"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 coa.r.s.e 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 s.p.a.ce before the front windows--familiarly referred to by its habitues as "the Amen Corner"--chatting and watching the pa.s.sers-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 pa.s.sed. 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 pa.s.sed 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, s.h.a.ggy 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 d.o.g.g.i.ng 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 G.o.d!--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 pa.s.s 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 ident.i.ty. It had obtruded into clicking leagues on steel-rails, into miles afoot by fruit-hung lanes, on white Pacific sh.e.l.l-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 gla.s.s farther along the bar.
The new-comer regarded none of them. He poured his gla.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. Then he raised his gla.s.s.
"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 att.i.tude 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 gla.s.s--to the castaway. "I drink to the health of the only other gentleman present," he said, and tossed the drink off.