CHAPTER XI
That night, in Olaf"s cabin, Alan put himself back on the old track again. He made no effort to minimize the tragedy that had come into his life, and he knew its effect upon him would never be wiped away, and that Mary Standish would always live in his thoughts, no matter what happened in the years to come. But he was not the sort to let any part of himself wither up and die because of a blow that had darkened his mental visions of things. His plans lay ahead of him, his old ambitions and his dreams of achievement. They seemed pulseless and dead now, but he knew it was because his own fire had temporarily burned out. And he realized the vital necessity of building it up again. So he first wrote a letter to Ellen McCormick, and in this placed a second letter--carefully sealed--which was not to be opened unless they found Mary Standish, and which contained something he had found impossible to put into words in Sandy"s cabin. It was trivial and embarra.s.sing when spoken to others, but it meant a great deal to him. Then he made the final arrangements for Olaf to carry him to Seward in the _Norden_, for Captain Rifle"s ship was well on her way to Unalaska. Thought of Captain Rifle urged him to write another letter in which he told briefly the disappointing details of his search.
He was rather surprised the next morning to find he had entirely forgotten Rossland. While he was attending to his affairs at the bank, Olaf secured information that Rossland was resting comfortably in the hospital and had not one chance in ten of dying. It was not Alan"s intention to see him. He wanted to hear nothing he might have to say about Mary Standish. To a.s.sociate them in any way, as he thought of her now, was little short of sacrilege. He was conscious of the change in himself, for it was rather an amazing upsetting of the original Alan Holt. That person would have gone to Rossland with the deliberate and businesslike intention of sifting the matter to the bottom that he might disprove his own responsibility and set himself right in his own eyes.
In self-defense he would have given Rossland an opportunity to break down with cold facts the disturbing something which his mind had unconsciously built up. But the new Alan revolted. He wanted to carry the thing away with him, he wanted it to live, and so it went with him, uncontaminated by any truths or lies which Rossland might have told him.
They left Cordova early in the afternoon, and at sunset that evening camped on the tip of a wooded island a mile or two from the mainland.
Olaf knew the island and had chosen it for reasons of his own. It was primitive and alive with birds. Olaf loved the birds, and the cheer of their vesper song and bedtime twitter comforted Alan. He seized an ax, and for the first time in seven months his muscles responded to the swing of it. And Ericksen, old as his years in the way of the north, whistled loudly and rumbled a bit of crude song through his beard as he lighted a fire, knowing the medicine of the big open was getting its hold on Alan again. To Alan it was like coming to the edge of home once more. It seemed an age, an infinity, since he had heard the sputtering of bacon in an open skillet and the bubbling of coffee over a bed of coals with the mysterious darkness of the timber gathering in about him.
He loaded his pipe after his chopping, and sat watching Olaf as he mothered the half-baked bannock loaf. It made him think of his father. A thousand times the two must have camped like this in the days when Alaska was new and there were no maps to tell them what lay beyond the next range.
Olaf felt resting upon him something of the responsibility of a doctor, and after supper he sat with his back to a tree and talked of the old days as if they were yesterday and the day before, with tomorrow always the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow which he had pursued for thirty years. He was sixty just a week ago this evening, he said, and he was beginning to doubt if he would remain on the beach at Cordova much longer. Siberia was dragging him--that forbidden world of adventure and mystery and monumental opportunity which lay only a few miles across the strait from the Seward Peninsula. In his enthusiasm he forgot Alan"s tragedy. He cursed Cossack law and the prohibitory measures to keep Americans out. More gold was over there than had ever been dreamed of in Alaska; even the mountains and rivers were unnamed; and he was going if he lived another year or two--going to find his fortune or his end in the Stanovoi Mountains and among the Chukchi tribes. Twice he had tried it since his old comrade had died, and twice he had been driven out. The next time he would know how to go about it, and he invited Alan to go with him.
There was a thrill in this talk of a land so near, scarcely a night ride across the neck of Bering Sea, and yet as proscribed as the sacred plains of Tibet. It stirred old desires in Alan"s blood, for he knew that of all frontiers the Siberian would be the last and the greatest, and that not only men, but nations, would play their part in the breaking of it. He saw the red gleam of firelight in Olaf"s eyes.
"And if we don"t go in first from _this side_, Alan, the yellow fellows will come out some day from _that,"_ rumbled the old sour-dough, striking his pipe in the hollow of his hand. "And when they do, they won"t come over to us in ones an" twos an" threes, but in millions.
That"s what the yellow fellows will do when they once get started, an"
it"s up to a few Alaska Jacks an" Tough-Nut Bills to get their feet planted first on the other side. Will you go?"
Alan shook his head. "Some day--but not now." The old flash was in his eyes and he was seeing the fight ahead of him again--the fight to do his bit in striking the shackles of misgovernment from Alaska and rousing the world to an understanding of the menace which hung over her like a smoldering cloud. "But you"re right about the danger," he said. "It won"t come from j.a.pan to California. It will pour like a flood through Siberia and jump to Alaska in a night. It isn"t the danger of the yellow man alone, Olaf. You"ve got to combine that with Bolshevism, the menace of blackest Russia. A disease which, if it crosses the little neck of water and gets hold of Alaska, will shake the American continent to bed-rock. It may be a generation from now, maybe a century, but it"s coming sure as G.o.d makes light--if we let Alaska go down and out. And my way of preventing it is different from yours."
He stared into the fire, watching the embers flare up and die. "I"m not proud of the States," he went on, as if speaking to something which he saw in the flames. "I can"t be, after the ruin their unintelligent propaganda and legislation have brought upon Alaska. But they"re our salvation and conditions are improving. I concede we have factions in Alaska and we are not at all unanimous in what we want. It"s going to be largely a matter of education. We can"t take Alaska down to the States--we"ve got to bring them up to us. We must make a large part of a hundred and ten million Americans understand. We must bring a million of them up here before that danger-flood we speak of comes beyond the Gulf of Anadyr. It"s G.o.d"s own country we have north of Fifty-eight, Olaf. And we have ten times the wealth of California. We can care for a million people easily. But bad politics and bad judgment both here in Alaska and at Washington won"t let them come. With coal enough under our feet to last a thousand years, we are buying fuel from the States. We"ve got billions in copper and oil, but can"t touch them. We should have some of the world"s greatest manufacturing plants, but we can not, because everything up here is locked away from us. I repeat that isn"t conservation. If they had applied a little of it to the salmon industry--but they didn"t. And the salmon are going, like the buffalo of the plains.
"The destruction of the salmon shows what will happen to us if the bars are let down all at once to the financial banditti. Understanding and common sense must guard the gates. The fight we must win is to bring about an honest and reasonable adjustment, Olaf. And that fight will take place right here--in Alaska--and not in Siberia. And if we don"t win--"
He raised his eyes from the fire and smiled grimly into Olaf"s bearded face.
"Then we can count on that thing coming across the neck of sea from the Gulf of Anadyr," he finished. "And if it ever does come, the people of the States will at last face the tragic realization of what Alaska could have meant to the nation."
The force of the old spirit surged uppermost in Alan again, and after that, for an hour or more, something lived for him in the glow of the fire which Olaf kept burning. It was the memory of Mary Standish, her quiet, beautiful eyes gazing at him, her pale face taking form in the lacy wisps of birch-smoke. His mind pictured her in the flame-glow as she had listened to him that day in Skagway, when he had told her of this fight that was ahead. And it pleased him to think she would have made this same fight for Alaska if she had lived. It was a thought which brought a painful thickening in his breath, for always these visions which Olaf could not see ended with Mary Standish as she had faced him in his cabin, her back against the door, her lips trembling, and her eyes softly radiant with tears in the broken pride of that last moment of her plea for life.
He could not have told how long he slept that night. Dreams came to him in his restless slumber, and always they awakened him, so that he was looking at the stars again and trying not to think. In spite of the grief in his soul they were pleasant dreams, as though some gentle force were at work in him subconsciously to wipe away the shadows of tragedy.
Mary Standish was with him again, between the mountains at Skagway; she was at his side in the heart of the tundras, the sun in her shining hair and eyes, and all about them the wonder of wild roses and purple iris and white seas of sedge-cotton and yellow-eyed daisies, and birds singing in the gladness of summer. He heard the birds. And he heard the girl"s voice, answering them in her happiness and turning that happiness from the radiance of her eyes upon him. When he awoke, it was with a little cry, as if someone had stabbed him; and Olaf was building a fire, and dawn was breaking in rose-gleams over the mountains.
CHAPTER XII
This first night and dawn in the heard of his wilderness, with the new import of life gleaming down at him from the mighty peaks of the Chugach and Kenai ranges, marked the beginning of that uplift which drew Alan out of the pit into which he had fallen. He understood, now, how it was that through many long years his father had worshiped the memory of a woman who had died, it seemed to him, an infinity ago. Unnumbered times he had seen the miracle of her presence in his father"s eyes, and once, when they had stood overlooking a sun-filled valley back in the mountains, the elder Holt had said:
"Twenty-seven years ago the twelfth day of last month, mother went with me through this valley, Alan. Do you see the little bend in the creek, with the great rock in the sun? We rested there--before you were born!"
He had spoken of that day as if it had been but yesterday. And Alan recalled the strange happiness in his father"s face as he had looked down upon something in the valley which no other but himself could see.
And it was happiness, the same strange, soul-aching happiness, that began to build itself a house close up against the grief in Alan"s heart. It would never be a house quite empty. Never again would he be alone. He knew at last it was an undying part of him, as it had been a part of his father, clinging to him in sweet pain, encouraging him, pressing gently upon him the beginning of a great faith that somewhere beyond was a place to meet again. In the many days that followed, it grew in him, but in a way no man or woman could see. It was a secret about which he built a wall, setting it apart from that stoical placidity of his nature which some people called indifference. Olaf could see farther than others, because he had known Alan"s father as a brother. It had always been that way with the elder Holt--straight, clean, deep-breathing, and with a smile on his lips in times of hurt.
Olaf had seen him face death like that. He had seen him rise up with awesome courage from the beautiful form that had turned to clay under his eyes, and fight forth again into a world burned to ashes. Something of that look which he had seen in the eyes of the father he saw in Alan"s, in these days when they nosed their way up the Alaskan coast together. Only to himself did Alan speak the name of Mary Standish, just as his father had kept Elizabeth Holt"s name sacred in his own heart.
Olaf, with mildly casual eyes and strong in the possession of memories, observed how much alike they were, but discretion held his tongue, and he said nothing to Alan of many things that ran in his mind.
He talked of Siberia--always of Siberia, and did not hurry on the way to Seward. Alan himself felt no great urge to make haste. The days were soft with the premature breath of summer. The nights were cold, and filled with stars. Day after day mountains hung about them like mighty castles whose battlements reached up into the cloud-draperies of the sky. They kept close to the mainland and among the islands, camping early each evening. Birds were coming northward by the thousand, and each night Olaf"s camp-fire sent up the delicious aroma of flesh-pots and roasts. When at last they reached Seward, and the time came for Olaf to turn back, there was an odd blinking in the old Swede"s eyes, and as a final comfort Alan told him again that the day would probably come when he would go to Siberia with him. After that, he watched the _Norden_ until the little boat was lost in the distance of the sea.
Alone, Alan felt once more a greater desire to reach his own country.
And he was fortunate. Two days after his arrival at Seward the steamer which carried mail and the necessities of life to the string of settlements reaching a thousand miles out into the Pacific left Resurrection Bay, and he was given pa.s.sage. Thereafter the countless islands of the North Pacific drifted behind, while always northward were the gray cliffs of the Alaskan Peninsula, with the ramparted ranges beyond, glistening with glaciers, smoking with occasional volcanoes, and at times so high their snowy peaks were lost in the clouds. First touching the hatchery at Karluk and then the canneries at Uyak and Chignik, the mail boat visited the settlements on the Island of Unga, and thence covered swiftly the three hundred miles to Dutch Harbor and Unalaska. Again he was fortunate. Within a week he was berthed on a freighter, and on the twelfth day of June set foot in Nome.
His home-coming was unheralded, but the little, gray town, with its peculiar, black shadowings, its sea of stove-pipes, and its two solitary brick chimneys, brought a lump of joy into his throat as he watched its growing outlines from the small boat that brought him ash.o.r.e. He could see one of the only two brick chimneys in northern Alaska gleaming in the sun; beyond it, fifty miles away, were the ragged peaks of the Saw-Tooth Range, looking as if one might walk to them in half an hour, and over all the world between seemed to hover a misty gloom. But it was where he had lived, where happiness and tragedy and unforgetable memories had come to him, and the welcoming of its frame buildings, its crooked streets, and what to others might have been ugliness, was a warm and thrilling thing. For here were his _people_. Here were the men and women who were guarding the northern door of the world, an epic place, filled with strong hearts, courage, and a love of country as inextinguishable as one"s love of life. From this drab little place, shut out from all the world for half the year, young men and women went down to southern universities, to big cities, to the glamor and lure of "outside." But they always came back. Nome called them. Its loneliness in winter. Its gray gloom in springtime. Its glory in summer and autumn.
It was the breeding-place of a new race of men, and they loved it as Alan loved it. To him the black wireless tower meant more than the Statue of Liberty, the three weather-beaten church spires more than the architectural colossi of New York and Washington. Beside one of the churches he had played as a boy. He had seen the steeples painted. He had helped make the crooked streets. And his mother had laughed and lived and died here, and his father"s footprints had been in the white sands of the beach when tents dotted the sh.o.r.e like gulls.
When he stepped ash.o.r.e, people stared at him and then greeted him. He was unexpected. And the surprise of his arrival added strength to the grip which men"s hands gave him. He had not heard voices like theirs down in the States, with a gladness in them that was almost excitement.
Small boys ran up to his side, and with white men came the Eskimo, grinning and shaking his hands. Word traveled swiftly that Alan Holt had come back from the States. Before the day was over, it was on its way to Shelton and Candle and Keewalik and Kotzebue Sound. Such was the beginning of his home-coming. But ahead of the news of his arrival Alan walked up Front Street, stopped at Bahlke"s restaurant for a cup of coffee, and then dropped casually into Lomen"s offices in the Tin Bank Building.
For a week Alan remained in Nome. Carl Lomen had arrived a few days before, and his brothers were "in" from the big ranges over on the Choris Peninsula. It had been a good winter and promised to be a tremendously successful summer. The Lomen herds would exceed forty thousand head, when the final figures were in. A hundred other herds were prospering, and the Eskimo and Lapps were full-cheeked and plump with good feeding and prosperity. A third of a million reindeer were on the hoof in Alaska, and the breeders were exultant. Pretty good, when compared with the fact that in 1902 there were less than five thousand!
In another twenty years there would be ten million.
But with this prosperity of the present and still greater promise for the future Alan sensed the undercurrent of unrest and suspicion in Nome.
After waiting and hoping through another long winter, with their best men fighting for Alaska"s salvation at Washington, word was traveling from mouth to mouth, from settlement to settlement, and from range to range, that the Bureaucracy which misgoverned them from thousands of miles away was not lifting a hand to relieve them. Federal office-holders refused to surrender their deadly power, and their strangling methods were to continue. Coal, which should cost ten dollars a ton if dug from Alaskan mines, would continue to cost forty dollars; cold storage from Nome would continue to be fifty-two dollars a ton, when it should be twenty. Commercial brigandage was still given letters of marque. Bureaus were fighting among themselves for greater power, and in the turmoil Alaska was still chained like a starving man just outside the reach of all the milk and honey in a wonderful land. Pauperizing, degrading, actually killing, the political misrule that had already driven 25 per cent of Alaska"s population from their homes was to continue indefinitely. A President of the United States had promised to visit the mighty land of the north and see with his own eyes. But would he come? There had been other promises, many of them, and promises had always been futile. But it was a hope that crept through Alaska, and upon this hope men whose courage never died began to build. Freedom was on its way, even if slowly. Justice must triumph ultimately, as it always triumphed. Rusty keys would at last be turned in the locks which had kept from Alaskans all the riches and resources of their country, and these men were determined to go on building against odds that they might be better prepared for that freedom of human endeavor when it came.
In these days, when the fires of achievement needed to be encouraged, and not smothered, neither Alan nor Carl Lomen emphasized the menace of gigantic financial interests like that controlled by John Graham--interests fighting to do away with the best friend Alaska ever had, the Biological Survey, and backing with all their power the ruinous legislation to put Alaska in the control of a group of five men that an aggrandizement even more deadly than a suffocating policy of conservation might be more easily accomplished. Instead, they spread the optimism of men possessed of inextinguishable faith. The blackest days were gone. Rifts were breaking in the clouds. Intelligence was creeping through, like rays of sunshine. The end of Alaska"s serfdom was near at hand. So they preached, and knew they were preaching truth, for what remained of Alaska"s men after years of hopelessness and distress were fighting men. And the women who had remained with them were the mothers and wives of a new nation in the making.
These mothers and wives Alan met during his week in Nome. He would have given his life if a few million people in the States could have known these women. Something would have happened then, and the sisterhood of half a continent--possessing the power of the ballot--would have opened their arms to them. Men like John Graham would have gone out of existence; Alaska would have received her birthright. For these women were of the kind who greeted the sun each day, and the gloom of winter, with something greater than hope in their hearts. They, too, were builders. Fear of G.o.d and love of land lay deep in their souls, and side by side with their men-folk they went on in this epic struggle for the building of a nation at the top of the world.
Many times during this week Alan felt it in his heart to speak of Mary Standish. But in the end, not even to Carl Lomen did word of her escape his lips. The pa.s.sing of each day had made her more intimately a part of him, and a secret part. He could not tell people about her. He even made evasions when questioned about his business and experiences at Cordova and up the coast. Curiously, she seemed nearer to him when he was away from other men and women. He remembered it had been that way with his father, who was always happiest when in the deep mountains or the unending tundras. And so Alan thrilled with an inner gladness when his business was finished and the day came for him to leave Nome.
Carl Lomen went with him as far as the big herd on Choris Peninsula. For one hundred miles, up to Shelton, they rode over a narrow-gauge, four-foot railway on a hand-car drawn by dogs. And it seemed to Alan, at times, as though Mary Standish were with him, riding in this strange way through a great wilderness. He could _see_ her. That was the strange thing which began to possess him. There were moments when her eyes were shining softly upon him, her lips smiling, her presence so real he might have spoken to her if Lomen had not been at his side. He did not fight against these visionings. It pleased him to think of her going with him into the heart of Alaska, riding the picturesque "pup-mobile," losing herself in the mountains and in his tundras, with all the wonder and glory of a new world breaking upon her a little at a time, like the unfolding of a great mystery. For there was both wonder and glory in these countless miles running ahead and drifting behind, and the miracle of northward-sweeping life. The days were long. Night, as Mary Standish had always known night, was gone. On the twentieth of June there were twenty hours of day, with a dim and beautiful twilight between the hours of eleven and one. Sleep was no longer a matter of the rising and setting of the sun, but was regulated by the hands of the watch. A world frozen to the core for seven months was bursting open like a great flower.
From Shelton, Alan and his companion visited the eighty or ninety people at Candle, and thence continued down the Keewalik River to Keewalik, on Kotzebue Sound. A Lomen power-boat, run by Lapps, carried them to Choris Peninsula, where for a week Alan remained with Lomen and his huge herd of fifteen thousand reindeer. He was eager to go on, but tried to hide his impatience. Something was urging him, whipping him on to greater haste. For the first time in months he heard the crackling thunder of reindeer hoofs, and the music of it was like a wild call from his own herds hurrying him home. He was glad when the week-end came and his business was done. The power-boat took him to Kotzebue. It was night, as his watch went, when Paul Davidovich started up the delta of the Kobuk River with him in a lighterage company"s boat. But there was no darkness. In the afternoon of the fourth day they came to the Redstone, two hundred miles above the mouth of the Kobuk as the river winds. They had supper together on the sh.o.r.e. After that Paul Davidovich turned back with the slow sweep of the current, waving his hand until he was out of sight.
Not until the sound of the Russian"s motor-boat was lost in distance did Alan sense fully the immensity of the freedom that swept upon him. At last, after months that had seemed like so many years, he was _alone_.
North and eastward stretched the unmarked trail which he knew so well, a hundred and fifty miles straight as a bird might fly, almost unmapped, unpeopled, right up to the doors of his range in the slopes of the Endicott Mountains. A little cry from his own lips gave him a start. It was as if he had called out aloud to Tautuk and Amuk Toolik, and to Keok and Nawadlook, telling them he was on his way home and would soon be there. Never had this hidden land which he had found for himself seemed so desirable as it did in this hour. There was something about it that was all-mothering, all-good, all-sweetly-comforting to that other thing which had become a part of him now. It was holding out its arms to him, understanding, welcoming, inspiring him to travel strongly and swiftly the s.p.a.ce between. And he was ready to answer its call.
He looked at his watch. It was five o"clock in the afternoon. He had spent a long day with the Russian, but he felt no desire for rest or sleep. The musk-tang of the tundras, coming to him through the thin timber of the river-courses, worked like an intoxicant in his blood. It was the tundra he wanted, before he lay down upon his back with his face to the stars. He was eager to get away from timber and to feel the immeasurable s.p.a.ce of the big country, the open country, about him. What fool had given to it the name of _Barren Lands_? What idiots people were to lie about it in that way on the maps! He strapped his pack over his shoulders and seized his rifle. Barren Lands!
He set out, walking like a man in a race. And long before the twilight hours of sleep they were sweeping out ahead of him in all their glory--the Barren Lands of the map-makers, _his_ paradise. On a knoll he stood in the golden sun and looked about him. He set his pack down and stood with bared head, a whispering of cool wind in his hair. If Mary Standish could have lived to see _this_! He stretched out his arms, as if pointing for her eyes to follow, and her name was in his heart and whispering on his silent lips. Immeasurable the tundras reached ahead of him--rolling, sweeping, treeless, green and golden and a glory of flowers, athrill with a life no forest land had ever known. Under his feet was a crush of forget-me-nots and of white and purple violets, their sweet perfume filling his lungs as he breathed. Ahead of him lay a white sea of yellow-eyed daisies, with purple iris high as his knees in between, and as far as he could see, waving softly in the breeze, was the cotton-tufted sedge he loved. The pods were green. In a few days they would be opening, and the tundras would be white carpets.
He listened to the call of life. It was about him everywhere, a melody of bird-life subdued and sleepy even though the sun was still warmly aglow in the sky. A hundred times he had watched this miracle of bird instinct, the going-to-bed of feathered creatures in the weeks and months when there was no real night. He picked up his pack and went on.
From a pool hidden in the lush gra.s.ses of a distant hollow came to him the twilight honking of nesting geese and the quacking content of wild ducks. He heard the reed-like, musical notes of a lone "organ-duck" and the plaintive cries of plover, and farther out, where the shadows seemed deepening against the rim of the horizon, rose the harsh, rolling notes of cranes and the raucous cries of the loons. And then, from a clump of willows near him, came the chirping twitter of a thrush whose throat was tired for the day, and the sweet, sleepy evening song of a robin.
_Night!_ Alan laughed softly, the pale flush of the sun in his face.
_Bedtime!_ He looked at his watch.
It was nine o"clock. Nine o"clock, and the flowers still answering to the glow of the sun! And the people down there--in the States--called it a frozen land, a h.e.l.l of ice and snow at the end of the earth, a place of the survival of the fittest! Well, to just such extremes had stupidity and ignorance gone through all the years of history, even though men called themselves super-creatures of intelligence and knowledge. It was humorous. And it was tragic.
At last he came to a shining pool between two tufted ridges, and in this velvety hollow the twilight was gathering like a shadow in a cup. A little creek ran out of the pool, and here Alan gathered soft gra.s.s and spread out his blankets. A great stillness drew in about him, broken only by the old squaws and the loons. At eleven o"clock he could still see clearly the sleeping water-fowl on the surface of the pool. But the stars were appearing. It grew duskier, and the rose-tint of the sun faded into purple gloom as pale night drew near--four hours of rest that was neither darkness nor day. With a pillow of sedge and gra.s.s under his head he slept.
The song and cry of bird-life wakened him, and at dawn he bathed in the pool, with dozens of fluffy, new-born ducks dodging away from him among the gra.s.ses and reeds. That day, and the next, and the day after that he traveled steadily into the heart of the tundra country, swiftly and almost without rest. It seemed to him, at last, that he must be in that country where all the bird-life of the world was born, for wherever there was water, in the pools and little streams and the hollows between the ridges, the voice of it in the morning was a babel of sound. Out of the sweet breast of the earth he could feel the irresistible pulse of motherhood filling him with its strength and its courage, and whispering to him its everlasting message that because of the glory and need and faith of life had G.o.d created this land of twenty-hour day and four-hour twilight. In it, in these days of summer, was no abiding place for gloom; yet in his own heart, as he drew nearer to his home, was a place of darkness which its light could not quite enter.
The tundras had made Mary Standish more real to him. In the treeless s.p.a.ces, in the vast reaches with only the sky shutting out his vision, she seemed to be walking nearer to him, almost with her hand in his. At times it was like a torture inflicted upon him for his folly, and when he visioned what might have been, and recalled too vividly that it was he who had stilled with death that living glory which dwelt with him in spirit now, a crying sob of which he was not ashamed came from his lips.
For when he thought too deeply, he knew that Mary Standish would have lived if he had said other things to her that night aboard the ship. She had died, not for him, but _because_ of him--because, in his failure to live up to what she believed she had found in him, he had broken down what must have been her last hope and her final faith. If he had been less blind, and G.o.d had given him the inspiration of a greater wisdom, she would have been walking with him now, laughing in the rose-tinted dawn, growing tired amid the flowers, sleeping under the clear stars--happy and unafraid, and looking to him for all things. At least so he dreamed, in his immeasurable loneliness.
He did not tolerate the thought that other forces might have called her even had she lived, and that she might not have been his to hold and to fight for. He did not question the possibility of shackles and chains that might have bound her, or other inclinations that might have led her. He claimed her, now that she was dead, and knew that living he would have possessed her. Nothing could have kept him from that. But she was gone. And for that he was accountable, and the fifth night he lay sleepless under the stars, and like a boy he cried for her with his face upon his arm, and when morning came, and he went on, never had the world seemed so vast and empty.