Gordon found relief in a customary cigarette when the uncomfortable repast was finished. The priest removed the dishes, and reappeared with bed linen, with which he proceeded to convert the bare couch into a provision for sleeping. Then he returned the lamp to the center of the table, opened the book and seated with his back squarely toward the room, addressed himself to the pages.

Gordon Makimmon's head throbbed, suddenly paining him--it was as though sharp, malicious fingers were compressing the spine at the base of his brain. That, and the profound weariness which swept over him, were disconcerting; he was so seldom ill, so rarely tired, that those unwelcome symptoms bore an aggravated menace; it was the slight, premonitory rusting, the corrosion of time, upon the iron of his manhood.

In an instinctive need for human support, the rea.s.surance of the comprehension of his kind, he directed an observation at the broad, squat, somber back. "I might have been drunk a month," he a.s.serted, "by the way I feel." The priest paused in his reading, inserted a finger in the page, and half turned. Gordon could see the full, smooth cheek, the drooping gaze, against the green radiance of the lamp.

"If you will drink," Merlier said in a bitter, repressed voice, "if you will indulge the flesh, don't whimper at the price." He made a gesture, indicating the bed, then returned to his reading.

"The man doesn't live who's heard me whimper," Gordon began loudly; but his angry protest trailed into silence. There was no comfort, no redress, to be obtained from that absorbed, ungainly figure. He slipped out of the baggy trousers, the worsted slippers, and, extending himself on the couch, fell heavily asleep.

XXIII

When he woke the room was bright with narrow strips of sun, already too high to shine broadly through the doors and windows. His clothes, dry and comparatively clean, reposed on a chair at his side, and, washing in the basin which he found outside the door, he hastily dressed. He looked, tentatively, for the priest, but found only his aged helper in the roughly-cleared s.p.a.ce at the back of the house.

Bartamon was a small man, with a skull-like head, to the hollows of which, the bony projections, dark skin clung dryly; his eyes were mere dimming glints of watery consciousness; and from the sleeves of a faded blue shirt, the folds of formless, canvas trousers, knotted, blackish hands, grotesque feet, appeared to hang jerking on wires.

"Where's the Father?" Gordon inquired.

The other rested from the laborious sawing of a log, blinking and tremulous in the hard brilliancy of midday. "Beyond," he answered vaguely, waving up the valley; "Sim Caley's wife sent for him from Hollidew's farm.

Sim or his wife think they're going to die two or three times the year, and bother the Father.... But I wouldn't wonder they would, and them working for Hollidew, dawn, day and dark, with never a proper skinful of food, only this and that, maybe, chick'ry and fat pork and moldy ends of nothing."

He filled the blackened ruin of a pipe, shaking in his palsied fingers, clasped it in mumbling, toothless gums: he was so sere, so juiceless, that the smoke trailing from his sunken lips might well have been the spontaneous conflagration of his desiccated interior.

"Hollidew's a terrible man for money," he continued, "it hurts him like a cut with a hick'ry to see a dollar go. They say he won't hear tell of quitting his fortune for purgatory, no, nor for heaven neither. He can't get him to make a will, the lawyer can't. He was telling the Father the other day, sitting right in the house there, 'Pompey Hollidew,' he says, 'won't even talk will....' He'd like to take it all with him to the devil, Pompey would." He turned with a sigh to the log. A cross-cut saw, with a handle at either end, lay upon the ground; and Gordon, grasping the far handle, helped him to drag the slim, glittering steel through the powdering fiber of the wood.

As he worked mechanically Gordon's thoughts returned to the past, the past which had collapsed so utterly, so disastrously, so swiftly upon his complacency, robbing him of his sustenance, of Clare, of his home. The complaining voice of the old man finally pierced his abstraction. "If you are going to ride," Bartamon complained, "don't drag your feet."

The two men consumed a formless, ample meal, after which Gordon still waited negligently for the priest. The sun sank toward the western range; the late afternoon grew as hushed, as rich in color, in vert shadows, ultramarine, and amber, as heavy in foliage bathed in aureate light, as the nave of a cathedral under stained gla.s.s.

In a corner of the shed Gordon found a fishing rod of split bamboo, sprung with time and neglect, the wrappings hanging and effectually loose. A small bra.s.s reel was fastened to the b.u.t.t, holding an amount of line. He balanced the rod in his grasp, discovering it to be the property of the old man.

"What'll you take for it?" he demanded. His store of money had been reduced to a precarious sum of silver; but the longing had seized him to fish in the open, to follow a stream into the tranquil dusk.

"I got some flies too." The other resurrected a cigar box, which held some feathered hooks attached to doubtful guts. "They are dried out," Gordon p.r.o.nounced, testing them; "what will you take for the whole worthless lot?" Bartamon demurred: the rod had been a good rod, it had been given to him in the past by a mayor, or had it been a senator? It was not like common rods, made of six strips of bamboo, but of eight, the line was silk.... He would take sixty cents.

Delaying his expression of grat.i.tude to the priest--he could stop on his return with trout--Gordon was soon tramping over the soft, dusty road to where he bordered a stream skirting the eastern range. A shelf of pasturage ran, deep blue-green sod, against the rocky wall; to the left, through scattered trees, the valley was visible; on the right the range mounted precipitant, verdant, to its far crown. The stream, now torn to white foam on a rocky descent, now swept with a gla.s.sy rush between level, green banks, now moved slowly in a deep-shaded pool, where gleaming bubbles held filmed sliding replicas of the banks, the trees, the sky.

The sun, growing less a source of light than a brilliant circle of carmine, almost touched the western range; the shadow troop swept down the slope and lengthened across the valley; cut by the trunks of trees the light fell in dusty gold bars across the water. Gordon drew the line through the dipping tip, knotting on three of the flies. Then he quietly followed the stream to where it fell into a circular, stone-bound basin.

He made his cast with a quick turn of the wrist, skilfully avoiding the high underbrush, the overhanging limbs. The flies swung out and dropped softly on the water. On the second cast he caught a trout--a silvery, gleaming shape flecked with vermilion and black, shaded with mauve and emerald and maroon.

In a shallow reach he waded, forgetful of his clothes. He caught another trout, another and another, stringing them on a green withe. He cast indefatigably, but with the greatest possible economy of effort; his progress was all but soundless; he slipped down stream like a thing of the woods, fishing with delicate art, with ardor, with ingenuity, and with continual success.

The sun disappeared in a primrose void behind the darkening mountains; the hush deepened upon the valley, a hush in which the voice of the stream was audible, cool--a sound immemorially old, lingering from the timeless past through vast, dim changes, cataclysms, carrying the melancholy, eloquent, incomprehensible plaint of primitive nature.

Gordon was absorbed, content; the quiet, the magic veil of oblivion, of the woods, of the immobile mountains, enveloped and soothed him, released his heart from its oppression, banished the fever, the struggle, from his brain. The barrier against which he still fished was mauve, the water black; the moon appeared buoyantly, like a rosy bubble blown upon a curtain of old blue velvet. He cast once more, and met his last strike, a heavy jar that broke the weakened line, in a broad, still expanse where white moths fluttered above the water in a cold, stagnant gloom. He saw the rotting wall of a primitive dam, the crumbling, fallen sides of a rude mill. Night fell augustly. The whippoorwills cried faint and distant.

He sat on a log, draining his shoes, pressing the water from his trousers, and smoked while the light of the moon brightened into a silvery radiance in which objects, trees, were greyly visible; reaches sank into soft obscurity. He recognized his position from the ruined mill--he was on the edge of that farm of Pompey Hollidew's of which Bartamon had spoken.

Hollidew, he knew, seldom visited his outlying acres, then only in the collection of rents or profits--they lay too far from his iron chest, from the communication of the Stenton banks. Gordon knew Sim Caley, and, suddenly, he decided to visit him; the trout would afford the Caleys and himself an ample repast.

He crossed the road, made his way through a fragrant tangle of field gra.s.s, over shorn and orderly acres of grazing. The moon rose higher, grew brighter; the vistas were clear, unreal, the shadows like spilled ink. The house toward which he moved stood sharply defined, and enclosed by a fence, flowers, from the farm. As he approached he saw that no lights were visible, but a blur of white moved in the shadow of the portico. He decided that it was Sim Caley's wife; and, opening the gate, advanced with a query for Mrs. Caley's health forming on his lips.

But it was Lettice Hollidew.

XXIV

She retreated, as he advanced, within the deeper obscurity of an opened door but he had seen, in the shimmering, elusive light, her features, gathered the unmistakable, intangible impression of her person.

"It's me, Gordon Makimmon," he said. He paused by the step, on which he laid the trout, shining with sudden, liquid gleams of silver in the moonlight.

"Oh!" she exclaimed in a low voice; "oh!" She moved forward, materializing, out of the dark, into a figure of white youth. Her face was pale, there were white ruffles on her neck, on her arms, her skirt clung simply, whitely, about her knees and ankles.

"I stopped to see Sim," he explained further, "and took you for Mrs.

Caley. I reckoned I'd bring them some trout: I didn't know your father was here."

"Won't you sit down. Mrs. Caley is sick, and Sim's on the mountain with the cattle. Father isn't here."

He mounted to the portico, mentally formulating a way of speedy escape; he thought, everywhere he turned Lettice Hollidew stood with her tiresome smile. "I come out here every summer," she volunteered, sinking upon a step, "and spend two weeks. I was born here you see, and," she added in a stiller voice, "my mother died here. Father Merlier calls it my yearly retreat."

"I'd be pleased if you'd take the fish," he remarked; "I guess I'd better be moving--I've got to see the priest."

"Why, you haven't stopped a minute," she protested, "not long enough to smoke one of your little cigarettes. Visitors are too scarce here to let them go off like that."

At the implied suggestion he half-mechanically rolled a cigarette. The chair he found was comfortable; he was very weary. He sat smoking and indifferently studying Lettice Hollidew. She was, to-night, prettier than he had remembered her. She was telling him, in a voice that rippled cool and low like the stream, of Mrs. Caley's indisposition. Her face, now turned toward the fields, was dipped in the dreaming radiance; now it was blurred, vaguely appealing, disturbing. Her soft youth was creamy, distilling an essence, a fragrance, like a flower; it was one with the immaculate flood of light bathing the world in virginal beauty.

A new interest stirred within him, a satisfaction grew from her palpable liking for him, and was reflected in the warmer tones of his replies; a new pain ordered his comments. The situation, too, appealed to him; his instinct responded to the obvious implications of the position in the exact degree of his habit of mind. The familiar, professional gallantry took possession of him, directing the sensuality to which he abandoned himself.

He moved from the chair to the step by her side. Nearer she was more appealing still; a lovely shadow dwelt at the base of her throat; the simple dress took the soft curves of her girlish body, stirred with her breathing. Her hands lay loosely in her lap, and the impulse seized him to take them up, but he repressed it ... for the moment.

"I saw Buckley Simmons, yesterday," she informed him, "his face is nearly well. He wanted to come out here, but I wouldn't let him. He wants to marry me," she continued serenely; "I told him I didn't think I'd every marry."

"But you will--some lucky, young man."

"I don't think I like young men, that is," she qualified carefully, "not very young. I like men who are able to act ever so quickly, no matter what occurs, and they must be terribly brave. I like them best if they have been unfortunate; something in me wants to make up to them for--for any loss," she paused, gazing at him with an elevated chin, serious lips, intent eyes.

This, he told himself complacently, was but a description of himself, as pointed as she dared to make it. "A man who had had trouble couldn't do better than tell you about it," he a.s.sured her; "I have had a good lot of trouble."

"Well, tell me," she moved toward him.

"Oh! you wouldn't care to hear about mine. I'm a sort of n.o.body at present. I haven't anything in the world--no home, nothing in the whole world. Even the little saving I had after the house was sold was--was taken from me by sharpers."

"Tell me," she repeated, "more."