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 p.r.i.c.ked 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s 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 succ.u.mbed.
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 la.s.situde 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 pa.s.sed over him, though how or when he could not tell. Some mysterious moral alchemy had trans.m.u.ted 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 pa.s.sed.
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 gra.s.s-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 a.s.sociate. 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.