her, that I will give her
now to a caught thief--a common jailbird?"

Hugh started. A sickly pallor came to his sallow cheek. That salient
chin, that mouth close-gripped--those words, vengeful, vindictive, the
utterance of a wrath so mighty in the feeble frame as to seem almost
uncouth--smote him with a mastering terror.

A jailbird! That was what his father called _him_! Did he mean to give
him up, then? To have him arrested--tried--put in prison? When he had
canvassed the risks of discovery, he had imagined a scene, bitter
anger--perhaps even disinheritance. His marriage to Jessica, he had
reckoned, would cover that extremity. But he had never thought of
something worse. Now, for the first time, he saw himself in the grip of
that impersonal thing known as the law--handcuffs on his wrists, riding
through the streets in the "Black-Maria"--standing at the dock an
outcast, gazed at with contempt by all the town--at length sitting in a
cell somewhere, no more pleasures or gaming, or fine linen, but dressed
in convict's dress, loose, ill-shapen, hanging on him like bags, with
broad black-and-white stripes. He had been through the penetentiary
once. He remembered the sullen, stolid faces, the rough, hobnailed
shoes, the cropped heads! His mind turned from the picture with fear and
loathing.

In the thoughts that were darting through Hugh's mind, there was none
now of regret or of pity for Jessica. His fear was the fear of the
trapped spoiler, who discerns capture and its consequent penalties in
the patrolling bull's-eye flashed upon him. He studied his father with
hunted, calculating eyes, as the old man turned to Harry Sanderson.

"Sanderson," said David Stires, once more in his even, deadly voice,
"Jessica is waiting in the room above this. She will not understand the
delay. Will you go to her? Make some excuse--any you can think of--till
I come."

Harry nodded and left the room, shutting the door carefully behind him,
carrying with him the cowering helpless look with which Hugh saw himself
left alone with his implacable judge. What to say to her? How to say it?

As he passed the hall, the haste of demolition had already begun.
Florists' assistants were carrying the plants from the east room, and
through the open door a man was rolling up the red carpet. The cluttered
emptiness struck him with a sense of fateful symbolism--as though it
shadowed forth the shattering of Jessica's ordered dream of happiness.
He mounted the stair as if a pack swung from his shoulders. He paused a
moment at the door, then knocked, turned the knob, and entered.

[Illustration]

There, in the middle of the blue-hung room, in her wedding-dress, with
her bandaged eyes, and her bridal bouquet on the table, stood Jessica.
Twilight was near, but even so, all the shutters were drawn save one,
through which a last glow of refracted sunlight sifted to fall upon his
face. Her hands were clasped before her, he could hear her
breathing--the full hurried respiration of expectancy.

Then, while his hand closed the door behind him, a thing unexpected,
anomalous, happened--a thing that took him as utterly by surprise as if
the solid floor had yawned before him. Slim fingers tore away the broad
encircling bandage. She started forward. Her arms were flung about his
neck.

"Hugh!... Hugh!" she cried. "My husband!"

The paleness was stricken suddenly from Harry's face. An odd, dazed
color--a flush of mortification, of self-reproach, flooded it from chin
to brow. Despite himself, he had felt his lips molding to an answering
kiss beneath her own. He drew a gasping breath, his hand nervously
caught the bandage, replaced it over the eyes, and tied it tightly,
putting down her protesting hands.

"Oh, Hugh," she pleaded, "not for a moment--not when I am so happy! Your
face is what I dreamed it must be! Why did you make me wait so long? And
I can see, Hugh! I can really see! Let it stay off, just for one little
moment more!"

He held her hands by force. "Jessica--wait!" he said in a broken
whisper. "You must not take it off again--not now!"

An incredible confusion enveloped him--his tongue cleaved to the roof of
his mouth. Not only had the painful _contretemps_ nonplussed and
dismayed him; not only had it heightened and horrified the realization
of what she must presently be told. It had laid a careless hand upon his
own secret, touching it with an almost vulgar mockery. It had overthrown
in an instant the barricades he had been piling. The pressure of those
lips on his had sent coursing to the furthest recesses of his nature a
great wave which dikes nor locks might ever again forbid.

Her look, leaping to his face, had not noted the ministerial dress, nor
in the ecstasy of the moment did she catch the agitation in his voice;
or if she did, she attributed it to a feeling like her own. She was
laughing happily, while he stood, trembling slightly, holding himself
with an effort.

"What a dear goose you are!" she said. "The light didn't hurt
them--indeed, indeed! Only to think, Hugh! Your wife will have her
sight! Do go and tell your father! He will be waiting to know!"

Harry made some incoherent reply. He was desperately anxious to get
away--his thought was a snarl of tatters, threaded by one lucid purpose:
to spare her coming self-abasement this sardonic humiliation. He did not
think of a time in the future, when her error must naturally disclose
itself. The tangle spelled _Now_. Not to tell her--not to let her know!

He almost ran from the room and down the stair.




CHAPTER VIII

"AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?"


At the foot of the landing he paused, drawing a deep breath as if to
lift a weight of air. He needed to get his bearings--to win back a
measure of calmness.

As he stood there, Hugh came from the library. His head was down and he
went furtively and slinkingly, as though dreading even a casual regard.
He snatched his hat from the rack, passed out of the house, and was
swallowed up in the dusk. David Stires had followed his son into the
hall. He answered the gloomy question in Harry's eyes:

"He is gone," he said, "and I hope to Heaven I may never see his face
again!" Then, slowly and feebly, he ascended the stair.

The library windows were shadowed by shrubbery, and the sunset
splintered against the wall in a broad stripe, like cloth of crimson
silk. Harry leaned his hot forehead against the chill marble of the
mantelpiece and gazed frowningly at the dark Korean desk--an antique
gift of his own to David Stires--where the slip of paper still lay that
had spelled such ruin and shame. From the rear of the house came the
pert, tittering laugh of a maid bantering an expressman, and the heavy,
rattling thump of rolled trunks. There was something ghastly in the
incomprehension of all the house save the four chief actors of the
melodrama. The travesty was over, the curtain rung down to clapping of
hands, the scene-shifters clearing away--and behind all, in the wings,
unseen by any spectator, the last act of a living tragedy was rushing to
completion.

Ten, fifteen minutes passed, and old David Stires reentered the room,
went feebly to his wheel-chair, and sat down. He sat a moment in
silence, looking at a portrait of Jessica--a painting by Altsheler that
hung above the mantel--in a light fleecy gown, with one white rose in
the bronze hair. When he spoke the body's infirmity had become all at
once pitifully apparent. The fiery wrath seemed suddenly to have burned
itself out, leaving only dead ashes behind. His eyes had shrunk away
into almost empty sockets. The authority had faded from his face. He was
all at once a feeble, gentle-looking, ill, old man, with white mustaches
and uncertain hands, dressed in ceremonial broadcloth.

"I have told her," he said presently, in a broken voice. "You are kind,
Sanderson, very kind. God help us!"

"What has God to do with it?" fell a voice behind them. Harry faced
about. It was Jessica, as he had first seen her in the upper room, with
the bandage across her eyes.

"What has God to do with it?" she repeated, in a hard tone. "Perhaps Mr.
Sanderson can tell us. It is in his line!"

"Please--" said Harry.

He could not have told what he would have asked, though the accent was
almost one of entreaty. The harsh satire touched his sacred calling;
coming from her lips it affronted at once his religious instinct and his
awakened love. It was all he said, for he stopped suddenly at sight of
her face, pain-frosted, white as the folded cloth.

"Oh," she said, turning toward the voice, "I remember what you said that
night, right here in this very room--that you sowed your wild oats at
college with Hugh--that they were 'a tidy crop'! You were strong, and he
was weak. You led, and he followed. You were 'Satan Sanderson,' Abbot of
The Saints, the set in which he learned gambling. Why, it was in your
rooms that he played his first game of poker--he told me so himself! And
now he has gone to be an outcast, and you stand in the pulpit in a
cassock, you, the 'Reverend Henry Sanderson'! You helped to make him
what he has become! Can you undo it?"

Harry was looking at her with a stricken countenance. He had no answer
ready. The wave of confusion that had submerged him when he had restored
the bandage to her eyes had again welled over him. He stood shocked and
confounded. His hand fumbled at his lapel, and the white carnation,
crushed by his fingers, dropped at his feet.

"I am not excusing Hugh now," she went on wildly. "He has gone beyond
excuse or forgiveness. He is as dead to me as though I had never known
him, though the word you spoke an hour ago made me his wife. I shall
have that to remember all my life--that, and the one moment I had waited
for so long, for my first sight of his face, and my bride's kiss! I must
carry it with me always. I can never wipe that face from my brain, or
the sting of that kiss from my lips--the kiss of a forger--of my
husband!"

The old man groaned. "I didn't know he had seen her!" he said
helplessly. "Jessica, Hugh's sin is not Sanderson's fault!"

In her bitter words was an injustice as passionate as her pain, but for
her life she could not help it. She was a woman wrenched and torn,
tortured beyond control, numb with anguish. Every quivering tendril of
feeling was a live protest, every voice of her soul was crying out
against the fact. In those dreadful minutes when her mind took in the
full extent of her calamity, Hugh's past intimacy and present grim
contrast with Harry Sanderson had mercilessly thrust themselves upon
her, and her agony had seared the swift antithesis on her brain.

To Harry Sanderson, however, her words fell with a wholly
disproportionate violence. It had never occurred to him that he himself
had been individually and actively the cause of Hugh's downfall. The
accusation pierced through the armor of self-esteem that he had linked
and riveted with habit. The same pain of mind that had spurred him, on
that long-ago night, to the admission she had heard, had started to new
life a bared, a scathed, a rekindling sin.

"It is all true," he said. It was the inveterate voice of conscience
that spoke. "I have been deceiving myself. I was my brother's keeper! I
see it now."

She did not catch the deep compunction in the judicial utterance. In her
agony the very composure and restraint cut more deeply than silence. She
stood an instant quivering, then turned, and feeling blindly for the
door, swept from their sight.

White and breathless, Jessica climbed the stair. In her room, she took
a key from a drawer and ran swiftly to the attic-studio. She unlocked
the door with hurried fingers, tore the wrappings from the tall white
figure of the Prodigal Son, and found a heavy mallet. She lifted this
with all her strength, and showered blow upon blow on the hard clay, her
face and hair and shimmering train powdered with the white dust, till
the statue lay on the floor, a heap of tumbled fragments.


Fateful and passionate as the scene in the library had been, her going
left a pall of silence in the room. Harry Sanderson looked at David
Stires with pale intentness.

"Yet I would have given my life," he said in a low voice, "to save her
this!"

Something in the tone caught the old man. He glanced up.

"I never guessed!" he said slowly. "I never guessed that you loved her,
too."

But Harry had not heard. He did not even know that he had spoken aloud.

David Stires turned his wheel-chair to the Korean desk, touching the
bell as he did so. He took up the draft and put it into his pocket. He
pressed a spring, a panel dropped, and disclosed a hidden drawer, from
which he took a crackling parchment. It was the will against whose
signing Harry had pleaded months before in that same room. The butler
entered.

"Witness my signature, Blake," he said, and wrote his name on the last
page. "Mr. Sanderson will sign with you."


An hour later the fast express that bore Jessica and David Stires was
shrieking across the long skeleton railroad bridge, a dotted trail of
fire against the deepening night. The sound crossed the still miles. It
called to Harry Sanderson, where he sat in his study with the evening
paper before him. It called his eyes from a paragraph he was reading
through a painful mist--a paragraph under heavy leads, on its front
page:


     This city has seldom seen so brilliant a gathering as that
     witnessed, late this afternoon, at the residence of the groom, the
     marriage of Mr. Hugh Stires and Miss Jessica Holme, both of this
     place.

     The ceremony was performed by the Reverend Henry Sanderson, rector
     of St. James.

     The groom is the son of one of our leading citizens, and the beauty
     and talent of the bride have long made her noted. The happy couple,
     accompanied by the groom's father, left on an early train, carrying
     with them the congratulations and good wishes of the entire
     community.

     A full account of the wedding will be given in to-morrow morning's
     issue.




CHAPTER IX

AFTER A YEAR


Night had fallen. The busy racket of wheeled traffic was still, the
pavements were garish with electric light, windows were open, and crowds
jostled to and fro on the cool pavements. But Harry Sanderson, as he
walked slowly back from a long ramble in knickerbockers and norfolk
jacket over the hills, was not thinking of the sights and sounds of the
pleasant evening. He had tramped miles since sundown, and had returned
as he set out, gloomy, unrequited, a follower of a baffled quest. Even
the dog at his heels seemed to partake of his master's mood; he padded
along soberly, forging ahead now and again to look up inquiringly at the
preoccupied face.

Set back from the street in a wide estate of trees and shrubbery, stood
a great white-porched house that gloomed darkly from amid its aspens.
Not a light had twinkled from it for nearly a year. The little city had
wondered at first, then by degrees had grown indifferent. The secret of
that prolonged honeymoon, that dearth and absence, Harry Sanderson and
the bishop alone could have told. For the bishop knew of Hugh's
criminal act; he was named executor of the will that lay in the Korean
chest, and him David Stires had written the truth. His heart had gone
out with pity for Jessica, and understanding. The secret he locked in
his own breast, as did Harry Sanderson, each thinking the other ignorant
of it.

Since that wedding-day no shred of news had come to either. Harry had
wished for none. To think of Jessica was a recurrent pang, and yet the
very combination of the safe in his study he had formed of the letters
of her name! In each memory of her he felt the fresh assault of a new
and tireless foe--the love which he must deny.

Until their meeting his moral existence had been strangely without
struggle. When at a single blow he had cut away, root and branch, from
his old life, he had left behind him its vices and temptations. That
life had been, as he himself had dimly realized at the time, a phase,
not a quality, of his development. It had known no profound emotions.
The first deep feeling of his experience had come with that college
catastrophe which had brought the abrupt change to all his habits of
living. He did not know that the impulse which then drew him to the
Church was the gravitational force of an austere ancestry, itself an
inheritance from a long line of sectarian progenitors--an Archbishop of
Canterbury among them--reaching from Colony times, when King George had
sent the first Sanderson, a virile, sport-loving churchman, to the
tobacco emoluments of the Old Dominion. He did not know that in the
reaction the pendulum of his nature was swinging back along an old
groove in obeisance to the subtle call of blood.

In his new life, problems were already solved for him. He had only to
drift with the current of tradition, whereon was smooth sailing. And so
he had drifted till that evening when "Satan Sanderson," dead and done
and buried, had risen in his grave-clothes to mock him in the person of
Hugh. Each hour since then had sensitized him, had put him through
exercises of self-control. And then, with that kiss of Jessica's, had
come the sudden illumination that had made him curse the work of his
hands--that had shown him what had dawned for him, too late!

Outcast and criminal as he was, castaway, who had stolen a bank's money
and a woman's love, Hugh was still her husband. Hugh's wife--what could
she be to him? And this fevered conflict was shot through with yet
another pang; for the waking smart of compunction which had risen at
Jessica's bitter cry, "You helped to make him what he has become!"
would not down. That cry had shown him, in one clarifying instant, the
follies and delinquencies of his early career reduplicated as through
the facets of a crystal, and in the polarized light of conscience,
Hugh--loafer, gambler and thief--stood as the type and sign of an
enduring accusation.

But if the recollection of that wedding-day and its aftermath stalked
always with him--if that kiss had seemed to cling again and again to his
lips as he sat in the quiet of his study--no one guessed. He seldom
played his violin now, but he had shown no outward sign. As time went
on, he had become no less brilliant, though more inscrutable; no less
popular, save perhaps to the parish heresy-hunter for whom he had never
cared a straw. But beneath the surface a great change had come to Harry
Sanderson.

To-night, as he wended his way past the house in the aspens, through the
clatter and commotion of the evening, there was a kind of glaze over his
whole face--a shell of melancholy.

Judge Conwell drove by in his dog-cart, with the superintendent of the
long, low hospital. The man of briefs looked keenly at the handsome face
on the pavement. "Seems the worse for wear," he remarked sententiously.

The surgeon nodded wisely. "That's the trouble with most of you
professional people," he said; "you think too much!" The judge clucked
to his mare and drove on at a smart trot.

The friendly, critical eye clove to the fact; it discerned the
mental state of which gloom, depression and insomnia were but the
physical reagents. Harry had lately felt disquieting symptoms of
strain--irritable weakness, fitful repose, a sense of vague, mysterious
messages in a strange language never before heard. He had found that the
long walks no longer brought the old reaction--that even the swift rush
of his motor-car, as it bore him through the dusk of an evening, gave
him of late only a momentary relief. To-morrow began his summer
vacation, and he had planned a month's pedestrian outing through the
wide ranch valleys and the further ranges, and this should set him up
again.

Now, however, as he walked along, he was bitterly absorbed in thoughts
other than his own needs. He passed more than one acquaintance with a
stare of non-recognition. One of these was the bishop, who turned an
instant to look after him. The bishop had seen that look frequently of
late, and had wondered if it betokened physical illness or mental
unquiet. More than once he had remembered with a sigh the old whisper of
Harry Sanderson's early wildness. But he knew youth and its lapses, and
he liked and respected him. Only two days before, on the second
anniversary of Harry's ordination, he had given him for his silken
watch-guard a little gold cross engraved with his name, and containing
the date. The bishop had seen his gift sparkling against Harry's
waistcoat as he passed. He walked on with a puzzled frown.

The bishop was pursy and prosy, conventional and somewhat stereotyped in
ideas, but he was full of the milk of human kindness. Now he promised
himself that when the hour's errand on which he was hastening was done,
he would stop at the study and if he found Harry in, would have a quiet
chat with him. Perhaps he could put his finger on the trouble.

At a crossing, the sight of a knot of people on the opposite side of the
street awoke Harry from his abstraction. They had gathered around a
peripatetic street preacher, who was holding forth in a shrill voice.
Beside him, on a short pole, hung a dripping gasoline flare, and the
hissing flame lit his bare head, his thin features, his long hair, and
his bony hands moving in vehement gestures. A small melodeon on four
wheels stood beside him, and on its front was painted in glaring white
letters:


              "HALLELUJAH JONES."

     "_Suffer me that I may speak; and after
     that I have spoken, mock on._"

                                 Job, xxi, 3


From over the way Harry gazed at the tall, stooping figure, pitilessly
betrayed by the thin alpaca coat, at the ascetic face burned a brick-red
from exposure to wind and sun, at the flashing eyes, the impassioned
earnestness. He paused at the curb and listened curiously, for
Hallelujah Jones with his evangelism mingled a spice of the rancor of
the socialist. In his thinking, the rich and the wicked were mingled
inextricably in the great chastisement. He was preaching now from his
favorite text: _Woe to them that are at ease in Zion_.

Harry smiled grimly. He had always been "at ease in Zion." He wore
sumptuous clothes--the ruby in his ring would bring what this plodding
exhorter would call a fortune. At this moment, Hede, his dapper Finn
chauffeur, was polishing the motor-car for him to take his cool evening
spin. That very afternoon he had put into the little safe in the chapel
study two thousand dollars in gold, which he had drawn, a part for his
charities and quarterly payments and a part to take with him for the
exigencies of his trip. The street evangelist over there, preaching
paradise and perdition to the grinning yokels, often needed a square
meal, and was lucky if he always knew where he would sleep. Yet did the
Reverend Henry Sanderson, after all, get more out of life than
Hallelujah Jones?

The thread of his thought broke. The bareheaded figure had ended his
harangue. The eternal fires were banked for a time, while, seated on a
camp-stool at his crazy melodeon, he proceeded to transport his audience
to the heavenly meads of the New Jerusalem. He began a "gospel song"
that everybody knew:


      "I saw a wayworn traveller,
        The sun was bending low.
      He overtopped the mountain
        And reached the vale below.
      He saw the Golden City,
        His everlasting home,
      And shouted as he journeyed,
        'Deliverance will come!

         "'Palms of Victory,
           Crowns of Glory!
     Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"


The voice was weather-cracked, and the canvas bellows of the instrument
coughed and wheezed, but the music was infectious, and half from
overflowing spirits, and half from the mere swing of the melody, the
crowd chanted the refrain:


         "'Palms of Victory;
           Crowns of Glory!
     Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"


Two, three verses of the old-fashioned hymn he sang, and after each
verse more of the bystanders--some in real earnestness, some in impious
hilarity--shouted in the chorus:


     "'Palms of Victory, I shall wear!'"


Harry walked on in a brown study, the refrain ringing through his brain.
There came to him the memory of Hugh's old sneer as he looked at his
book-shelves--whereon Nietzsche and Pascal sat cheek by jowl with
_Theron Ware_ and _Robert Elsmere_--"I wonder how much of all that you
really believe!" How much _did_ he really believe? "I used to read
Thomas a Kempis then," he said to himself, "and Jonathan Edwards; now I
read Renan and the _Origins of Christian Mythology_!"

At the chapel-gate lounged his chauffeur, awaiting orders.

"Bring the car round, Hede," said Harry, "and I shan't need you after
that to-night. I'll drive her myself. You can meet me at the garage."

Hede, the dapper, good-looking Scandinavian, touched his glossy straw
hat respectfully. It was a piece of luck that his master had not planned
a motor trip instead of a tour afoot. For a month, after to-night, his
time was his own. His quarter's wages were in his pocket, and he slapped
the wad with satisfaction as he sauntered off to the bowling-alley.

The study was pitch-dark, and Rummy halted on the threshold with a low,
ominous growl as Harry fumbled for the electric switch. As he found and
pressed it and the place flooded with light, he saw a figure there--the
figure of a man who had been sitting alone--beside the empty hearth, who
rose, shrinking back from the sudden brilliancy.

It was Hugh Stires.




CHAPTER X

THE GAME


Harry Sanderson stared at the apparition with a strange feeling, like
rising from the dead. There flashed into his mind the reflection he had
seen once in the mirror above the mantel--the face on which fell the
amber ray from the chapel window, shining through the figure of the
unrepentant thief--the face that had seemed so like his own!

The likeness, however, was not so startling now. The aristocratic
features were ravaged like a nicked blade. Dissipation, exposure, shame
and unbridled passion had each set its separate seal upon the handsome
countenance. Hugh's clothes were shabby-genteel and the old slinking
grace of wearing them was gone. A thin beard covered his chin, and his
shifty look, as he turned it first on Harry and then nervously over his
shoulder, had in it a hunted dread, a dogging terror, constant and
indefinable. From bad to worse had been a swift descent for Hugh Stires.

The wave of feeling ebbed. Harry drew the window-curtains, swung a
shade before the light, and motioned to the chair.

"Sit down," he said.

Hugh looked his old friend in the face a moment, then his unsteady
glance fell to the white carnation in his lapel as he said: "I suppose
you wonder why I have come here."

Harry did not answer the implied question. His scrutiny was deliberate,
critical and inquiring. "What have you been doing the last year?" he
asked.

"A little of everything," replied Hugh. "I ran a bucket-shop with Moreau
in Sacramento for a while. Then I went over in the mining country. I
took up a claim at Smoky Mountain--that's worth something, or may be
sometime."

"Why did you leave it?"

Hugh touched his parched lips with his tongue--again that nervous,
sidelong look, that fearful glance over his shoulder.

"I had no money to work it. I had to live. Besides, I'm tired of the
whole thing."

The backward glance, the look of dread, were tangible tokens. Harry
translated them:

"You are not telling the truth," he said shortly. "What have you
_done_?"

Hugh flinched, but he made sullen answer: "Nothing. What should I have
done?"

"That is what I am now inquiring of myself," said Harry. "Your face is a
book for any one to read. I see things written on it, Hugh--things that
tell a story of wrong-doing. You are afraid."

Hugh shivered under the regard. Did his face really tell so much?

"I don't care to be seen in town," he said. "You wouldn't either,
probably, under the circumstances." His gaze dropped to his frayed
coat-sleeve. In his craven fear of something that he dared not name even
to himself, and in his wretched need, he remembered a night once before,
when he had sidled into town drunken and soiled--to a luxurious room, a
refreshing bath, clean linen and a welcome. Abject drops of self-pity
started in his eyes.

"You're the only one in the world I dared come to," he said miserably.
"I've walked ten miles to-day, for I haven't a red cent in my pocket.
Nor even decent clothes," he ended.

"That can be partly remedied," said Harry after a pause. He took a dark
coat from its hook and tossed it to him. "Put that on," he said. "You
needn't return it."

Hugh caught the garment. In another moment he had exchanged it for the
one he wore, and was emptying the old coat's pockets.

"Don't sneak!" said Harry with sudden contempt. "Don't you suppose I
know a deck of cards when I see it?"

The thin scar on Hugh's brow reddened. He thrust into his pocket the
pasteboards he had made an instinctive move to conceal and buttoned the
coat around him. It fitted sufficiently. His eyes avoided the well-set
figure standing in white negligee shirt, norfolk jacket and leather
belt. As they had been wont to do in the comfortable past, they fixed
themselves on the little safe.

"Look here, Harry," he began, "you were a good fellow in the old days.
I'm sorry I never paid you the money I borrowed. I would have, but
for--what happened. But you won't go back on me now, will you? I want to
get out of the country and begin over again somewhere. Will you loan me
the money to do it?"

Hugh was eager and voluble now. The man to whom he appealed was his
forlorn hope. He had come with no intention of throwing himself upon his
father's mercy. He had wished to see anybody in the world but him. In
his urgent need, he had had a wild thought of appealing to Jessica, or
at worst to get speech with Blake, the old butler who many a time of old
had hidden his backslidings from the parental eye. But he had found the
white house in the aspens closed and desolate, the servants gone. Harry
Sanderson was his last resort.

"If you will, I'll never forget it, Harry!" he cried. "Never, the
longest day I live! I'll use every dollar of it just as I say! I will,
on my honor!"

But the sight of the poker deck had been steel to Harry's soul. It had
touched an excoriated spot that in the past months had grown as
sensitive as an exposed nerve. The pictured squares were the ironic
badge of Hugh's incorrigibility. They had ruined him, and the ruin had
broken his father's heart, and wrecked the life of Jessica Holme. And
out of this havoc a popular rector named Harry Sanderson had emerged
pitifully the worse.

"Honor!" he said. "Have you enough to swear by? You are what you are
because you are a bad egg! You were born a gentleman, but you choose to
be a rogue. Do you know the meaning of the word honor, or right, or
justice? Have you a single purpose of mind which isn't crooked?"

"You're just like the rest, then," Hugh retorted. "Just because I did
that one thing, you'll give me no more chance. Yet the first thing I did
with that money was to square myself. I paid every debt of honor I had.
That's why I'm in the hole now. But I get no credit for it, even from
you. I wish you could put yourself in my place!"

Harry had been looking steadily at the sallow face with its hoof-print
of the satyr, not seeing it, but hearing his own voice say to Jessica:
"I was my brother's keeper! I see it now." And out of the distance, it
seemed, his voice answered:

"Put myself in your place! I wish I could! I wish to God I could!"

The exclamation was involuntary, automatic, the cumulative expression of
every throe of conscience Harry had endured since then, the voice of
that remorse that had cried insistently for reparation, dinning in his
ears the fateful question that God asked of Cain! Suddenly a whirl of
rage seized him, unmeasured, savage, malicious. He had despised Hugh,
now he hated him; hated him because he was Jessica's husband, and more
than all, because he was the symbol of his own self-abasement. A
dare-devil side of the old Satan Sanderson that he had chained and
barred, rose up and took him by the throat. He struck the oak
wainscoting with his fist, feeling a red mist grow before his eyes.

"So you paid every 'debt of honor' you had, eh? You acknowledge a
gamester's honor, but not the obligation of right action between man
and man! Very well! Give me that pack of cards. You want money--here it
is!"

He swiftly turned the clicking combination of the safe, wrenched open
the door and took out two heavy canvas bags. He snapped the cord from
the neck of one of these and a ringing stream of double-eagles swept
jingling on the table. He dipped his hand in the yellow pile. A thought
mad as the hoofs of runaway horses was careening through his brain. He
felt an odd lightness of mind, a tense tingling of every nerve and
muscle.

"Here is two thousand dollars!--yours, if you win it! For you shall play
for it, you gambler who pays his debts of 'honor' and no other! You
shall play fair and straight, if you never play again!"

Hugh gazed at Harry in a startled way. This was not the ministerial
Harry Sanderson he had known--this _gauche_ figure, with the white
infuriate face, the sparkling eyes and the strange, veiled look. This
reminded him of the reckless spirit of his college days, that he had
patterned after and had stood in awe of. Only he had never seen him look
so then. Could Harry be in earnest? Hugh glanced from him to the pile of
coin and back again. His fingers itched.

"How can I play," he said, "when you know very well I haven't a _sou
markee_?"

Harry stuffed the gold back into the bag. He snatched the cards from
Hugh's hand and a box of waxen envelope wafers from his desk. There was
a strange light in his eye, a tremor in his fingers.

"It is I who play with money!" he said. "My gold against your counters!
Each of those hundred red disks represents a day of your life--a day, do
you understand?--a red day of your sin! A day of yours against a
double-eagle! What you win you keep. But for every counter I win, you
shall pay me one straight, white day, a clean day, lived for decency and
for the right!"

He was the old Satan Sanderson now, with the blood bubbling in his
veins--the Satan Sanderson who could "talk like Bob Ingersoll or an
angel," as the college saying was--the cool, daring, enigmatical Abbot
of The Saints, primed for any audacity. It was the old character again,
but curiously changed. The new overlaid it. Under the spur of some
driving impulse the will was travelling along a disused and preposterous
channel to a paramount end.

Hugh's eyes were fastened on the gold in Harry's fingers. Two thousand
dollars! If luck came his way he could go far on that--far enough to
escape the nameless terror that pursued him in every shadow. Money
against red wafers? Why, it was plenty if he won, and if he lost he had
staked nothing. What a fool Harry was!

Harry saw the shrewd, calculating look that came to his eyes. He caught
his wrist.

"Not here!" he said hoarsely. He flung open the chapel door and pushed
him inside. He seized one of the altar candles, lit it with a match and
stuck it upright in its own wax on the small communion table that stood
just inside the altar-rail, with the cards, the red wafers and the bags
of coin. He dragged two chairs forward.

"Now," he said in a strained voice, "put up your hand--your right
hand--and swear before this altar, on the gambler's honor you boast of,
win or lose, to abide by this game!"

Hugh shrank. He was superstitious. The calculating look had fled. He
glanced half fearfully about him--at Harry's white face--at the high
altar with its vases of August lilies--at the great rose-window, now a
mass of white, opaque blotches on which the three black crosses stood
out with weird distinctness--at the lurking, unlighted shadows in the
corners. He looked longingly at the gold, shining yellow in the
candle-light. It fascinated him.

He lifted his hand. It was trembling.

"I swear I will!" he said. "I'll stand by the cards, Harry, and for
every day you win, I'll walk a chalk line--so help me God!"

Harry Sanderson sat down. He emptied one of the bags at his elbow, and
pushed the box of wafers across the table. He shuffled the cards swiftly
and cut.

"Your deal!" he said.




CHAPTER XI

HALLELUJAH JONES TAKES A HAND


Hallelujah Jones had finished his labor for the night. The crowd had
grown restive, and finally melted away, and, his audience gone, he
folded the camp-stool, turned off the gasoline flare, shut down the lid
of his melodeon, and trundled it up the street. A goodly number of
coppers had rattled into his worn hat, and to the workman belonged his
wage. There was a little settlement on the river, a handful of miles
away, and the trudge under the stars would be cool and pleasant. If he
grew tired, there was his blanket strapped atop the melodeon, and the
open night was dry and balmy.

As he pushed up the street he came to a great motor-car standing at the
curb under the maples. There was no one in it, but somewhere in its
interior a muffled whirring throb beat evenly like a double, metallic
heart. He stopped and regarded it inquisitively; a rich man's property,
to be sure!

He looked up--it was at the gate of the chapel. No doubt it belonged to
the fashionable rector who had been pointed out to him on the street the
day before. He remembered the young, handsome face, the stylish
broadcloth. He thought he would have liked to lean over the Reverend
Henry Sanderson's shoulder and lay his finger on a text: _How hardly
shall a rich man enter into the kingdom of Heaven_. Yet it was a
beautiful edifice that wealth had built there for Christ! He saw dimly
the stone angel standing in the porch, and, leaving his melodeon on the
pavement, entered the gate to examine it.

He noticed now a dim flicker that lit one corner of the great
rose-window. Moving softly over the cropped grass, he approached, tilted
one of the hinged panels, and peered in. Two men were there, behind the
altar-railing, seated at the communion table.

Hallelujah Jones started back. There on the table was a bag of coin,
cards and counters. They were playing--he heard the fall of the cards on
the hard wood, saw the gleam of a gold-piece, the smear of melted wax
marring the polished oak. The reddish glow of the candle was reflected
on the players' faces. Well he knew the devil's tools: had he not sung
and exhorted in Black Hill mining camps and prayed in frontier faro
"joints"? They were gambling! At God's holy altar, and on Christ's
table! Who would dare such a profanation?

He craned his neck. Suddenly he gave a smothered cry. The player facing
him he recognized--it was the rector himself! He bent forward, gazing
with a tense and horrified curiosity.

In that hazard within the altar-rail strange forces were contending,
whose meaning he could not fathom. Between the two men who played, not a
word had been spoken save those demanded by the exigencies of the game.
Harry had seemed to act almost automatically, but his mind was working
clearly, his hand was firm and cool as the blossom on his coat; he made
his play with that old steely nonchalance with which, once upon a time,
he had staked--and lost--so often. But in his brain a thousand spindles
were whirring, a maze of refractory images was rushing past him into an
eddying phantasmagoria. A kind of exaltation possessed him. He was
putting his past into the dice-box to redeem a soul in pawn, fighting
the devil with his own fire, gambling for God!

Five times, ten times, the cards had changed hands, and with every deal
he lost. The gold disks had slipped steadily across the table. But Harry
had seemed to be looking beyond the ebb and flow of the jettons and the
pale face opposite him that gloated over its yellow pile. Though that
pile grew larger and larger, Harry's face had never changed. Hugh's was
the shaking hand when he discarded, the convulsed features when he
scanned his draw, the desperate anxiety when for a moment fortune seemed
to waver. He had never in his life had such luck! He swept his winnings
into his pockets with a discordant laugh as he noted that, of the
contents of the opened bag, Harry had but one double-eagle remaining.

Harry paused an instant. He snapped the little gold cross he wore from
its silken tether and set it upright by him on the table.

His hand won, and the next, and the next. Hugh hoarded his gold: he
staked the red wafers--each one a day! He had won almost a thousand
dollars, but the second bag had not yet been opened, and the vampire
intoxication was running molten-hot in his veins. The untouched bag drew
him as the magnet mountain drew the adventurous Sindbad--he could have
snatched it in his eagerness.

But the luck had changed; his red counters diminished, melted; he would
soon have to draw on his real winnings. Cold beads of sweat broke on his
forehead.

Neither had heard the creak of the rose-window as the hinged panel drew
back. Neither saw the face pressed against the aperture. Neither guessed
the wild and terrible thoughts that were raging through the mind of the
solitary watcher as he peered and peered.

This minister! This corrupt, ungodly shepherd! He could be neither
hanged nor put in jail, yet he committed a crime for which hell itself
scarce held adequate penalty and punishment! The street preacher's eyes
dilated, the hand that held the panel trembled, spots of unhealthy white
sprang into his burning cheeks. The flaring candles--the table with its
carven legend, _This Do In Remembrance of Me_--the little gold cross,
set there, it seemed to him, in a satanic derision! It was the evil the
Apostle Paul wrestled against, of "wicked spirits in high places." It
was sacrilege! It was blasphemy! It was the Arch-Fiend laughing, making
a mock of God's own altar with the guilty pleasures of the pit--a very
sacrament of the damned!

Scarce knowing what he did, he closed the panel softly and ran across
the chapel lawn. On the pavement outside he met a man approaching. It
was the bishop, on his way to his contemplated chat with Harry
Sanderson. The excited evangelist did not know the man, but his eye
caught the ministerial dress, the plain, sturdy piety of the face. In
his zeal he saw an instrument to his hand. He grasped the bishop's arm.

"Quick! Quick!" he gasped. "There's devil's work doing in there! Come
and see!" He fairly pulled him inside the gate.

The puzzled bishop saw the intense excitement of the other's demeanor.
He saw the faint glow in the corner of the rose-window. Were there
thieves after the altar-plate?

He shook off the eager hand that was drawing him toward the window. "Not
there--come this way!" he said, and hurried toward the porch. He tried
the chapel door--it was fast. He had a key to this in his pocket. He
inserted it with caution, opened the door noiselessly and went in, the
street preacher at his heels.

What the bishop saw was photographed instantaneously on his mind in
fiery, indelible colors. It ate into his soul like hot iron into
quivering flesh, searing itself upon his memory. It was destined to
haunt his sleep for many months afterward, a phantom of regret and
shame. He was, in his way, a man of the world, travelled, sophisticated,
acquainted with sin in unexpected forms and places. But this sight, in
all its coarse suggestion of license, in its harrowing implication of
hidden vice and hypocrisy, was damning and appalling. The evangelist of
the pave had been horrified, shocked to word and action; the bishop was
frozen, inarticulate, impaled. For any evil in Hugh Stires he was
prepared--since the forgery. But Hugh's companion now was the man whom
he himself had ordained and anointed, by the laying on of hands, with
the chrism of his holy ministry.

It was sin, then, that had set the look he had marvelled at in Harry
Sanderson's face--sin, flaunting, mocking and terrible! He whom the
church had ordained to shepherd its little ones, to comfort its
afflicted, to give in marriage and to bless, to hold before the world
the white and stainless banner--a renegade, polluting the sanctuary! A
priest apostate, surprised in a hideous revel, gambling, as the Roman
soldiers gambled for the seamless garment, at the foot of the cross! An
irrepressible exclamation burst from his lips.

With the sound both men at the table started to their feet. Hugh, with a
single glance behind him, uttering a wild laugh, leaped the railing,
dashed through the study, and vanished into the night; Harry, as though
suddenly turned to stone, stood staring at the accusatory figure, with
the eager form of the evangelist behind it. It was as if the horror on
the stern, set face of the bishop mirrored itself instantaneously upon
his countenance, his imagination opening in a shocked, awed way to the
concentrated light of feeling, so that he stood bewildered in the
paralysis of a like dismay.

To the bishop it seemed the attitude of guilt detected.

What was Harry Sanderson thinking, as, under that speechless regard, he
mechanically gathered the scattered cards and lifted the little cross
and the unopened bag of double-eagles from the table? Where was the odd
excitement, the strange exaltation that had possessed him? The spindles
in his brain had stilled, and an algid calm had succeeded, as abrupt as
the quiet, deadly assurance with which his mind now saw the pit into
which his own feet had led him. The paradoxical impulse that had bred
this sinister topsyturvydom had fallen away. The same judicial Harry
Sanderson who had said to Jessica, "I was my brother's keeper,"
arraigned and judged himself, and pronounced the sentence on the
bishop's face conclusive, irrefutable, without the power of explanation
or appeal.

He blew out the candle, replaced it carefully in its altar bracket, made
shift to wipe the wax from the table, and slowly, half blindly, and
without a word, went into the study.

The bishop came forward, drew the key from the inside of the study door,
closed it and locked it from the chapel side. Harry did not turn, but he
was acutely conscious of every sound. He heard the door shut sharply,
the harsh grate of the key in the lock, and the sound came to him like
the last sentence--the realization of a soul on whom the gate of the
good closes for ever.

In the dark silence of the chapel Hallelujah Jones smote his thin hands
together approvingly, as he followed the bishop to the outer door. There
the older man laid his hand on his shoulder.

"_Let him that thinketh he standeth_," he said, "_take heed lest he
fall_! Let not this knowledge be spread abroad that it make the
unrighteous to blaspheme. When you pray for your own soul to-night, pray
for the soul of that man from whom God's face is turned away!"

Something in the churchless evangelist bowed to the voice of
ecclesiastical authority. He went without a word.


In the study Harry Sanderson stood for a moment with the cards and the
bag of double-eagles in his hand. In his soft shirt and disordered hair,
with his preternaturally bright eyes, the white blossom on his lapel,
and the brilliant light upon his face, he might have been that
satin-sleeved colonial ancestor of his, in dissolute maturity, coming
from an unclerical bout at Loo, two hundred years ago.

Finally he put the cards and the canvas bag methodically into the safe
and closed it. Then he knelt by his desk and said, clearly and aloud--to
that cold inner symbol of consciousness in his soul:

"O God, I do not know if Thou art, as has been said, a seer of the good
that is in the bad, and of the bad that is in the good, and a lover of
them both. But I know that I am in a final extremity. I can no longer do
my labor consistently before the world and before Thee. If I am
delivered, it must be by some way of Thine own that I can not conceive,
for I can not help myself. Amen."

He rose to his feet, mechanically put on a coat that was lying on a
chair--Hugh's coat, but he did not notice this--and bareheaded passed
out to the street. The motor-car stood there. He took his place in the
forward seat, and threw on the power.

Barking joyously, Rummy, the brown spaniel, tore out of the gate, but
his master did not stop. The little creature pursued the moving car,
made a frantic leap to gain his seat, but missed, and the huge armored
wheel struck and hurled him to the gutter.

Harry did not hear the sharp yelp of pain; his hand was on the lever,
pushing it over, over, to its last notch, and the great mechanism,
responding with a leap, sped away, faster and faster, through the night.




CHAPTER XII

THE FALL OF THE CURTAIN


Harry Sanderson was acting in a kind of fevered dream. His head and
hands were bare, his face white and immobile, and his eyes stared
straight before him with the persistent fixity of the sleep-walker's.
They did not see a bowed, plodding figure pushing a rickety, wheeled
melodeon, who scurried from before the hurtling weight that had all but
run him down. Nor could they see far behind in the eddying dust a little
dog, moaning, limping piteously on three legs, with tongue lolling and
shaggy coat caked with mud--following the hopeless, bird-like flight.

One mile, two miles, three miles. The streets were far behind now. The
country road spun before him, a dusty white ribbon, along which the dry
battered corn rattled as if in a surge of torrid wind. The great
motor-car was reeling off the distance like a maddened thing, swooping
through the haloed dark, the throttle out, the lever pushed to its
utmost limit of speed, rocking drunkenly, every inch of tested steel
ringing and throbbing. Yet Harry's fingers had no tremor, no hesitancy,
no lack of cunning. His heart was beating measuredly. He kept the road
by a kind of instinct as rudimentary as that which points the homing
carrier-pigeon. He seemed to be moving in a mental world created by some
significant clairvoyancy, in which the purpose operated without recourse
to the spring of reason. The light of neurasthenia burned behind his
eyelids; he felt at once a consuming flame within, a paralyzing frost
without. The light autumn mist drenched him like a fine, sifting rain;
the wheel-flung dust adhered like yellow mud, and above the clatter of
the exhaust the still air shrieked past like a shrewd wind.

Five miles, through the dark, under the breathless, expectant stars. The
car was on the broad curve now, where the road bent to the bluff above
the river to pass the skeleton railroad bridge. But Harry knew neither
place nor time. He was conscious only of motion--swift, swallow-like,
irresistible--this, and the racing pictures in his brain, stencilled on
the blur of night that closed around him. These pictures came and went;
the last revel of The Saints when he was Satan Sanderson--Hugh sneering
at his calling--Jessica facing him with unbandaged eyes--Hallelujah
Jones, preaching on the street corner. The figure of the street
evangelist recurred again and again with a singular persistency. It grew
more tangible! It threatened him!

Something in Harry's brain seemed to snap. A tiny shutter, like that of
a camera, fell down. His hands dropped from the steering-wheel, and,
swaying in his seat, he began to sing, in a voice made high and uneven
by the speed of the car:


         "Palms of Victory,
         Crowns of Glory!
     Palms of Victory, I shall wear!"


He sang but the three lines. For suddenly the car left the road--the
inflated tires rebounded from the steel ridge of the railroad track--the
forward axle caught an iron signal post--and the great motor-car, its
shattered lamp jingling like a gong, its pistons thrusting in midair,
reared on two wheels, hurling its occupant out like a pebble thrown from
a sling, half-turned, and, leaving a trail of sparks like the tail of a
rocket behind it, plunged heavily over the rim of the bluff into the
river.

A moment later the deep black waters of "the hole" had closed above the
mass of sentient steel. The swift current had smoothed away every trace
of the strange monster it had engulfed, and there, by the side of the
track, huddled against the broken signal post, his clothing plastered
with mud and grime, motionless, and with a nasty cut on the temple, lay
Harry Sanderson.




CHAPTER XIII

THE CLOSED DOOR


A long saturating peace, a deep and drenching darkness, had folded Harry
Sanderson. Dully at first, at length more insistently and sharply, a
rhythmic pulsing sound began to annoy the quietude. K-track, k-track,
k-track--it grew louder; it grew more momentous and material; it
irritated the calm that had wrapped the animate universe. Shreds of
confusing impression had begun to arrange themselves on a void of
nothingness, blurred inchoate images to struggle through a delicious
sensation of indifference and repose. Outlines were filling, contours
growing distinct; the brain was beginning to resume its interrupted
function. As though from an immeasurable distance he heard a low
continuous roar, and now and again, through the roar, nearer voices.

Harry awoke. His mind awoke, but his eyes did not open at once, for the
gentle swaying that cradled him was pleasant and the muffled clack and
hum soothed him like opium. He was as serenely comfortable as a
stevedore who dozes out of the long stupefaction of exhaustion to the
realization that the day is a holiday. His blood was coursing like
quicksilver. He felt a buoyancy, a volatile pleasure, a sense of
complete emancipation from all that clogged and cloyed--the sensuous
delight of the full pulse and the perfect bodily mechanism.

He opened his eyes.

It was daylight. He was lying on dusty boards that rattled and vibrated
beneath him--the floor of an empty freight car in motion. The sliding
door was part-way open, and through it was borne the moist air of a
river bay and the purring wash of the tide. A small brown dog, an
abject, muddied and shivering morsel, was snuggled close to his side. It
whined, as if with joy to see his eyes opened, and its stubby tail beat
the floor.

Harry turned his head. Two men in dingy garments were seated on the
floor a little distance away, thumbing a decrepit pack of cards over an
empty box. He could see both side-faces, one weather-beaten and
good-humored, the other crafty--knights of the road.

The sudden movement had sent a momentary twinge to his temple; he put up
his hand--it touched a coarse handkerchief that had been bound tightly
about it. The corner hung down--it was soiled and stiff with blood. What
was he doing there? Where was he? _Who was he?_

It came to him with a start that he actually for the moment did not
know who he was--that he had ridiculously slipped the leash of his
identity. He smiled at his predicament. He would lie quietly for a few
moments and it would come: of course it would come!

Yet it did not come, though he lay many moments, the fingers of his mind
fumbling for the latch of the closed door. He had waked perfectly
well--all save the slight cut on his temple, and that was clearly
superficial, a mere scratch. Not a trouble or anxiety marred his soul;
his mind was as clear and light as a lark's. Body and brain together
felt as if they had never had a serious ache in the world. But all that
had preceded his awakening was gone from him as completely as though it
had had no existence. His mind, so far as memory of incident was
concerned, was wiped clean, as a wet sponge wipes off a slate. Yet he
felt no trouble or anxiety. That part of his brain which had vibrated to
these emotions was, as it were, under a curious anesthesia. Goaded and
overkeyed into a state of hypertension, it had retaliated with
insensibility. All that had vexed and hurt was gone into the limbo with
its own disturbing memories.

Stealthily he rose to a sitting posture and, with a frown of humorous
perplexity, took a swift and silent inventory. Here he was, in a
freight car, speeding somewhere or other, with a sore and damaged skull.
The dog clearly belonged to him, or he to the dog--there was an old
intimacy in the fawning fondness of the amber eyes. Yonder were two
tramps, diverting themselves in their own way, irresponsible and
questionable birds of passage. He scanned his own clothing. It was
little better than theirs. His coat was threadbare, and with mud, oil
and coal-dust, was in a more disreputable state. His wristbands were
grimy, and one cuff-link had been torn away. He had no hat.

He bethought himself of his pockets, and went through them methodically
one by one. They yielded several dollars in coin, a penknife and a tiny
gold cross, but not a letter, not a scrap of paper, nothing to serve
him. The gleam of a ring on his finger caught his eye; he rubbed away
the dirt and carefully examined it, wondering if the stone was real. His
hand was slightly cut and swollen, and the circlet would not come off,
but by shifting it slightly he could see the white depression made by
long wear. The setting was an odd one, formed of the twisted letters H.
S. Those naturally should be his initials, but there he stopped. He
repeated to himself all the names he could think of beginning with S,
but they told him nothing.

He looked himself over again, carefully, reflectively--many a time of
old he had regarded himself with the same amused, fastidious tolerance
when dressed for a "slumming" expedition--his head a little to one side,
the ghost of a smile on his lips. He put out his hand and laid it on the
spaniel's head.

Its rough tongue licked his fingers; it held up one forepaw mutely and
lamely. He drew the feverish, dirty little creature into his lap and
examined the limp member. It was broken.

"Poor little beggar!" said he under his breath. "So you've been knocked
out, too!" With his knife he cut a piece from the lining of his coat and
with a splinter of wood from the floor he set the fractured bone and
wrapped the leg tightly. The dog submitted without a whimper, and when
he set it down, it lay quietly beside him, watching him with
affectionate canine solicitude.

"I wonder who we are, you and I," muttered Harry Sanderson whimsically.
"I wonder!"

His gaze turned to where he could see the sunshine dancing and
shimmering from the tremulous water. He sniffed the warm air--it was
clear and sweet. Not a cloud was in the perfect sky. How fine he felt,
broken head and all!

He looked across the car, where the card players were still absorbed.
Over the shoulder of one he could see the hand he held--a queen, two
aces, a seven and a deuce. For an instant something in his brain snapped
and crackled like the sputtering spark of an incomplete insulation--for
an instant the fingers almost touched the latch of the closed door. Then
the sensation faded, and left a blank as before. He rose to his feet and
walked forward.

The players looked around. One of them nodded approvingly.

"Right as a trivet!" he said. "I made a pretty good job of that cut of
yours. Hurt you much?"

"No," said Harry. "I'm obliged to you for the attention."

"Foolish to walk on a railroad track," the other went on. "By your
looks, you've been on the road long enough to know better. We figgered
it out that you was just a-going to cross the railroad bridge when the
freight raised merry hell with you. We stopped to tank there and we
picked you up, you and your four-legged mate. Must have been a bit
squiffy, eh?"

He winked, and took a flask from his pocket. "Have a hair of the dog
that bit you?" he said.

Harry took the flask, and, wiping the top on his sleeve, uncorked it.
Something in the penetrating odor of the contents seemed to cleave
through far mental wastes to an intimate, though mysterious goal. He put
it to his lips and drank thirstily.

As the burning liquid scorched his throat, a recrudescence of old
impulses surged up through the crust of more modern usage. Mentally,
characteristically, he was once more the incongruous devil-may-care
figure in whom conspicuous achievement and contradictory excesses had
walked hand in hand. The Harry Sanderson of the new, remorseful,
temperate life, of chastened impulses, of rote and rule and reformed
habit--the rector of St. James--had been lost on that wild night ride.
The man who had awakened in the freight car was the Satan Sanderson of
four years before, who, under stress of mental illness and its warped
purview, in that strenuous scene in the chapel, had regained his ancient
governance.

Harry handed back the flask with a long breath. There was a composed yet
reckless light in his eye--the old veiled gleam of vagary, and paradox,
and escapade. He seated himself beside them.

"Thank you," he said. "With your permission, gentlemen, I will take a
hand in the game."




CHAPTER XIV

THE WOMAN WHO REMEMBERED


Since that tragical wedding-day at the white house in the aspens,
Jessica had passed through a confusion of experiences. She had always
lived much in herself, and to her natural reserve her blindness had
added. As a result her knowledge both of herself and of life had been
superficial. She had been drawn to Hugh by both the weakest and the
noblest in her, in a self-obliterating worship that had counted her
restored sight only an ornament and glory for her love. In the baleful
hour of enlightenment she had been lost, whirled away, out into the
storm and void, every landmark gone, every light extinguished, her feet
set in the "abomination of desolation." The first bitter shock of the
catastrophe, however, seemed to burn up in her the very capacity for
further poignant suffering, and she went through the motions of life
apathetically.

Change of scene and the declining health of David Stires occupied,
fortunately, much of her waking thoughts. After the first few months of
travel he failed steadily. His citric-acid moods were forgotten, his
harsh tempers put aside. Hour after hour he lay in his chair, gazing out
from the wide sun parlor of the sanatorium on the crest of Smoky
Mountain, whither their journeying had finally brought them. He had
never spoken of Hugh. But Jessica, sitting each day beside him, reading
to him till he dropped asleep, seeing the ever-increasing sadness in his
face, knew the hidden canker that gnawed his heart.

To the northward the slope of the mountain fell gradually to fields of
violet-eyed alfalfa, and twice a day a self-important little
donkey-engine drew a single car up and down between the great glass
building on the ridge and the junction of the northern railroad. This
view did not attract her; she liked best the southern exposure, with its
flushed, serrated snow-peaks in the distance, the warmer brown shadows
of the gulch-seamed hills unrolling at her feet, and at their base the
treeless, busy little county-seat two miles away. In time her fiercer
pain had dulled, and her imagination--naturally so importunate--had
begun to seize upon her surroundings. In the summer season the
sanatorium had few guests, and for this she was thankful. Doctor Brent,
its head, rallying her on her paleness, drove her out of doors with
good-natured severity, and when she was not with David Stires she
walked or rode for hours at a time over the mountain trails. Breathing
in the crisp air of altitude her spirits grew more buoyant. The beauty
of shrub and flower, of cloud and sky, began to call to her, and the
breath of October found a tinge of color in her cheek. She fed the
squirrels, listened to the pert chirp of the whisky-jack and the
whirring drum of the partridge, or sat on a hidden elevation which she
named "The Knob," facing across the shallow valley to the south.

The Knob overlooked a little grassy shelf a few hundred feet below,
where stood a miner's cabin, with weed-grown gravel heaps near by, in
front of which a tree bore the legend, painted roughly on a board: "The
Little Paymaster Claim." From its point of vantage, too, unobserved, she
could look down into the gulch far below, where yellowish-brown cones
reared like gigantic ant-hills--the ear-marks of the placer miner--and
gray streaks indicated the flumes in which, by tortuous meanderings, the
water descended to do its work in the sluices. She could even watch the
toiling miners, hoisting the gravel by windlasses, or shovelling it into
the long narrow boxes through which the foaming water raced. So limpid
was the air that in the little town she could distinguish each several
building lining the single straight street--a familiar succession of
gilded cafe, general emporium and drug store, with the dull terra cotta
"depot" at one end, and on the other, on a sunburned acre of its own,
the glaring white court-house, flanked by the post-office and the jail.
She could see the clouds of dust, the wagons hitched at the curb and the
drab figures grouped at the corners or passing in and out of doorways.

Her interest had opened eagerly to these scenes. The solitudes soothed
and the life of the community below, frankly primitive and
uncomplicated, attracted her. Between the town of Smoky Mountain and the
expensive sanatorium on the ridge a great social gulf was fixed; the
latter's patrons for the most part came and went by the narrow-gage road
that linked with the northern junction; the settlement far below was
only a feature of the panorama for which they paid so well. Even Doctor
Brent--who had perched this place of healing where his patients could
breathe air fresh from the Pacific and cooled by the snow-peaks--knew it
chiefly through two of its citizens, Mrs. Halloran, the capable,
bustling wife of the proprietor of the Mountain Valley House, the town's
single hostelry, who brewed old-fashioned blackberry wine and cordials
for his patients, and Tom Felder, a young lawyer whom he had known on
the coast before ill health had sent him to hang out his shingle in a
more genial altitude.

The latter sometimes came for a chat with the physician, and on one of
these calls Jessica and he had met. She had liked his keen, good-humored
face and waving, slightly graying hair. She had met him once since on
the mountain road, and he had walked with her and told her quaint
stories of the townspeople. She did not guess that more than once since
then he had walked there hoping to meet her again. He had taken her to
Mrs. Halloran, whose heart she had won by praise of her cherry cordial.

As Mrs. Halloran said afterward: "'Twas no flirt with the bottle and
make love to the spoon! She ain't a bit set up. Take the word I give
you, Tom Felder, an' go and swap lies with the doctor at the santaranium
soon again. Ye can do worse."

This had been Jessica's first near acquaintance with the town, but since
that time she had often reined up at the door of the neat hotel to pass
a word with Mrs. Halloran or to ask for another bottle of the cherry
cordial, which the sick man she daily tended found grateful to his jaded
palate.

"It brings back my boyhood," David Stires said to her one afternoon,
tapping the bottle by his wheel-chair. "That was before the chemist
married the vintner's daughter. Somehow this has the old taste."

"It is nearly gone," she said. "I'll get another bottle--I am going for
a ride now. I think it does you good."

"Before you go," he said, "fetch my writing-case and I will dictate a
letter."

She brought and opened it with a trouble at her heart, for the request
showed his increasing weakness. Until to-day the few letters he had
written had been done with his own hand. Thinking of this as she waited,
her fingers nervously plucked at the inside of the leather cover. The
morocco flap fell and disclosed a slip of paper. It was a canceled
bank-draft. It bore Hugh's name, and across its face, in David Stires'
crabbed hand, written large, was the venomous word _Forgery_.

The room swam before her eyes. Only by a fierce effort could she compel
her pen to trace the dictated words. Hugh's misdeed, evil as it was, had
been to her but an abstract crime; now it suddenly lay bare before her,
a concrete expression of coarse thievery, a living symbol of crafty
simulation. Scarce knowing why she did it, she drew the draft covertly
from its receptacle, and slipped it into her bosom. Her fingers trembled
as they replaced the flap, and her face was pale when she put away the
writing-case and went to don her habit.

The evidence of Hugh's sin! As the horse pounded down the winding road,
she held her hand hard against her breast, as though it were a live coal
that she would press into her flesh in self-torture. That paper must
remain, as the sin that made it remained--the sign-manual of her
dishonor and loss! The man whose hand had penned its lying signature was
the man she had thought she loved. By that act he had thrust himself
from her for ever. Yet he lived. Somewhere in the world he walked, in
shame and degradation, beyond the pale of honorable living--and she was
his wife!

_She was his wife!_ The words hummed in the hoof-beats and taunted her.
The odors of the balsam boughs about her became all at once the scent of
jasmin, the sigh of the wind turned to the chanting of choir voices, and
beneath her closed eyelids came a face seen but once, but never to be
erased or forgotten, a face startled, quivering with a strange,
remorseful flush--which she had not guessed was guilt!

_She was his wife!_ Though she called herself Jessica Holme, yet, in the
law, his name and fame were hers. There was deep in her the unreasoned,
intuitive regard, handed down through inflexible feminine generations,
for the relentless mandate, "let not man put asunder;" but she had no
finical conception of woman's duty to convention. To break the bond? To
divorce the husband to whom she was wife in name only? That would be to
spread abroad the disgrace under which she cringed! She thought of the
old man she had left--uncomplaining, growing feebler every day. To shame
him before the world, whose ancestors had been upright and clean-handed?
To add the final sting to his sufferings--who had done her only good?
No, she could not do that. Time must solve the problem for her in some
other way.

The main street of the town was busy, yet quiet withal, with the
peculiar quiet which marks the absence of cobblestone and trolley-bell.
Farmers from outlying fruit ranches gossiped on the court-house square;
here and there a linen collar and white straw hat betokened the
professional man or drummer; and miners in overalls and thong-laced
boots kept a-swing the rattan half-doors of the saloons.

"Look at that steady hand, now, an' her hair as red as glory!" said Mrs.
Halloran, gazing admiringly from the doorstep where she had been
chatting with Tom Felder. "Ye needn't stare yer gray eyes out though, or
she'll stop at th' joolry shop to buy ye a ring--to shame ye fer jest
hankerin' and sayin' nothin'!"

Felder laughed as he crossed the street, raising his felt hat gallantly
to the approaching rider. Mrs. Halloran was a privileged character. The
ravage of drudgery had not robbed her of comeliness that gave her face
an Indian summer charm, and she was as kindly as her husband was morose.
It was not Michael Halloran who kept the Mountain Valley House popular!
The old woman hurried to the curb and tied the horse as Jessica
dismounted.

"How did ye guess I made some more this day?" she exclaimed. "Sure, if
ye drink it yerself, my dearie, them cheeks is all th' trade-mark I
need!" She led the way into the little carpeted side room, by courtesy
denominated "the parlor." "I'll go an' put it up in two shakes," she
said. "Sit ye down an' I'll not be ten minutes." So saying she bustled
away.

Left alone, Jessica gazed abstractedly about her. Her mind was still
full of the painful reflections of her ride. A door opened from the room
into the office. It was ajar; she stepped close and looked in.

A group of miners lounged in the space before the front
windows--familiarly referred to by its habitues as "the Amen
Corner"--chatting and watching the passers-by.

Suddenly she clapped her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. A name had
been spoken--the name that was in her thought--the name of "Hugh
Stires." She leaned forward, listening breathlessly.

"I wonder where the young blackleg's been," said one, peering through
the windows. "He'd better have stayed away for good, I'm thinking. What
does he want to come back for, to a place where there aren't three men
who will take a drink with him?"

The reply was as contemptuous.

"We get some rare black sheep in the hills!" The voice spoke meaningly.
"If I had my way, he'd leave this region almighty quick!"

Jessica looked about her an instant wildly, guiltily. She could not be
mistaken in the name! Was Hugh here, whither by the veriest accident she
had come--here in this very town that she had gazed down upon every day
for weeks? _Was he?_ She pressed her cold hands to her colder cheeks.
The contempt in the voices had smitten through her like a sword.

A revulsion seized her. No, no, it could not be! She had not heard
aright. It was only a fancy! But she had an overwhelming desire to
satisfy herself with her own eyes. From where she stood she could not
see the street. She bethought herself of the upper balcony.

Swiftly, on tiptoe, she crossed to the hall door, threw it open, and ran
hastily up the stair.




CHAPTER XV

THE MAN WHO HAD FORGOTTEN


If the man who had been the subject of the observations Jessica had
heard had been less absorbed, as he walked leisurely along on the
opposite side of the street, he would have noticed the look of dislike
in the eyes of those he passed. They drew away from him, and one
spoke--to no one in particular and with an oath offensive and fervid.
But weather-beaten, tanned, indifferently clad, and with a small brown
dog following him, the new-comer passed along, oblivious to the sidelong
scrutiny. He did not stare about him after the manner of a stranger,
though, so far as he knew, he had never been in the place before. So far
as he knew--for Harry Sanderson had no memories save those which had
begun on a certain day a month before in a box-car. He walked with eyes
on the pavement, absorbed in thoughts of his own.

But Harry Sanderson now was not the man who had ridden into oblivion in
the motor-car. The rector of St. James was in a strange eclipse.
Mentally and externally he had reverted to the old Satan Sanderson, of
the brilliant flashing originality, of the curt risk and daring. The
deeply human and sensitive side, that had developed during his divinity
years, was in abeyance; it showed itself only in the affection he
bestowed on the little nameless dog that followed him like a brown,
shaggy shadow.

He was like that old self of his, and yet, if he had but known it, he
was wonderfully like some one else, too--some one who had belonged to
the long ago and garbled past that still eluded him; some one who had
been a part also of the life of this very town, till a little over a
month before, when he had left it with dread dogging his footsteps!

Curious coincidences had wrought together for this likeness. In the past
weeks Harry had grown perceptibly thinner. A spare beard was now on his
chin, and the fiery sun that had darkened his cheeks to sallow had
lightened his brown hair a shade. The cut on his brow had healed to the
semblance of a thin red birth-mark. Most of all, the renaissance of the
old character had given his look, to the casual eye, a certain flare and
jauntiness, which dissipation and license, unclogged now with memory or
compunction, had matured and vitalized. His was now a replica of the
face he had once seen, in that lost life of his, mirrored in his chapel
study--his own face, with the trail of evil upon it, and yet weirdly
like Hugh Stires'.

Fate--or God!--was doing strange things for Harry Sanderson!


Harry's game of cards in the freight-car had been a sequent of the game
in the chapel. It was an instinctive effort of the newly-stirring
consciousness to relink the broken chain, utilizing the mental formula
which had been stamped deeply upon it when the curtain of oblivion
descended--which had persisted, as the photograph of the dead retina
shows the scene upon which the living eye last looked. The weeks that
followed were reversionary. Rebellion against convention,
dissipation--these had been the mask through which the odd temperament
of Satan Sanderson had looked at life. This mask had fallen before a
career of new meanings and motives. These blotted suddenly out with
their inspirations and habits, and, the old spring touched, the mind had
automatically resumed its old viewpoint.

He had studied himself with a sardonic, _ex parte_ interest. He had
found at his disposal a well-stocked mind, a copious vocabulary. Terms
of science, historic references, the thousand and one allusions of the
daily newspaper that the unlearned pass over, all had their
significance for him. He was no superficial observer, and readily
recognized the evidences of mental culture. But the cord that had bound
all together into character had snapped. He was a ship without a rudder;
a derelict, drifting with the avid winds of chance on the tide of fate.
A thousand ways he had turned and turned. A thousand tricks he had tried
to cajole the unwilling memory. All were vain. When he had awakened in
the freight-car, many miles had lain between him and his vanished
history, between him and St. James parish, the town he had impressed,
the desolate white house in the aspens, the chapel service and surplice,
and the swift and secret-keeping river. Between him and all that these
things had meant, there lay a gulf of silence and blankness as wide as
infinity itself.

But drifting, adventuring, blown by the gipsy wind of chance, learning
the alphabet and the rule of three of "the road," the man was at once a
part of it and apart from it. The side that rejoiced in the liberty and
madcap adventure was overlaid by another darkling side whose fingers
were ever feeling for the lost latch. In the nomad weeks of wind and
sun, as the tissues of the brain grew slowly back to a state of normal
action, the mind seized again and again upon the bitter question of his
identity. It had obtruded into clicking leagues on steel-rails, into
miles afoot by fruit-hung lanes, on white Pacific shell-roads under
cedar branches, on busy highways. It had stalked into days of labor in
hop-fields, work with hand and foot that brought dreamless sleep and
generous wage; into nights of less savory experience in city purlieus,
where a self-forgotten man gamed and drank, recklessly, audaciously,
forbiddingly. Who was he? From what equation of life had he been
eliminated? Had he loved anything or anybody? Had he a friend, any
friend, in the world? At first it was not often that he cared; only
occasionally some deep-rooted instinct would stir, subtly conscious,
without actual contrast, of the missed and evaded. But he came to ask it
no longer quizzically or sardonically, but gloomily and fiercely. And
lacking answer, the man of no yesterdays had plunged on toward the
ardent, alien to-morrow, and further into audacious folly. He had drunk
deeper, the sign-posts of warning were set in his countenance, and his
smile had grown as dangerous as a sunstroke.


The man of no memories gave no heed to the men on the street who looked
at him askance. He sauntered along unconsciously, his hands thrust deep
in his pockets. With a casual glance at the hotel across the way, he
entered a saloon, where a score of patrons were standing at the bar, or
shaking dice noisily at the tables ranged against the wall. The
bartender nodded to his greeting--the slightest possible nod. The dog
who had followed him into the place leaped up against him, its forepaws
on his knee.

"Brandy, if you please," said the new arrival, and poured indolently
from the bottle set before him.

The conversation in the room had chilled. To its occupants the man who
had entered was no stranger; he was Hugh Stires, returned unwelcome to a
place from which he had lately vanished. Moreover, what they felt for
him was not alone the crude hatred which the honest toiler feels for the
trickster who gains a living by devious knaveries. There was an uglier
suspicion afloat of Hugh Stires! A blue-shirted miner called gruffly for
his score, threw down the silver and went out, slamming the swing-door.
Another glowered at the new arrival, and ostentatiously drew his glass
farther along the bar.

The new-comer regarded none of them. He poured his glass slowly full,
sipped from it, and holding it in his hand, turned and glanced
deliberately about the place. He looked at everybody in the room,
suddenly sensible of the hostile atmosphere, with what seemed a careless
amusement. Then he raised his glass.

"Will you join me, gentlemen?" he said.

There was but one response. A soiled, shambling figure, blear,
white-haired and hesitating, with a battered violin under its arm,
slouched from a corner and grasped eagerly for the bottle the bartender
contemptuously pushed toward him. No one else moved.

The man who waited studied the roomful with a disdainful smile, with
eyes sparkling like steel points. He as wholly misunderstood their
dislike as they misconstrued his effrontery--did not guess that to them
he stood as one whom they had known and had good reason to despise.
Their attitude struck him as so manifestly unreasonable and absurd--so
primarily the sulky hatred of the laborious boor for the manifestly more
flippant member of society--that it diverted him. He had drunk at
bar-rooms in many strange places; never before had he encountered a
community like this. His veiled, insolent smile swept the room.

"A spirit of brotherhood almost Christian!" he said. "If I observe that
the town's brandy is of superior vintage to its breeding, let me not be
understood as complimenting the former without reservation. I have drunk
better brandy; I have never seen worse manners!"

He looked smilingly at the soiled figure beside him--a fragment of
flotsam tossed on the tide of failure. "I erred in my general
salutation," he said. "Gentility is, after all, less a habit than an
instinct." He lifted his glass--to the castaway. "I drink to the health
of the only other gentleman present," he said, and tossed the drink off.

A snort and a truculent shuffle came from the standing men. Their faces
were dark. Tom Felder, the lawyer, entered the saloon just in time to
see big Devlin, the owner of the corner dance-hall, rise from a table,
rolling up flannel sleeves along tattooed arms. He saw him stride
forward and, with a well-directed shove, send the shambling inebriate
reeling across the floor.

"Two curs at the bar are enough at a time!" quoth Devlin.

Then the lawyer saw an extraordinary thing. The emptied glass rang
sharply on the bar, the arm that held it straightened, the lithe form
behind it seemed to expand--and the big bulk of Devlin went backward
through the doorway, and collapsed in a sprawling heap on the pavement.

"For my part," said an even, infuriate voice from the threshold, "I
prefer but one."

The face the roomful saw now as they pushed to the outer air, and which
turned on the flocking crowd, bore anything but the slinking look they
had been used to see on the face of Hugh Stires. The smile that meant
danger played over it; there was both calculation and savagery in it. It
was the look of the man to whom all risks are alike, to whom nothing
counts. In the instant confusion, every one there recognized the element
of hardihood dumfounded. Here was one who, as Barney McGinn, the
freighter, said afterward, "hadn't the sand of a sick coyote," bearding
a bully and the most formidable antagonist the town afforded. Devlin
himself was not overpopular; his action had been plainly enough a play
to the galleries; and courage--that animal attribute which no
circumstance or condition can rob of due admiration--had appeared in an
unexpected quarter. But the man they despised had infuriated them with
insult, and Devlin had the sympathy that clings to a fair cause. An ugly
growl was running through the crowd, and several started forward. Even
when Tom Felder put up his hand with a sharp, indignant exclamation,
they fell back with an unwilling compulsion.

The prostrate man was on his feet in an instant, wiping the blood from a
cleft lip, and peeled off his vest with a vile epithet.

"That is incidentally a venturesome word to select from your
vocabulary," said the even voice, a sort of detonation in it. "You will
feel like apologizing presently."

Devlin came on with a bull-like rush. The lawyer's eye, shrewdly gaging
the situation, gave the slighter man short shrift, and for several
intense seconds every breath stopped. Those seconds called up from some
mysterious covert all the skill and strength of the old hard-hitting
Satan Sanderson, all the science of parry and feint learned in those
bluff college bouts with the gloves with Gentleman Jim. And this hidden
reserve rushed into combat with an avid thirst and wild ferocity as
strange as the steady eye and hand that cloaked them beneath a sardonic
coolness.

It was a short, sharp contest. Not a blow broke the guard of the man
whose back was to the doorway--on the other hand, Devlin's face was
puffed and bleeding. When for a breath he drew back, gulping, a sudden
glint of doubt and fear had slipped beneath the blood and sweat.

The end came quickly. Harry stepped to meet him, there was a series of
swift passes--then one, two, lightning-like blows, and Devlin went down
white and stunned in the dust of the roadway.

So high was the tension and so instantaneous the close, that for a
moment the crowd was noiseless, the spell still upon them. In that
moment Tom Felder came hastily forward, for, though sharing the general
dislike, admiration was strong in him, and, knowing the temper of the
bystanders, he expected trouble.

The man who had administered Devlin's punishment, however, did not see
his approach. He was looking somewhere above their heads--at the upper
balcony of the hotel opposite--staring, in a kind of strained and
horrified expectancy, at a girl who leaned forward, her hands clenching
the balustrade, her eyes fixed on his face. The late sunlight on her
hair made it gleam like burnished copper over her green riding-habit,
and her cheeks were blanched.

There was something in that face, in that intense look, that seemed to
cleave the gray veil that swathed Harry Sanderson's past. Somewhere,
buried in some cell of his brain, a forgotten memory tugged at its
shackles--a memory of a time when, thousands and thousands of years ago,
he had been something more than the initials "H. S." The look pierced
through the daredevil present in which the mind astray had roved
reckless and insensate, to a deeper stratum in which slept maturer
qualities of refined taste, of dignity and of repute. It stripped off
the protecting cicatrice and left him enveloped in an odd embarrassment.
A flush burned his face.

Only an instant the gaze hung between them. It served as a distraction,
for other eyes had raced to the balcony. Loud voices were suddenly
hushed, for there was not wanting in the crowd that instinctive regard
for the proprieties which belongs to communities where gentlewomen are
few. In that instant Felder put his hand on the arm of the staring man
and drew him to the door of the hotel.

"Inside, quickly!" he said under his breath, for a rumble from the crowd
told him the girl had left the balcony above. He pushed the other
through the doorway and turned for a second on the threshold.

"Whatever private feelings you may have," he said in a tone that all
heard, "don't disgrace the town. Fair play--no matter who he is! McGinn,
I should think you, at least, were big enough to settle your grudges
without the help of a crowd."

The freighter reddened angrily for a second, then with a shame-faced
laugh, shrugged his shoulders and turned away. The lawyer went in,
shutting the hotel door behind him.




CHAPTER XVI

THE AWAKENING


The man whose part the lawyer had taken had yielded to his touch almost
dazedly as the girl disappeared. The keen, pleasurable tang of danger
which had leaped in his blood when he faced the enmity of the crowded
street--the reckless zest with which he would have met any odds and any
outcome with the same smile, and gone down if need be fighting like the
tiger in the jungle--had been pierced through by that look from the
balcony. His poise for a puzzling moment had been shaken, his
self-command overthrown. Feeling a dull sense of anger at the curious
embarrassment upon him, he went slowly through the office to the desk,
and with his back to the room, lit a cigar.

The action was half mechanical, but to the men gathered at the windows,
as they got down from the chairs on which they had been standing,
interested spectators of the proceedings outside, it seemed a pose of
gratuitous insolence. Tom Felder, entering, saw it with something of
resentment.

"That was a close squeak," he said. "Do you realize that? In five
minutes more you'd have been handled a sight worse than you handled your
man, let me tell you!"

The man of no memories smiled, the same smile that had infuriated the
bar-room--and yet somehow it was more difficult to smile now.

"Is it possible," he asked, "that through an unlucky error I have
trounced the local archbishop?"

Felder looked at him narrowly. Beneath the sarcasm he distinguished
unfamiliarity, aloofness, a genuine astonishment. The appearance in the
person of Hugh Stires of the qualities of nerve and courage had
surprised him out of his usual indifference. The "tinhorn gambler" had
fought like a man. His present _sang-froid_ was as singular. Had he been
an absolute stranger in the town he might have acted and spoken no
differently. Felder's smooth-shaven, earnest face was puzzled as he
answered curtly:

"You've trounced a man who will remember it a long time."

"Ah?" said the man addressed easily. "He has a better memory than I,
then!"

He gazed over the heads of the silent roomful to the simmering street
where Devlin, with the aid of a supporting arm, was staggering into the
saloon in which his humiliation had begun. "They seem agitated," he
said. The feeling of embarrassment was passing, the old daring was
lifting. His glance, scanning the room, set itself on a shabby, blear
figure in the background, apologetic yet keenly and pridefully
interested. A whimsical light was in his eye. He crossed to him and,
reaching out his hand, drew the violin from under his arm.

"Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast," he said, and, opening
the door, he tucked the instrument under his chin and began to play.

What absolute contempt of danger, what insane prompting possessed him,
can scarcely be imagined. As he stood there on the threshold with that
veiled smile, he seemed utterly careless of consequence, beckoning
attack, flaunting an egregious impertinence in the face of anger and
dislike. Felder looked for a quick end to the folly, but he saw the men
in the street, even as they moved forward, waver and pause. With almost
the first note, it had come to them that they were hearing music such as
the squeaking fiddles of the dance-halls never knew. Those on the
opposite pavement crossed over, and men far down the street stood still
to listen.

More than the adept's cunning, that had at first tingled in his fingers
at sight of the instrument, was in Harry Sanderson's playing. The
violin had been the single passion which the old Satan Sanderson had
carried with him into the new career. The impulse to "soothe the savage
breast" had been a flare of the old character he had been reliving; but
the music, begun in bravado, swept him almost instantly beyond its
bounds. He had never been an indifferent performer; now he was playing
as he had never played in his life, with inspiration and abandon. There
was a diabolism in it. He had forgotten the fight, the crowd, his own
mocking mood. He had forgotten where he was. He was afloat on a
fluctuant tide of melody that was carrying him back--back--into the
far-away past--toward all that he had loved and lost!

"It's _Home, Sweet Home_," said Barney McGinn,--"no, it's _Annie
Laurie_. No, it's--hanged if I know what it is!"

The player himself could not have told him. He was in a kind of tranced
dream. The self-made music was calling with a sweet insistence to buried
things that were stirring from a long sleep. It sent a gulp into the
throat of more than one standing moveless in the street. It brought a
suspicious moisture to Tom Felder's eyes. It drew Mrs. Halloran from the
kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. It called to a girl who crouched
in the upper hall with her miserable face buried in her hands, drew her
down the stair to the office door, her eyes wide with a breathless
wonder, her face glistening with feeling.

From the balcony Jessica had witnessed the fight without understanding
its meaning. A fascination she could not gainsay had glued her eyes to
the struggle. It was he--it was the face she knew, seen but once for a
single moment in the hour of her marriage, but stamped indelibly upon
her memory. It was no longer smooth-shaven, and it was changed, evilly
changed. But it was the same! There was recklessness and mockery in it,
and yet strength, not weakness. Shunned and despised as he might be--the
chief actor, as it seemed to her, in a cheap and desperate bar-room
affray, a coarse affair of fisticuffs in the public street--yet there
was something intrepid in his bearing, something splendid in his
victory. In spite of the sharp, momentary sense of antagonism that had
bruised her inmost fiber, when the brutal bulk of his opponent fell she
could have wept with relief! Then, suddenly, she had found that look
chaining her own. It had given her a strange thrill, had both puzzled
and touched her. She had dragged her eyes away with a choking sensation,
a sense of helplessness and capture. When the violin sounded, a
resistless rush of feeling had swept her to the lower door, where she
stood behind the spectators, spellbound.

In the man who played, weird forces were contending. The feel of the
polished wood on his cheek, the odor of the resined catgut in his
nostrils, were plucking, plucking at the closed door. A new note crept
to the strings. They had spoken pathos--now they told of pain. All the
struggle whose very meaning was forgotten, the unrequital, the baffled
quest, the longing of that last year which had been born of a woman's
kiss in a darkened room, never voiced in that lost life, poured forth
broken, inarticulate.

To Jessica, standing with hands close-clasped, it seemed the agony of
remorse for a past fall, the cry of a forlorn soul, knowing itself cast
out, appealing to its good angel for pity and pardon. Hugh had often
played to her, lightly, carelessly, as he did all things. She had deemed
it only one of his many clever, amateurish accomplishments. Now it
struck her with a pang that there had been in him a deeper side that she
had not guessed. Since her wedding-day she had thought of her marriage
as a loathed bond, from which his false pretense had absolved her. Now a
doubt of her own position assailed her. Had loneliness and outlawry
driven him into the career that had made him shunned even in this rough
town--a course which she, had she been faithful to her vow "for better,
for worse," might have turned to his redemption? God forgave, but she
had not forgiven! Smarting tears scorched her eyelids.

For Harry Sanderson the music was the imprisoned memory, crying out
strongly in the first tongue it had found. But the ear was alien, the
mind knew no by-path of understanding. It was a blind wave, feeling
round some under-sea cavern of suffering. Beneath the pressure the
closed door yielded, though it did not wholly open. The past with its
memories remained hidden, but through the rift, miraculously called by
the melody, the real character that had been the Reverend Henry
Sanderson came forth. The perplexed phantom that had been moving down
the natural declivity of resurrected predisposition, fell away. The
slumbering qualities that had stirred uneasily at sight of the face on
the balcony, awoke. Who he was and had been he knew no more than before;
but the new writhing self-consciousness, starting from its sleep, with
almost a sense of shock, became conscious of the gaping crowd, the dusty
street, the red sunset, and of himself at the end of a vulgar brawl,
sawing a violin in silly braggadocio in a hotel doorway.

The music faltered and broke off. The bow dropped at his feet. He picked
it up fumblingly and turned back into the office, as a man entered from
a rear door. The new-comer was Michael Halloran, the hotel's proprietor,
short, thick-set and surly. Asleep in his room, he had neither seen the
fracas nor heard the playing. He saw instantly, however, that something
unusual was forward, and, blinking on the threshold, caught sight of the
man who was handing the violin back to its owner. He clenched his fist
with a scowl and started toward him.

His wife caught his arm.

"Oh, Michael, Michael!" she cried. "Say nothing, lad! Ye should have
heard him play!"

"Play!" he exclaimed. "Let him go fiddle to his side-partner Prendergast
and the other riffraff he's run with the year past!" He turned blackly
to Harry. "Take yourself from this house, Hugh Stires!" he said.
"Whether all's true that's said of you I don't say, but you'll not come
here!"

Harry had turned very white. With the spoken name--a name how
familiar!--his eyes had fallen to the ring on his finger--the ring with
the initials H. S. A sudden comprehension had darted to his mind. A
score of circumstances that had seemed odd stood out now in a baleful
light. The looks of dislike in the bar-room--the attitude of the
street--this angry diatribe--all smacked of acquaintance, and not alone
acquaintance, but obloquy. His name was Hugh Stires! He belonged to
this very town! And he was a man hated, despised, forbidden entrance to
an uncouth hostelry, an unwelcome visitant even in a bar-room!

An hour earlier the discovery would not so have appalled him. But the
violin music, in the emergence of the real Harry Sanderson, had, as it
were, flushed the mind of its turgid silt of devil-may-care and left it
quick and quivering. He turned to Felder and said in a low voice--to
him, not to the hotel-keeper, or to the roomful:

"When I entered this town to-day, I did not know my name, or that I had
ever set foot in it before. I was struck by a train a month ago, and
remember nothing beyond that time. It seems that the town knows me
better than I know myself."

Halloran looked about him with a laugh of derision and incredulity, but
few joined in it. Those who had heard the playing realized that in some
eerie way the personality of the man they had known had been altered.
Before the painful, shocked intensity of his face, the lawyer felt his
instant skepticism fraying. This was little like acting! He felt an
inclination to hold out his hand, but something held him back.

Harry Sanderson turned quietly and walked out of the door. Pavement and
street were a hubbub of excited talk. The groups parted as he came out,
and he passed between them with eyes straight before him.

As he turned down the street, a fragment of quartz, thrown with
deliberate and venomous aim, flew from the saloon doorway. It grazed his
head, knocking off his hat.

Tom Felder had seen the flying missile, and he leaped to the center of
the street with rage in his heart. "If I find out who threw that," he
said, "I'll send him up for it, so help me God!"

Harry stooped and picked up his hat, and as he put it on again, turned a
moment toward the crowd. Then he walked on, down the middle of the
street, his eyes glaring, his face white, into the dusky blue of the
falling twilight.




CHAPTER XVII

AT THE TURN OF THE TRAIL


The scene in the hotel office had left Jessica in a state of mental
distraction in which reason was in abeyance. In the confusion she had
slipped into the little sitting-room unnoticed, feeling a sense almost
of physical sickness, to sit in the half-light, listening to the
diminishing noises of the spilling crowd. She was wind-swept,
storm-tossed, in the grip of primal emotions. The surprise had shocked
her, and the strange appeal of the violin had disturbed her equipoise.

The significant words of awakening spoken in the office had come to her
distinctly. In their light she had read the piteous puzzle of that gaze
that had held her motionless on the balcony. Hugh had forgotten the
past--all of it, its crime, its penalty. In forgetting the past, he had
forgotten even her, his wife! Yet in some mysterious way her face had
been familiar to him; it had touched for an instant the spring of the
befogged memory.

As she spurred through the transient twilight past the selvage of the
town and into the somber mountain slope, she struck the horse sharply
with her crop. He who had entrapped her, who had married her under the
shadow of a criminal act, who had broken her future with his, when his
whole bright life had crashed down in black ruin--could such a one look
as he had looked at her? Could he make such music that had wrung her
heart?

All at once the horse shied violently, almost unseating her. A man was
lying by the side of the road, tossing and muttering to himself. She
forced the unwilling animal closer, and, leaning from the saddle, saw
who it was. In a moment she was off and beside the prostrate form, a
spasm of dread clutching at her throat at sight of the nerveless limbs,
the chalky pallor of the brow, the fever spots in the cheeks.

A wave of pity swept over her. He was ill and alone; he could not be
left there--he must have shelter. She looked fearfully about her. What
could she do? In that town, whose intolerance and dislike she had seen
so actively demonstrated, was there no one who would care for him? She
turned her head, listening to a nearing sound--footsteps were plodding
up the road. She called, and presently a pedestrian emerged from the
half-dark and came toward her.

He bent over the form she showed him.

"It's Stires," he said with a chuckle. "I heard he'd come back." The
chuckle turned to a cough, and he shook his head. "This is sad! You
could never believe how I have labored with the boy, but"--he turned out
his hands--"you see, there is the temptation. It is his unhappy
weakness."

Jessica remembered the yellow, smirking face now. She had passed him on
the day Tom Felder had walked with her from the Mountain Valley House,
and the lawyer had told her he lived in the cabin just below the Knob,
where she so often sat. She felt a quiver of repulsion.

"He is not intoxicated," she said coldly. "He is ill. You know him,
then?"

"Know him!" he echoed, and laughed--a dry, cackling laugh. "I ought to.
And I guess he knows me." He shook the inert arm. "Get up, Hugh!" he
said. "It's Prendergast!"

There flashed through her mind the phrase of the surly hotel-keeper:
"His side-partner, Prendergast!" Could it be? Had Hugh really lived in
the cabin on which she had so often peered down during those past weeks?
And with this chosen crony!

She touched Prendergast's arm. "He is ill, I say," she repeated. "He
must be cared for at once. Your cabin is on the hillside, isn't it?"

"_His_ cabin," he corrected. "A rough place, but it has sheltered us
both. I am but guide, philosopher and friend."

She bit her lips. "Lift him on my horse," she said. She stooped and put
her hands under the twitching shoulders. "I will help you. I am quite
strong."

With her aid he lifted the swaying form on to the saddle and supported
it while Jessica led the way up the darkening road.

"Here is the cut-off," he said presently. "Ah, you know it!" for she had
turned into the side-path that led along the hill, under the gray,
snake-like flume--the shortest route to the grassy shelf on which the
cabin stood.

The by-way was steep and rugged, and rhododendron clumps caught at her
ankles, and once she heard a snake slip over the dry rustle of leaves,
but she went on rapidly, dragging at the bridle, turning back now and
then anxiously to urge the horse to greater speed. She scarcely heard
the offensively honied compliments which Prendergast offered to her
courage and resource. Her pulses were throbbing unsteadily, her mind in
a ferment.

It seemed an eternity they climbed; in reality it was scarcely twenty
minutes before they reached the grassy knoll and the cabin whose crazy
swinging door stood wide to the night air. She tied the horse, went in
and at Prendergast's direction found matches and lit a candle. The bare,
two-room interior it revealed, was unkempt and disordered. Rough bunks,
a table and a couple of hewn chairs were almost its only furniture. The
window was broken and the roof admitted sun and rain. Prendergast laid
the man they had brought on one of the bunks and threw over him a shabby
blanket.

"My dear young lady," he said, "you are a good Samaritan. How shall we
thank you, my poor friend here and I?"

Jessica had taken money from her pocket and now she held it out to him.
"He must have a doctor," she said. "You must fetch one."

The yellow eyes fastened on the bill, even while his gesture protested.
"You shame me!" he exclaimed. "And yet you are right; it is for him." He
folded it and put it into his pocket. "As soon as I have built a fire, I
will go for our local _medico_. He will not always come at the call of
the luckless miner. All are not so charitable as you."

He untied her horse and extended a hand, but she mounted without his
help. "He will thank you one day--this friend of mine," he said, "far
better than I can do."

"It is not at all necessary to tell him," she replied frigidly. "The
sick are always to be helped, in every circumstance."

She gave her horse the rein as she spoke and turned him up the steep
path that climbed back of the cabin, past the Knob, and so by a narrow
trail to the mountain road.

Emmet Prendergast stood listening to the dulling hoof-beats a moment,
then reentered the cabin. The man on the bunk had lifted to a sitting
position, his eyes were open, dazed and staring.

"That's right," the older man said. "You're coming round. How does it
feel to be back in the old shebang? Can't guess how you got here, can
you? You were towed on horseback by a beauty, Hughey, my boy--a
rip-staving beauty! I'll tell you about it in the morning, if you're
good."

The man he addressed made no answer; his eyes were on the other,
industrious and bewildered.

"I heard about the row," went on Prendergast. "They didn't think it was
in you, and neither did I." He looked at him cunningly. "Neither did
Moreau, eh, eh? You're a clever one, Hugh, but the lost-memory racket
won't stand you in anything. You hadn't any call to get scared in the
first place--_I_ don't tell all I know!"

He shoved the candle nearer on the table. "There's a queer look in your
face, Hugh!" he said, with a clumsy attempt at kindness. "That rock they
threw must have hurt you. Feel sort of dizzy, eh? Never mind, I'll show
you a sight for sore eyes. You went off without your share of the last
swag, but I've saved it for you. Prendergast wouldn't cheat a pal!"

From a cranny in the clay-chinked wall he took a chamois-skin bag. It
contained a quantity of gold-dust and small nuggets, which he poured
into a miner's scales on the table and proceeded to divide in two
portions. This accomplished, he emptied one of the portions on to a
paper and pushed it out.

"That's yours," he said.

Harry's eyes were on his with a piercing intensity now, as though they
looked through him to a vast distance beyond. He was staring through a
gray mist, at something far off but significant that eluded his direct
vision. The board table, the yellow gold, the flickering candle-light
recalled something horrifying, in some other world, in some other life,
millions of ages ago.

He lurched to his feet, overturning the table. The gold-dust rattled to
the floor.

"Your deal!" he said. Then with a vague laugh, he fell sidewise upon
the bunk.

Emmet Prendergast stared at him with a look of amazement on his yellow
face. "He's crazy as a chicken!" he said.

He sat watching him a while, then rose and kindled a fire on the unswept
hearth. From a litter of cans and dented utensils in a corner he
proceeded to cook himself supper, after which he carefully brushed up
the scattered gold-dust and returned it all to its hiding-place. Lastly
he rummaged on a shelf and found a phial; this proved to be empty,
however, and he set it on the table.

"I guess you'll do well enough without any painkiller," he said to
himself. "Doctors are expensive. Anyway, I'll be back by midnight."

He threw more wood on the fire, blew out the candle, and, closing the
door behind him, set off down the trail to the town--where a faro-bank
soon acquired the bill Jessica had given him.




CHAPTER XVIII

THE STRENGTH OF THE WEAK


It was pitch-dark when Jessica reached the sanatorium, though she went
like a whirlwind, the chill damp smell of the dewy balsams in her
nostrils, the dust rising ghost-like behind the rapid hoofs. She found
David Stires anxious and peevish over her late coming.

Sitting beside him as he ate his supper, and reading to him afterward,
she had little time for coherent thought; all the while she was
maintaining her self-control with an effort. Since she had ridden away
that afternoon, she felt as if years had gone over her with all their
changes. She was oppressed with a new sense of fate, of power beyond and
stronger than herself, and her mind was enveloped in a haze of futurity.
She felt a relief when the old man grew tired and was wheeled to his
bedroom.

Left alone, her reflections returned. She began to be tortured. She
tried to read--the printed characters swam beyond her comprehension. At
length she drew a hood over her head and stole out on to the wide porch.

It was only nine o'clock, and along the gravel paths that wound among
the shrubbery a few dim forms were strolling--she caught the scent of a
cigar and the sound of a woman's laugh. The air was crisp and bracing,
with a promise of frost and painted leaves. She gazed down across the
dark gulches toward the town, a straggling design pricked in blinking
yellow points. Halfway between, folded in the darkness, lay the green
shelf and the cabin to which her thought recurred with a kind of
compulsion.

Her eyes searched the darkness anxiously. He had seemed dangerously ill;
he might die, perhaps. If he did, what would it be for her, his wife,
but freedom from a galling bond? She thought of the violin playing. Had
that been but the soul's swan-song, the last cry of his stained and
desolate spirit before it passed from this world that knew its
temptation and its fall? If she could only know what the doctor had
said!

There was no moon, but the stars were glowing like tiny, green-gilt
coals, and the yellow road lay plain and clear. With a sudden
determination she drew her light cloak closely about her, stepped down,
sped across the grass to a footpath, and so to the road.

As she ran on down the curving stretch under the trees, moving like a
hastening, gray phantom through a purple world of shadows, the
crackling slip of bank-paper that lay in her bosom seemed to burn her
flesh. She was stealing away to gaze upon the outcast who had shamed and
humbled her--going, she knew not why, with burning cheeks and hammering
heart.

She slipped through the side trail to the cabin with a choking
sensation. She stole to the window and peered in--in the firelight she
could see the form on the bunk, tossing and muttering. Otherwise the
place was empty. She lifted the latch softly and entered.

The strained anxiety of Jessica's look relaxed as she gazed about her.
She saw the phial on the table--the doctor had been there, then. If he
were in serious case, Prendergast would be with him. She threw back her
hood, drew one of the chairs to the side of the bunk and sat down, her
eyes fixed on his face. The weakness and helplessness of his posture
struck through and through her. Two sides of her were struggling in a
chaotic combat for mastery.

"I hate you! I hate you!" she said under her breath, clenching her cold
hand. "I _must_ hate you! You stole my love and put it under your feet!
You have disgraced my present and ruined my future! What if you have
forgotten the past--your crime? Does that make you the less guilty, or
me the less wretched?"

But withal a silent voice within her gave the lie to her vehemence.
Some element of her character that had been rigid and intact was
crumbling down. An old, sweet something, that a dreadful mill had ground
and crushed and annihilated, was rising whole and undefiled, superior to
any petty distinction, regardless of all that lifted combative in her
inheritance, not to be gainsaid or denied.

She leaned closer, listening to the incoherent words and broken phrases
borne on the turbid channels of fever. But she could not link them
together into meaning. Only one name he spoke clearly over and over
again--the name Hugh Stires--repeated with the dreary monotony of a
child conning a lesson. She noted the mark across his brow. Before her
marriage, in her blindness, she had used to wonder what it was like. It
was not in the least disfiguring--it gave a touch of the extraordinary.
It was so small she did not wonder that in that ecstatic moment of her
bride's kiss she had not seen it.

Slowly, half fearfully, she stretched out her hand and laid it on his.
As if at the touch the mutterings ceased. The eyes opened, and a
confused, troubled look crept to them. Then they closed again, and the
look faded out into a peace that remained.

Jessica dropped to her knees and buried her face in the blanket,
burning and chilling with an indescribable sensation of mingled pain and
pleasure. She scarcely knew what she was thinking. It seemed to her that
his very weakness and helplessness voiced again the something that had
sounded in the music of the violin, when the buried, forgotten past had
cried out its pain and shame and plea, half unconsciously--to her! A
thrill ran through her, the sense of moral power of the weak over the
strong, of the feminine over the masculine.

A rising flush stained her cheeks. With a sudden impulse, and with a
guilty backward glance, she bent and touched her lips to his forehead.

She drew back quickly, her face flooded with color, caught her breath,
then, drawing her hood over her head, went swiftly to the door and was
swallowed up in the darkness.




CHAPTER XIX

THE EVIL EYE


Harry Sanderson, harking back from the perilous pathway of fever, was to
see himself in the light of reawakened instincts. The man of no
memories, in his pointless wanderings, had felt dissatisfaction, a
fierce resentment, a savage unrest, but morally he had not suffered. The
spiritual elements of the maturer growth had slept. At a woman's look
they had awakened, to rise to full stature under the strange spell of
melody. When the real, remorseful nature, newly emerged, found itself an
object of animadversion and contempt, face to face with a past of shame
and reproach, the shock had been profound. The stirring of the old
conscience was as painful as is the first gasp of air to the drowned
lung. It had thrown the brain into a fever to whose fierce onslaught the
body had temporarily succumbed.

When, toward midnight, the fever ebbed, he had fallen into a deep sleep
of exhaustion, from which he opened his eyes next morning upon the
figure of Prendergast, sitting pipe in mouth in the sunny doorway.

He lifted himself on his elbow. That crafty face had been inexplicably
woven with the delirious fantasies of his fever. Where and when had he
known it? Then in a great wave welled over him the memory of his last
conscious hours--the scene in the saloon, the fight, the music, the
sudden appalling discovery of his name and repute. He remembered the
sickening wave of self-disgust, the fierce agony of resentment that had
beat in his every vein as he walked up the darkening street. He
remembered the thrown quartz. No doubt another missile had struck home,
or he had been set upon, kicked and pommelled into insensibility. This
old man--a miner probably, for there were picks and shovels in the
corner--had succored him. He had been ill, there was lassitude in every
limb, and shadowy recollections tantalized him. As in the garish day one
mistily recalls a dream of the night before, he retained a dim
consciousness of a woman's face--the face he had seen on the
balcony--leaning near him, bringing into a painful disorder a sense of
grateful coolness, of fragrance, and of rest.

He turned his head. Through the window he could see the blue, ravined
mountain--a slope of verdure soaked in placid, yellow sunshine, rising
gradually to the ridge, peaceful and Arcadian.

As he stared again at the seated figure, the grim fact reared like a
grisly specter, deriding, thrusting its haggard presence upon him. In
this little community, which apparently he had forsaken and to which he
had by chance returned, he stood a rogue and a scoundrel, a thing to
point the finger at and to avoid! The question that had burned his brain
to fire flamed up again. The town despised him. What had been his
career? How had he become a pariah? And by what miracle had he been so
altered as to look upon himself with loathing?

He was dimly conscious withal that some fundamental change had passed
over him, though how or when he could not tell. Some mysterious moral
alchemy had transmuted his elements. What he had been he was no more. He
was no longer even the man who had awakened in the box-car. Yet the
debts of the unknown yesterday must be paid in the coin of the known
to-day!

He lifted himself upright, dropping his feet to the floor. At the
movement the man on the doorstep rose quickly and came forward.

"You're better, Hugh," he said. "Take it easy, though. Don't get up just
yet--I'm going to cook you some breakfast." He turned to the hearth,
kicked the smoldering log-ends together and set a saucepan on them.
"You'll be stronger when you've got something between your ribs," he
added.

"How long have I been lying here?" asked Harry.

"Only since last night. You've had a fever."

"Where is my dog?"

"Dog?" said the other. "I never knew you had one."

Harry's lips set bitterly. It had fared more hardly, then, than he. It
had been a ready object for the crowd to wreak their hatred upon,
because it belonged to him--because it was Hugh Stires' dog! He leaned
back a moment against the cabin wall, with closed eyes, while
Prendergast stirred the heating mixture, which gave forth a savory
aroma.

"Is this your cabin, my friend?"

The figure bending over the hearth straightened itself with a jerk and
the blinking yellow eyes looked hard at him. Prendergast came close to
the bunk.

"That's the game you played in the town," he said with a surly sneer.
"It's all right for those that take it in, but you needn't try to
bamboozle me, pretending you don't know your own claim and cabin! I'm no
such fool!"

A dull flush came to Harry's face. Here was a page from that iniquitous
past that faced him. His own cabin? And his own claim? Well, why not?

"You are mistaken," he said calmly. "I am not pretending. I can not
remember you."

Prendergast laughed in an ugly, derisive way. "I suppose you've
forgotten the half-year we've lived here together, and the gold-dust
we've gathered in now and again--slipped it all, have you?"

Harry stood up. The motion brought a temporary dizziness, but it passed.
He walked to the door and gazed out on the pleasant green of the
hillside. On a tree near-by was nailed a rough, weather-beaten board on
which was scrawled "The Little Paymaster Claim." He saw the grass-grown
gravel-trenches, evidence of abandoned work. He had been a miner. That
in itself was honest toil. Across the waving foliage he could look down
to the distant straggling street with its huddles of houses and its
far-off swinging signs. Some of these signs hung above resorts of
clicking wheels and green baize tables; more than once in the past month
on such tables he had doubled many times over a paltry stake with that
satiric luck which smiles on the uncaring. His eye ran back up the
slope.

"The claim is good, then," he said over his shoulder. "We found the
pay?"

Prendergast contemplated him a moment in grim silence, with a scowl.
"You're either really fuddled, Hugh," he said then, "or else you're a
star play-actor, and up to something deep. Well, have it your own
way--it's all the same to me. But you can't pull the wool over my eyes
long!"

There was mockery and threat in his tone, but more than both, the evil
intimacy in his words gave Harry a qualm of disgust. This man had been
his associate. That one hour in the town had shown him what his own life
there had been.

What should he do? Forsake for ever the neighborhood where he had made
his blistering mark? Fling all aside and start again somewhere? And
leave behind this disgraceful present, with that face that had looked
into his from above the dusty street?

If fate intended that, why had it turned him back? Why had he been
plucked rudely from his purpose and set once more here, where every
man's hand was against him--every one but this sorry comrade? There was
in him an intuitive obstinacy, a steadfastness under stress which
approved this drastic coercion. If such was the bed he had made, he
would lie in it. He would drink the gall and vinegar without whimpering.
Whatever lay behind, he would live it down. This man at least had
befriended him.

He turned into the room. "Perhaps I shall remember after a while." He
took the saucepan from Prendergast's hand. "I'll cook the breakfast," he
said.

Prendergast filled his pipe and watched him. "I guess there _are_ bats
in your belfry, sure enough, Hugh," he said at length. "You never
offered to do your stint before."




CHAPTER XX

MRS. HALLORAN TELLS A STORY


From the moment her kiss fell upon the forehead of the delirious man in
the cabin, Jessica began to be a prey to new emotions, the significance
of which she did not comprehend. She was no longer a child; she had
attained to womanhood on that summer's wedding-day that seemed so far
away. But her woman's heart was untried, and it felt itself opening to
t

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/39689