"Poor old Clytie--but you see yesterday all day I felt queer--very queer, and wrought up, and last night I couldn"t rest, and I lay awake and excited all night--and something seemed to give way when I saw you in the door. Of course it was nervousness, and I shall be all right now--"
She looked up and saw Bernal staring at her--standing in the doorway of the big room, his face shading into the dusk back of him. She went to him with both hands out and he kissed her.
"Is it Nance?"
"I don"t know--but it"s really Bernal."
"Clytie says you knew I had come."
"Clytie must have misunderstood. No one even intimated such a thing. I came up to-day--I had to come--because--if I had known you were here, wouldn"t I have brought Allan?"
"Of course I was going to let you know, and come down in a few days--there was some business to do here. Dear old Allan! I"m aching to get a stranglehold on him!"
"Yes--he"ll be so glad--there"s so much to say!"
"I didn"t know whom I should find here."
"We"ve had Clytie look after both houses--sometimes we"ve rented mine--and almost every summer we"ve come here."
"You know I didn"t dream I was rich until I got here. The lawyer says they"ve advertised, but I"ve been away from everything most of the time--not looking out for advertis.e.m.e.nts. I can"t understand the old gentleman, when I was such a reprobate and Allan was always such a thoroughly decent chap."
"Oh, hardly a reprobate!"
"Worse, Nance--an a.s.s--think of my talking to that dear old soul as I did--taking twenty minutes off to win him from his lifelong faith. I shudder when I remember it. And yet I honestly thought he might be made to see things my way."
Their speech had been quick, and her eyes were fastened upon his with a look from the old days striving in her to bring back that big moment of their last parting--that singular moment when they blindly groped for each other but had perforce to be content with one poor, trembling handclasp! Had that trembling been a weakness or a strength? For all time since--and increasingly during the later years--secret memories of it had wonderfully quickened a life that would otherwise have tended to fall dull, torpid, stubborn. It was not that their hands had met, but that they had trembled--those two strange hands that had both repelled and coerced each other--faltering at last into that long moment of triumphant certainty.
Under the first light words with Bernal this memory had welled up anew in her with a mighty power before which she was as a leaf in the wind.
Then, all at once, she saw that they had become dazed and speechless above this present clasp--the yielding, yet opposing, of those all-knowing, never-forgetting hands. There followed one swift mutual look of bewilderment. Then their hands fell apart and with little awkward laughs they turned to Clytie.
They were presently at table, Clytie in a trance of ecstatic watchfulness for emptied plates, broken only by reachings and urgings of this or that esteemed fleshpot.
Under the ready talk that flowed, Nancy had opportunity to observe the returned one. And now his strangeness vaguely hurt her. The voice and the face were not those that had come to secret life in her heart during the years of his absence. Here was not the laughing boy she had known, with his volatile, Lucifer-like charm of light-hearted recklessness in the face of destiny. Instead, a thinned, shy face rose before her, a face full of awkwardness and dreaming, troubled and absent; a face that one moment appealed by its defenseless forgetfulness, and the next, coerced by a look eloquent of tested strength.
As she watched him, there were two of her: one, the girl dreaming forward out of the past, receptive of one knew not what secrets from inner places; the other, the vivid, alert woman--listening, waiting, judging. She it was whose laugh came often to make of her face the perfect whole out of many little imperfections.
Later, when they sat in the early summer night, under a moon blurred to a phantom by the mist, when the changed lines of his face were no longer relentless and they two became little more than voices and remembered presences to each other, she began to find him indeed unchanged. Even his voice had in an hour curiously lost that hurting strangeness. As she listened she became absent, almost drowsy with memories of that far night when his voice was quite the same and their hands had trembled together--with such prescience that through all the years her hand was to feel the groping of his.
Yet awkward enough was that first half-hour of their sitting side by side in the night, on the wide piazza of his old home. Before them the lawn stretched unbroken to the other big house, where Nancy had wondered her way to womanhood. Empty now it was, darkened as those years of her dreaming girlhood must be to the present. Should she enter it, she knew the house would murmur with echoes of other days; there would be the wraith of the girl she once was flitting as of old through its peopled rooms.
And out there actually before her was the stretch of lawn where she had played games of tragic pretense with the imperious, dreaming boy.
Vividly there came back that late afternoon when the monster of Bernal"s devising had frightened them for the last time--when in a sudden flash of insight they had laughed the thing away forever and faced each other with a certain half-joyous, half-foolish maturity of understanding. One day long after this she had humorously bewailed to Bernal the loss of their child"s faith in the Gratcher. He had replied that, as an inst.i.tution, the Gratcher was imperishable--that it was brute humanity"s instinctive negation to the incredible perfections of life; that while the child"s Gratcher was not the man"s, the latter was yet of the same breed, however it might be refined by the subtleties of maturity: that the man, like the child, must fashion some monster of horror to deter him when he hears G.o.d"s call to live.
She had not been able to understand, nor did she now. She was looking out to the two trees where once her hammock had swung--to the rustic chair, now falling apart from age, from which Bernal had faced her that last evening. Then with a start she was back in the present. Nancy of the old days must be shut fat in the old house. There she might wander and wonder endlessly among the echoes and the half-seen faces, but never could she come forth; over the threshold there could pa.s.s only the wife of Allan Linford.
Quick upon this realisation came a sharp fear of the man beside her--a fear born of his hand"s hold upon hers when they had met. She shrank under the memory of it, with a sudden instinct of the hunted. Then from her new covert of reserve she dared to peer cautiously at him, seeking to know how great was her peril--to learn what measure of defense would best insure her safety--recognising fearfully the traitor in her own heart.
Their first idle talk had died, and she noted with new alarm that they had been silent for many minutes. This could not safely be--this insidious, barrier-destroying silence. She seemed to hear his heart beating high from his own sense of peril. But would he help her? Would he not rather side with that wretched traitor within her, crying out for the old days--would he not still be the proud fool who would suffer no man"s law but his own? She shivered at the thought of his nearness--of his momentous silence--of his treacherous ally.
She stirred in her chair to look in where Clytie bustled between kitchen and dining-room. Her movement aroused him from his own abstraction. For a breathless stretch of time she was frozen to inertness by sheer terror. Would that old lawless spirit utter new blasphemies, giving fearful point to them now? Would the old eager hand come again upon hers with a boy"s pleading and a man"s power? And what of her own secret guilt? She had cherished the memory of him and across s.p.a.ce had responded to him through that imperious need of her heart. Swiftly in this significant moment she for the first time saw herself with critical eyes--saw that in her fancied security she had unwittingly enthroned the hidden traitor. More and more poignant grew her apprehension as she felt his eyes upon her and divined that he was about to speak. With a little steadying of the lips, with eyes that widened at him in the dim light, she waited for the sound of his voice--waited as one waits for something "terrible and dear"--the whirlwind that might destroy utterly, or pa.s.s--to leave her forever exulting in a new sense of power against elemental forces.
"Would you mind if I smoked, Nance?"
She stared stupidly. So tense had been her strain that the words were mere meaningless blows that left her quivering. He thought she had not heard.
"Would you mind my pipe--and this very mild mixture?"
She blessed him for the respite.
"Smoke, of course!" she managed to say.
She watched him closely, still alert, as he stuffed the tobacco into his pipe-bowl from a rubber pouch. Then he struck the match and in that moment she suffered another shock. The little flame danced out of the darkness, and wavering, upward shadows played over a face of utter quietness. The relaxed shoulders drooped sideways in the chair, the body placidly sprawled, one crossed leg gently waving. The shaded eye surveyed some large and tranquil thought--and in that eye the soul sat remote, aloof from her as any star.
She sank back in her chair with a long, stealthy breath of relief--a relief as cold as stone. She had not felt before that there was a chill in the wide sweetness of the night. Now it wrapped her round and slowly, with a soft brutality, penetrated to her heart.
The silence grew too long. With a shrugging effort she surmounted herself and looked again toward the alien figure looming unconcerned in the gloom. A warm, super-personal sense of friendliness came upon her.
Her intellect awoke to inquiries. She began to question him of his days away, and soon he was talking freely enough, between pulls of his pipe.
"You know, Nance, I was a prodigal--only when I awoke I had no father to go to. Poor grandad! What a brutal cub I was! That has always stuck in my mind. I was telling you about that cold wet night in Denver. I had found a lodging in the police station. There were others as forlorn--and Nance--did you ever realise the buoyancy of the human mind? It"s sublime. We rejected ones sat there, warming ourselves, chatting, and pretty soon one man found there were thirteen of us. You would have thought that none of them could fear bad luck--worse luck--none of them could have been more dismally situated. But, do you know? most of those fellows became nervous--as apprehensive of bad luck as if they had been pampered princes in a time of revolution. I was one of the two that volunteered to restore confidence by bringing in another man.
"We found an undersized, insignificant-looking chap toddling aimlessly along the street a few blocks away from the station. We grappled with him and hustled him back to the crowd. He slept with us on the floor, and no one paid any further attention to him, except to remark that he talked to himself a good bit. He and I awoke earliest next morning. I asked him if he was hungry and he said he was. So I bought two fair breakfasts with the money I"d saved for one good one, and we started out of town. This chap said he was going that way, and I had made up my mind to find a certain friend of mine--a chap named Hoover. The second day out I discovered that this queer man was the one who"d been turning Denver upside down for ten days, healing the halt and the blind. He was running away because he liked a quieter life."
He stopped, laughing softly, as if in remembrance--until she prompted him.
"Yes, he said, "Father" had commanded him to go into the wilderness to fast. He was always talking familiarly with "Father," as we walked. So I stayed by him longer than I meant to--he seemed so helpless--and I happened at that time to be looking for the true G.o.d."
"Did you find him, Bernal?"
"Oh, yes!"
"In this strange man?"
"In myself. It"s the same old secret, Nance, that people have been discovering for ages--but it is a secret only until after you learn it for yourself. The only true revelation from G.o.d is here in man--in the human heart. I had to be years alone to find it out, Nance--I"d had so much of that Bible mythology stuffed into me--but I mustn"t bore you with it."
"Oh, but I must know, Bernal--you don"t dream how greatly I need at this moment to believe _something_--more than you ever did!"
"It"s simple, Nance. It"s the only revelation in which the G.o.d of yesterday gives willing place to the better G.o.d of to-day--only here does the G.o.d of to-day say, "Thou shalt have no other G.o.d before me but the G.o.d of to-morrow who will be more G.o.dlike than I. Only in this way can we keep our G.o.d growing always a little beyond us--so that to-morrow we shall not find ourselves surpa.s.sing him as the first man you would meet out there on the street surpa.s.ses the Christian G.o.d even in the common virtues. That was the fourth dimension of religion that I wanted, Nance--faith in a G.o.d that a fearless man could worship."
He lighted his pipe again, and as the match blazed up she saw the absent look still in his eyes. By it she realised how far away from her he was--realised it with a little sharp sense of desolation. He smoked a while before speaking.
"Out there in the mountains, Nance, I thought about these things a long time--the years went before I knew it. At first I stayed with this healing chap, only after a while he started back to teach again and they found him dead. He believed he had a mission to save the world, and that he would live until he accomplished it. But there he was, dead for want of a little food. Then I stayed a long time alone--until I began to feel that I, too, had something for the world. It began to burn in my bones.
I thought of him, dead and the world not caring that he hadn"t saved it--not even knowing it was lost. But I kept thinking--a man can be so much more than himself when he is alone--and it seemed to me that I saw at least two things the world needed to know--two things that would teach men to stop being cowards and leaners."
Her sympathy was quick and ardent.
"Oh, Bernal," she said warmly, "you made me believe when you believed nothing--and now, when I need it above all other times, you make me believe again! And you"ve come back with a message! How glorious!"
He smiled musingly.