The name caught her ear now. The Little Paymaster? That was the name on the tree--on Hugh"s claim! At that instant she thought she heard David Stires calling. She turned and ran quickly up the long hall to his open door.
The sight of his face at first startled her, for it was held captive of emotion; but it was an emotion of joy, not of pain. A letter fluttered in his grasp. He thrust it into her hands.
"Jessica!" he exclaimed. "Hugh has paid it! He has sent the five thousand dollars, interest and princ.i.p.al, to the bank, to my account."
For a moment she stood transfixed. The talk she had mechanically heard leaped into significance, and her mind ran back to the hour when she had left the draft at the cabin. She caught the old man"s hand and knelt by his chair, laughing and crying at once.
"I knew--oh, I knew!" she cried, and hid her face in the coverlet.
"It is what I have prayed for," he said, after a moment, in a shaking voice. "I said I hoped I would never see his face again, but I was bitter then. He was my only son, after all, and he is your husband. I have thought it all over lying here."
Jessica lifted her eyes, shining with a great thankfulness. During these last few days the impulse to tell all that she had concealed had been almost irresistible; now the barrier had fallen. The secret she had repressed so long came forth in a rush of sentences that left him mute and amazed.
"I should have told you before," she ended, "but I didn"t know--I wasn"t sure--" She broke down for very joy.
He looked at her with eyes unnaturally bright. "Tell me everything, Jessica!" he said. "Everything from the beginning!"
She drew the shade wider before the open window, where he could look down across the two miles of darkening foliage to the far huddle of the town--a group of toy houses now hazily indistinct--and, seated beside him, his hand in hers, poured out the whole. She had never framed it into words; she had pondered each incident severally, apart, as it were, from its context. Now, with the loss of memory and the pitiful struggle of recollection as a background, the narrative painted itself in vivid colors to whose pathos and meaning her every instinct was alive. Her first view of Hugh, the street fight and the revelation of the violin--the part she and Prendergast had taken--the rescue of the child--the leaving of the draft in the cabin, and the strange sleep-walking that had so nearly found a dubious ending--she told all.
She did not realize that she was revealing the depths of her own heart without reserve. If she omitted to tell of his evil reputation and the neighborhood"s hatred, who could blame? She was a woman, and she loved them both.
Dusk came before the moving recital was finished. The rose of sunset grew over the trellised west, faded, and the gloom deepened to darkness, p.r.i.c.ked by stars. The old man from the first had scarcely spoken. When she ended she could hardly see his face, and waited anxiously to hear what he might say. Presently he broke the silence.
"He was young and irresponsible, Jessica," he said. "Money always came so easily. He didn"t realize what he was doing when he signed that draft. He has learned a lesson out in the world. It won"t hurt his career in the end, for no one but you and I and one other knows it.
Thank G.o.d! If his memory comes back--"
"Oh, it will!" she breathed. "It must! That day on the k.n.o.b he only needed the clue! When I tell him who I am, he will know me. He will remember it all. I am sure--sure! Will you let me bring him to you?" she added softly.
"Yes," he said, pressing her hand, "to-morrow. I shall be stronger in the morning."
She rose and lighted the lamp, shading it from his eyes.
"Do you remember the will, Jessica?" he asked her presently. "The will I drew the day he came back? You never knew, but I signed it--the night of your wedding. Harry Sanderson was right, my dear, wasn"t he?
"I wish now I hadn"t signed it, Jessica," he added. "I must set it right--I must set it right!" He watched her with a smile on his face. "I will rest now," he said, and she adjusted the pillows and turned the lamp low.
Crossing the room, she stepped through the long window on to the porch, and stood leaning on the railing. From the dark hedges where the brown birds built came a drowsy twitter as from a nest of dreams. A long time she stood there, a thousand thoughts busy in her brain--of Hugh, of the beckoning future. She thought of the day she had destroyed the model that her fingers longed to remold, now that the Prodigal was indeed returned. The words of the biblical narrative flashed through her mind: _And he arose and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compa.s.sion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him._ So Hugh"s father would meet him now! The dewed odors of the jasmin brought the memory of that stormy night when he had come to her in his sleep. She imagined she heard again his last word--his whispered "Good-by" in the sound of the rain.
She thought it a memory, but the word that flashed into her mind was carried to her from the shadow, where a man stood in the shrubbery watching her dim figure and her face white and beautiful in the light from a near-by window, with a pa.s.sionate longing and rebellion.
Harry was seeing her, he told himself, for the last time. He had made up his mind to this on that stormy morning when he had found the lucky crevice. For days he had labored, spurred by a fierce haste to make requital. Till the last ounce of the rich "pocket" had been washed, and the whole taken to the bank in the town, no one had known of the find.
It had repaid the forgery and left him a handful of dollars over--enough to take him far away from the only thing that made life worth the effort. He had climbed to the ridge on the bare chance of seeing Jessica--not of speaking to her. Watching her, it required all his repression not to yield to the reckless desire that prompted him to go to her, look into her eyes, and tell her he loved her. He made a step forward, but stopped short, as she turned and vanished through the window.
Standing on the porch, a gradual feeling of apprehension had come to Jessica--an impression of blankness and chill that affected her strangely. Inside the room she stood still, frightened at the sudden sense of utter soundlessness.
She caught up the lamp, and, turning the wick, approached the bed. She put out her hand and touched the wasted one on the coverlet. Then a sobbing cry came from her lips.
David Stires was gone. A crowning joy had goldened his bitterness at the last moment, and he had gone away with his son"s face in his heart and the smile of welcome on his lips.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE TENANTLESS HOUSE
Dark was falling keen and cool, for frost was in the air, touching the fall foliage on the hills to crimson and amber, silvering the long curving road that skirted the river bluff, and etching delicate h.o.a.r tracery on the spidery framework of the long black railroad bridge that hung above "the hole." The warning light from a signal-post threw a crimson splash on the ground. Its green pane cast a pallor on a bearded face turned out over the gloomy water.
The man who had paused there had come from far, and his posture betokened weariness, but his features were sharp and eager. He turned and paced back along the track to the signal-post.
"It was here," he said aloud. He stood a moment, his hands clenched.
"The new life began here. Here, then, is where the old life ended." From where he stood he could see blossoming the yellow lights of the little city, five miles away. He set his shoulders, whistled to the small dog that nosed near-by, and set off at a quick pace down the road.
What had brought him there? He scarcely could have told. Partly, perhaps, a painful curiosity, a flagellant longing to press the iron that had seared him to his soul. So, after a fortnight of drifting, the dark maelstrom of his thoughts had swept him to its dead center. This was the spot that held the key to the secret whose shame had sent him hither by night, like a jailbird revisiting the haunts that can know him no more. He came at length to a fork in the road; he mechanically took the right, and it led him soon to a paved road and to more cheerful thoroughfares.
Once in the streets, a bar to curious glances, he turned up his coat collar and settled the brim of his felt hat more closely over his eyes.
He halted once before a shadowed door with a barred window set in its upper panel--the badge of a gambling-house. As he had walked, baffling hints of pictures, unfilled outlines like a painter"s studies had been flitting before him, as faces flit noiselessly across the opaque ground of a camera-obscura. Now, down the steps from that barred door, a filmy, faded, Chesterfieldian figure seemed to be coming toward him with outstretched hand--one of the ghosts of his world of shadows.
He walked on. He crossed an open square and presently came to the gate of a Gothic chapel, set well back from the street. Its great rose-window was alight, for on this evening was to be held a memorial service for the old man whose money had built the pile, who had died a fortnight before in a distant sanatorium. A burnished bra.s.s plate was set beside the gate, bearing the legend: "St. James Chapel. Reverend Henry Sanderson, Rector." The gaze with which the man"s eye traced the words was as mechanical as the movement with which his hand, in his pocket, closed on the little gold cross; for organ practice was beginning, and the air, throbbing to it, was peopled with confused images--but no realization of the past emerged.
He turned at the sound of wheels, and the blur shocked itself apart to reveal a kindly face that looked at him for an instant framed in the window of a pa.s.sing carriage. With the look a specter plucked at the flesh of the wayfarer with intangible fingers. He shrank closer against the palings.
Inside the carriage Bishop Ludlow settled back with a sigh. "Only a face on the pavement," he said to his wife, "but it reminded me somehow of Harry Sanderson."
"How strange it is!" she said--the bishop had no secrets from his wife--"never a word or a sign, and everything in his study just as he left it. What can you do, John? It is four months ago now, and the parish needs a rector."
He did not reply for a moment. The question touched the trouble that was ever present in his mind. The whereabouts of Harry Sanderson had caused him many sleepless hours, and the look of frozen realization which had met his stern and horrified gaze that unforgetable night--a look like that of a tranced occultist waked in the demon-constrained commission of some rueful impiety--had haunted the good man"s vigils. He had knowledge of the by-paths of the human soul, and the more he reflected the less the fact had fitted. The wild laugh of Hugh"s, as he had vanished into the darkness, had come to seem the derisive glee of the tempter rejoicing in his handiwork. Recollection of Harry"s depression and the insomnia of which he had complained had deepened his conviction that some phase of mental illness had been responsible. In the end he had revolted against his first cra.s.s conclusion. When the announced vacation had lengthened into months, he had been still more deeply perplexed, for the welfare of the parish must be considered.
"I know," he said at length. "I may have failed in my whole duty, but I haven"t known how to tell David Stires, especially since we heard of his illness. I had written to him--the whole story; the ink was not dry on the paper when the letter came from Jessica telling us of his death."
Behind them, as they talked, the man on the pavement was walking on feverishly, the organ music pursuing him, the dog following with a reluctant whine.
At last he came to a wide, dark lawn set thick with aspens cl.u.s.tering about a white house that loomed grayly in the farther shadow. He hesitated a moment, then walked slowly up the broad, weed-grown garden path toward its porch. In the half light the ma.s.sive silver door-plate stood out clearly. He had known instinctively that that house had been a part of his life, and yet a tremor caught him as he read the name--STIRES. The intuition that had bent his steps from the street, the old stirring of dead memory, had brought him to his past at last. This house had been his home!
He stood looking at it with trouble in his face. He seemed now to remember the wide colonnaded porch, the tall fluted columns, the green blinds. Clearly it was unoccupied. He remembered the scent of jasmin flowers! He remembered--
He started. A man in his shirt-sleeves was standing by a half-open side door, regarding him narrowly.
"Thinking of buying?" The query was good-humoredly satiric. "Or maybe just looking the old ranch over with a view to a shake-down!"
The trespa.s.ser smiled grimly. It was not the first time he had seen that weather-beaten face. "You have given up surgery as a profession, I see,"
he said.
The other came nearer, looked at him in a puzzled way, then laughed.
"If it isn"t the card-sharp we picked up on the railroad track!" he said, "dog and all! I thought you were far down the coast, where it"s warmer. Nothing much doing with you, eh?"
"Nothing much," answered the man he addressed. Others might recognize him as the black sheep, but this nondescript watchman whom chance had set here could not. He knew him only as the dingy vagabond whose broken head he had bandaged in the box-car!