"It was one night in the apartment. I had gone to bed. They, your father and his--friend, were in the parlor. They had quarreled during the evening over some money affairs which I did not understand. Your father was headstrong, as he always was, and the other, well, he rarely raised his voice--he was one of those quiet men who disguise their purposes under a calm atmosphere--as a rule. However, on this occasion high words had pa.s.sed, and I knew that stormy feelings were underlying the calm which finally ensued. At last, when they sat down to a heavy game of baccarat, I crept away to bed.
"I don"t know how long I had been in bed when it happened. I know I was asleep, for I wakened suddenly with a great sense of shock, and sat up trying to realize what had happened. It took me some moments. I know my mind ran over a dozen things before I decided what to do. I remembered that we were alone in the place. The servants had been dismissed more than a week before. There was only you, and your father, and me in the place. Then I remembered that his friend was there, and I had left them playing cards. Instantly I got out of bed.
I slipped on a dressing-gown and crept out into the pa.s.sage. I moved silently toward the door of the sitting-room. It was wide open. I had left it shut. The gas was full on. I reached the door and cautiously peered in. But there was no need for caution. Your father had fallen forward in his chair, and lay with his head, face downward, upon the table. He was dead and--the other had gone. I ran to the dead man"s side and raised him up. It was too late. All--all I had or cared for in the world had been taken from me by the hand of the murderer."
"Murdered?" Joan whispered in horrified tones.
"Yes, murdered!" came the swift, vehement retort. "Shot--shot through the heart, and in the stomach--and his murderer had fled. Oh, G.o.d, shall I ever forget that moment!"
The woman fell back in her chair, her whole withered body shaking with emotion. Then with an effort she pulled herself together and went on more calmly--
"I hardly know what I did. All I remember is that I gave the alarm, and presently had the police there. I told them all I could, and gave the name and description of--the man who had done the deed. But it was useless. He had gone--bolted. Nor was he ever seen or heard of again.
The curse had worked out. You, your father"s golden girl, were left orphaned to the care of the woman to whom your very existence was an ineradicable wrong, and who, through your coming, had been robbed of all that made life possible."
She raised her crystal and held it poised on the gathered finger-tips of one hand. And when she spoke again her voice had gained strength and tone.
"Since those days I have learnt to read the words that are written by the hand of Fate. And here--here is the open book. It is all here. The storm of disaster that brought you into the world will dog your footsteps. You are cursed with the luck that leads to disaster.
Wherever you go men will bless your name, and, almost in the same breath, their blessings shall turn to the direst curses. It is not I who am speaking. My tongue utters the words, but the writing of Fate has been set forth for me to interpret. Wherever you go, wherever you be, you cannot escape the destiny set out for you. I tell you you are a leper, a pariah, whom all men, for their own safeguarding, must shun."
All through the final p.r.o.nouncement Joan sat transfixed with horror. A leper! A pariah! Nor, in the light of those things which to her own knowledge had happened, could she doubt the hideous denunciation. She had heard and understood that ill-luck could and did pursue its victims. But this! Oh, it was too terrible--too cruel! For an instant she thought of the doctor and his words of warning. But one glance at the bowed figure, again intent upon her crystal, and the thought pa.s.sed. The story she had listened to was too real, too full of those things which had driven her poor aunt to her present unyielding att.i.tude toward the world to be the ravings of an insane mind. And suddenly panic gripped her, that panic which, in a moment of weakness, so easily tends toward self-destruction.
"Is--is there no hope, auntie?" she asked helplessly.
Mercy Lascelles looked up from the crystal. She eyed her niece steadily, as though to read all there was hidden behind the desperate blue eyes.
Slowly she shook her head.
Again came that spasm of panic, and Joan seemed to hurl her whole young strength into denial.
"But there is. There must be," she cried, with a fierceness that held the other in something like astonishment. "There must be," she reiterated desperately. "No G.o.d could be so cruel--so--so wicked.
What have I done to deserve this? The injustice is demoniacal. Far better go and throw myself before a pa.s.sing train than live to carry such a pestilence with me wherever I go through life. If you can read these things--read on. Read on and tell me, for I swear that I will not live with this curse forever tied about my neck."
"You will live--you must live. It is written here." Mercy pointed at the crystal. Then she laughed her cold, mirthless laugh. "There was one power that served me, that helped me to save my reason through all those early days. G.o.d knows how it may help you--for I can"t see. I loved your father with a pa.s.sion nothing, no disaster could destroy. I loved him so that I could crush every other feeling down, subservient to my pa.s.sion. Go you, child, and find such a love. Go you and find a love so strong that no disaster can kill it. And maybe life may still have some compensations for you, maybe it will lift the curse from your suffering shoulders. It--it is the only thing in the world that is stronger than disaster. It is the only thing in the world that is stronger than--death."
Joan had no answer. She stared straight ahead of her, focusing some trifling detail of the pattern on the wall paper. Her face was stony--stony as the face of the woman who was watching her. The moments pa.s.sed rapidly. A minute pa.s.sed, and neither spoke.
Then at last the girl abruptly rose from her seat. Almost mechanically she moved over to a mirror, and, removing her hat, deftly patted her beautiful hair till it a.s.sumed its wonted appearance. And quite suddenly she turned about.
"I have nearly fifty thousand dollars, auntie. I am going to realize that capital. I am going to leave this house--I am going to leave it forever. I shall change my name, and cover up my tracks, for I intend going where I am not known. I am going where men cannot figure in my life, which I intend to begin all over again. The burden Fate has imposed upon me is too great. I am going to run from it."
She laughed. And her laugh was as mirthless as her aunt"s had been.
CHAPTER IV
TWO MEN OF THE WILDERNESS
The westering sun was drooping heavily toward its fiery couch. The purple of evening was deepening from the east, meeting and blending softly with the gold of the dying day. A great furnace of ruddy cloud rose above the mountain-tops, lighting the eternal snows of the peaks and ancient glaciers with a wealth of kaleidoscopic color. Viewed from the plains below there might have been a great fire raging among the hill-caps, where only snow and ice could provide the fuel.
The radiant colors of sunset held the quiet eyes of a solitary horseman riding amidst the broken lands of the lesser foot-hills. He was a big man, of powerful shoulders and stout limbs. He was a man of fifty or thereabouts, yet his hair was snow white, a perfect mane that reached low upon his neck, touching the soft collar of his cotton shirt. His face was calm with something of the peace of the world through which he was riding, something of the peace which comes to those who have abandoned forever the strife of the busy life beyond.
It only needed the garb of the priest, and his appearance would have matched perfectly his sobriquet, "the Padre."
But Moreton Kenyon was clad in the rough moleskin, the riding boots and general make-up of the western life to which he belonged. Even he carried the protecting firearms by which to administer the personal laws of the wilderness. His whole appearance, the very horse under him, a prairie-bred broncho of excellent blood, suggested a man who knew the life amidst which he lived, and was more than capable of surviving it.
Whatever his appearance, whatever his capacity for the rougher corners of earth, Moreton Kenyon was a man of great kindliness, of great sympathy, as the mission from which he was now returning might well have testified. Those who knew him best held him in deep affection.
Those who knew him less withheld their judgment, but never failed to treat him with a courtesy not usual amongst the derelicts of an out-world camp.
Just now something of the smallness of human life, of human aims and efforts, of human emotions, was occupying the busy brain behind his reflective eyes. The scene before him, upon which he had so often looked, never failed to remind him of the greatness of that which lay beyond the ken of man. Somehow it exalted his thoughts to planes to which no a.s.sociation with his kind could ever have exalted them. It never failed to inspire him with a reverence for the infinity of power which crowned the glory of creation, and reduced self to a humble realization of its atomic place in the great scheme of the Creator.
His horse ambled easily over the ribbon-like trail, which seemed to rise out of the eastern horizon from nowhere, and lose itself somewhere ahead, amidst the dark ma.s.ses of forest-crowned hills. The journey was nearly over. Somewhere ahead lay the stable, which could be reached at leisure in the cool of the evening, and neither master nor beast seemed to feel the need for undue haste.
As the light slowly faded out and left the snow-white hill-crests drab with the gray of twilight, the man"s mind reverted to those things which had sent him on his journey. Many doubts had a.s.sailed him by the way, doubts which set him debating with himself, but which rarely made him turn from a purpose his mind was once set upon. He knew that his action involved more than his own personal welfare, and herein had lain the source of his doubt. But he had clearly argued every point with himself, and through it all had felt the rightness of his purpose.
Then, too, he had had the support of that other with whom he was concerned. And he smiled as he thought of the night when his decision had been taken. Even now the picture remained in his mind of the eager face of his youthful protege as they discussed the matter. The younger man had urged vehemently, protesting at every objection, that they two had no right to live in comparative comfort with women and children starving about them.
He remembered young Buck"s eager eyes, large dark-brown eyes that could light with sudden, almost volcanic heat, or smile their soft, lazy smile of amus.e.m.e.nt at the quaintnesses of life about him. The Padre understood the largeness of heart, the courage which urged him, the singleness of purpose which was always his. Then, when their decision had been taken, he remembered the abrupt falling back of the man into the quiet, almost monosyllabic manner which usually belonged to him.
Yes, Buck was a good lad.
The thought carried him back to days long gone by, to a time when a lad of something less than eight years, clad in the stained and worn garb of a prairie juvenile, his feet torn and bleeding, his large brown eyes staring out of gaunt, hungry sockets, his thin, pinched, sunburnt face drawn by the ravages of starvation, had cheerfully hailed him from beneath the shelter of a trail-side bush.
That was nearly twenty years ago, but every detail of the meeting was still fresh in his memory. His horse had shied at the sudden challenge. He remembered he had thrashed the creature with his spurs.
And promptly had come the youthful protest.
"Say, you needn"t to lick him, mister," the boy piped in his thin treble. "Guess he"ll stand if you talk to him."
Strangely enough the man had almost unconsciously obeyed the mandate.
And the memory of it made him smile now. Then had followed a dialogue, which even now had power to stir every sympathy of his heart. He started by casually questioning the starving apparition.
"Where you from, sonny?" he asked.
And with that unequivocal directness, which, after twenty years, still remained with him, the boy flung out a thin arm in the direction of the eastern horizon.
"Back ther", mister."
The natural sequence was to ask him whither he was bound, and his answer came with a similar gesture with his other hand westward.
"Yonder."
"But--but who"re your folks? Where are they?" the Padre had next hazarded. And a world of desolation was contained in the lad"s half-tearful reply--
"Guess I ain"t got none. Pop an" ma"s dead. Our farm was burnt right out. Y" see there was a prairie fire. It was at night, an" we was abed. Pop got me out, an" went back for ma. I never see him agin. I never see ma. An" ther" wa"an"t no farm left. Guess they"re sure dead."
He fought the tears back manfully, in a way that set the Padre marveling at his courage.
After a moment he continued his interrogation.