"If I had never gone, Jessica!" he exclaimed. "Then I might have seen my father! But I didn"t know--"
She clasped her hands together. "You know now--you remember it all?"
He shook his head. "I have been there"--he pointed to the hillside--"and I have guessed who it is that lies there. I know I sinned against him and against myself, and left him to die unforgiving. That is what the statue said to me--as he must have said: _I am no more worthy to be called thy son_."
"Ah," she cried, "he knew and he forgave you, Hugh. His last thought was of your coming! That is why I carved the figure there."
"You carved it?" he exclaimed. She bent her forehead to his hands, as they clasped her own.
"The prodigal is yourself," she said. "I modelled it once before when you came back to him, in the time you have forgotten. But I destroyed it,"--the words were very low now--"on my wedding-day."
His hands released hers, and, looking up, she saw, even in the moonlight, that with the last word his face had gone ghastly white. At the sight, timidity, maidenly reserve, fell, and all the woman in her rushed uppermost. She lifted her arms and clasped his face.
"Hugh," she cried, "can"t you remember? Don"t you understand? Think! I was blind, dear, blind--a white bandage was across my eyes, and you came to me in a shaded room! Why did you come to me?"
A spark seemed to dart through his brain, like the p.r.i.c.kling discharge from a Leyden jar. A spot of the mental blackness visualized, and for an instant sprang out in outlines of red. He smelled the odor of jasmin flowers. He saw himself standing, facing a figure with bandaged eyes.
He saw the bandage torn off, felt that yielding body in his arms, heard a voice--her voice--crying, "Hugh--Hugh! My husband!" and felt those lips pressed to his own in the tense air of a darkened room.
A cry broke from his lips: "Yes, yes! I remember! Jessica, my wife!" His arms went round her, and with a little sob she nestled close to him on the doorstep.
The blank might close again about him now! He had had that instantaneous glimpse of the past, like lightning through a rifted pall, and in that glimpse was joy. For him there was now no more consciousless past or remorseful present. No forgery or exile, no Prendergast, or hatred, or evil repute. For her, all that had embittered, all that stood for loss and grieving, was ended. The fire on the hearth behind them domed and sank, and far below the lights of the streets wavered unheeded.
The shadowed silence of the cathedral pines closed them round. Above in the calm sky the great constellations burned on and swung lower, and in that dim confessional she absolved him from all sin.
CHAPTER x.x.x
IN A FOREST OF ARDEN
Keen, morning sunlight, a sky clean as a hound"s tooth, and an air cool and tinctured with the wine of perfect autumn! Jessica breathed it deeply as her buoyant step carried her along the mountain trails, brave in the pageant of the pa.s.sing year. Her face reflected the rich color and her eyes were deep as the sky.
Only last night had been that sweet unfolding in which the past had been swept away for ever. To-day her heart was almost too full to bear, beating to thought of the man to whose arms the violin had called her.
That had been the hour of confidence, of love"s sacrament, the closure of all her distrust and agony. Now she longed inexpressibly for the further a.s.surance she knew would look from his eyes to hers; yet her joy was so poignant that it was near to pain, and withal was so enwound with maidenly consciousness that, knowing him near, she must have fled from him. She walked rapidly on, losing herself in the windings of blind wood-paths, revelling in the beauty of the silent, empty forest.
The morning had found the man whose image filled her mental horizon no less a prey to conflicting emotions than herself. That hour on the mountain-side, under the stars, had left Harry possessed of a melee of perplexing emotions. Dreaming and waking, Jessica"s face hung before his eyes, her voice sounded in his ear. Yet over his happiness more than once a chill had fallen, an odd shrinking, an unexplainable sense of flush, of fastidiousness, of mortification. This subtle conflict of feeling, not understood, had driven him, in sheer nervousness, to the peaceful healing of the solitudes.
The future held no longer any doubt--it held only her. Where was that future to be? Back in the city to which his painful curiosity had so lately driven him? This lay no longer in his own choice; it was for her to decide now, Jessica--his wife. He said the word softly, under his breath, to the sweet secret gra.s.ses, as something mysterious and sacred.
How appealing, how womanly she was--how incommunicably dear, how--
He looked up transfixed, for she stood there before him, ankle-deep in a brown whirlwind of leaves from a frost-stung oak, her hand to her cheek in an adorable gesture that he knew, her lips parted and eager. She said no word, nor did he, but he came swiftly and caught her to him, and her face buried itself on his breast.
As he looked down at her thus folded, the trouble, the sense of vexing complexity vanished, and the primitive demand rea.s.serted its sway.
Presently he released her, and drew her gently to a seat on the sprawling oak roots.
"I wanted so to find you," she said. "I have so many, many things to say."
"It is all wonderfully strange and new!" he said. "It is as though I had rubbed Aladdin"s lamp, and suddenly had my heart"s desire."
"Ah," she breathed, "am I that?"
"More than that, and yet once I--Jessica, Jessica! When I woke this morning in the cabin down there, it seemed to me for a moment that only last night was real, and all the past an ugly dream. How could you have loved me? And how could I have thrown my pearl away?"
"We are not to think of that," she protested, "never, never any more."
"You are right," he rejoined cheerfully; "it is what is to come that we must think of." He paused an instant, then he said:
"Last night, when you told me of the white house in the aspens, I did not tell you that I had just come from there--from Aniston."
She made an exclamation of wonder. "Tell me," she said.
Sitting with her hand in his, he told of that night"s experiences, the fear that had held him as he gazed at her portrait in the library, the secret of the Korean desk that had solaced his misery and sent him back to the father he was not to see.
At mention of the will she threw out her hand with a pa.s.sionate gesture.
"The money is not mine!" she cried. "It is yours! He intended to change it--he told me so the day he died. Oh, if you think I--"
"No, no," he said gently. "There is no resentment, no false pride in my love, Jessica. I am thinking of you--and of Aniston. You would have me go back, would you not?"
She looked up smiling and slowly shook her head. "You are a blind guesser," she said. "Don"t you think I know what is in your mind? Not Aniston, Hugh. Sometime, but not now--not yet. It is nearer than that!"
His eyes flowed into hers. "You understand! Yes, it is here. This is where I must finish my fight first. Yesterday I would have left Smoky Mountain for ever, because you were here. Now--"
"I will help you," she said. "All the world besides counts nothing if only we are together! I could live in a cabin here on the mountain always, in a Forest of Arden, till I grow old, and want nothing but that--and you!" She paused, with a happy laugh, her eye turned away.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
A log cabin, but a home glorified by her presence! In a dozen words she had sketched a sufficient Paradise. As he did not answer, she faced him with crimsoning cheeks, then reading his look she suddenly threw her arms about his neck.
"Hugh," she cried, "we belong to each other now. There is no one else to consider, is there? I want to be to you what I haven"t been--to bear things with you, and help you."
He kissed her eyes and hair. "You _have_ helped, you _do_ help me, Jessica!" he urged. "But I am jealous for your love. It must not be offended. The town of Smoky Mountain must not sneer--and it would sneer now."
"Let it!" she exclaimed resentfully. "As if I would care!"
"But _I_ would care," he said softly. "I want to climb a little higher first."
She was silent a moment, her fingers twisting the fallen leaves. "You don"t want them to know that I am your wife?"
"Not yet--till I can see my way."
She nodded and smiled and the cloud lifted from her face. "You must know best," she said. "This is what I shall do, then. I shall leave the sanatorium to-morrow. The people there are nothing to me, but the town of Smoky Mountain is yours, and I must be a part of it, too. I am going to the Mountain Valley House. Mrs. Halloran will take care of me." She sprang to her feet as she added: "I shall go to see her about it now."
He knew the dear desire her determination masked--to do her part in softening prejudice, in clearing his way--and the thought of her great-heartedness brought a mist to his eyes. He rose and walked with her through the bracken to the road. They came out to the driveway just below the trail that led to the k.n.o.b. The bank was high, and leaping first he held up his arms to her and lifted her lightly down. In the instant, as she lay in his arms, he bent and kissed her on the lips.
Neither noted two figures walking together that at that moment rounded the bend of the road a little way above. They were Tom Felder and Doctor Brent, the latter swinging a light suit-case, for he was on his way to the station of the valley railroad. He had chosen to walk that he might have a longer chat with his friend. Both men saw the kiss and instinctively drew back, the lawyer with a sudden color on his face, the doctor with a look of blank astonishment.
The latter, in one way, knew little about the town. Beside Felder and Mrs. Halloran, whose surly husband he had once doctored when the town"s pract.i.tioner was away--thereby earning her admiration and grat.i.tude--there were few with whom he had more than a nodding acquaintance. He had liked David Stires, and Jessica he genuinely admired, though he had thought her at times somewhat distant. He himself had introduced Felder to her, on one of the latter"s visits. He had not observed that the young lawyer"s calls had grown more frequent, nor guessed that he had more than once loitered on the mountain trails hoping to meet her.