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 gla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.ses--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 bal.u.s.trade, 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 embarra.s.sment.
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 embarra.s.sment 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 embarra.s.sment was pa.s.sing, 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 pa.s.sion 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 ap.r.o.n. 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 coa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sailed 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? G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstances that had seemed odd stood out now in a baleful light. The looks of dislike in the bar-room--the att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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.