CHAPTER XXIV

ON SMOKEY MOUNTAIN

Jessica bore back from the town that afternoon a spirit of tremulous gladness. In the few moments of that thrilling ride and rescue, a mysterious change had been wrought in her.

In the past days her soul had been possessed by a painful agitation which she did not attempt to a.n.a.lyze. At moments the ingrained hatred of Hugh's act, the resentment that had been the result of that year of pain, had risen to battle for the inherent justice of things. At such times she was restless and _distraite_, sitting much alone, and puzzling David Stires by meaningless responses.

She could not tell him that the son whose name he never took upon his lips was so near: that he whose crime his father's pride of name had hidden, through all the months since then, had gone down with the current, shunned by honest folk, adding to his one dismal act the weight of persistent repet.i.tion! She could not tell him this, even though that son now lived without memory of the evil he had done; though he struggled under a cloud of hatred, reaching out to clean deed and high resolve.

Now, however, all distrust and trepidation had vanished. Strangely and suddenly the complex warfare in her mind had stilled. Standing with Mrs.

Halloran, she had listened to the comment with shining eyes. Not that she distinguished any sudden and violent _volte-face_ of opinion to turn persecution to popularity and make the reprobate of to-day the favorite of to-morrow. But in its very reserve she instinctively felt a new tension of respect. Suspicion and dislike aside, there was none there who would again hinder the man who had made that race with death!

For her own part, she only knew that she had no longer fear of soul or sense of irrevocable loss, or suffering. What were those old Bible words about being born again? What was that rebirth but a divine forgetting, a wiping out, a "remembering no more?" If it was the memory of his shame that had dragged him down, that memory was gone, perhaps for ever. The Hugh she now loved was not the Hugh who had sinned!

She sat by David Stires that evening chatting gaily--he had been much weaker and more nervous of late and she would not have him told of the runaway--talking of cheerful things, radiating a glow from her own happiness that warmed the softly-lighted sick-room. All the while her heart was on the hillside where a rough cabin held him who embodied for her all the mystery and meaning of life. By a kind of clairvoyance she saw him sitting in the snug firelight, thinking perhaps of the instant their eyes had met. She did not guess that for him that moment had held an added pang.

So the hours had pa.s.sed, and the sun, when it rose next day, shone on a freshly created world. The wind no longer moaned for the lost legends of the trees. There was a bloom on every flowering bush, a song in the throat of every bird. She was full of new feelings that yielded in their sway only to new problems that loomed on her mental horizon. As the puzzle of the present cleared, the future was become the all-dominating thing. She knew now that she had never hated, had never really ceased to love. And Hugh? Love was not a mere product of times and places. It was only the memory that was gone, his love lived on underneath. Surely that was what the violin--what the look on his face had said! When the broken chain was welded, he would know her! Would it be chance--some sudden mental shock--that would furnish the clue? She had heard of such things.

But suppose he did not recover his memory. In the very nature of the case, he must sometime learn the facts of his past. Was it not better to know the very worst it contained now, to put all behind him, and face a future that held no hidden menace? She alone could tell him what had clouded his career--the thing whose sign and symbol was the forged draft. She carried the slip of paper in the bosom of her dress, and every day she took it out and looked at it as at some maleficent relic.

It was a token of the old buried misery that, its final purpose accomplished, should be forgotten for ever. How to convey the truth with as little pain as might be--this was the problem--and she had found the solution. She would leave the draft secretly in the cabin, where he must see it. It bore his own name, and the deadly word David Stires' cramped fist had written across it, told its significant story. How it got there Hugh would not question; it would be to him only a detail of his forgotten life there.

She was glad when in the late afternoon Doctor Brent came for his chat with David Stires, and the latter sent her out for a walk. It was a garlanded day, a day of clear blue s.p.a.ces between lavender clouds lolling in the sky, and over all the late summer landscape a dull gold wash of sun. There had long ceased to be for her any direction save one--down the mountain road to where a rambling, overgrown path led to the little gra.s.sy plateau with its jutting rock, which was her point of observation. She did not keep to the main road, but chose a short-cut through the thick underbrush that brought her more quickly to the k.n.o.b.

There she sat down, and, parting the bushes, peered through them.

All was quiet. No wisp of smoke curled from the cabin chimney, no work was forward; for Harry had climbed far up the mountain, alone with his thoughts. It was a favorable opportunity.

Jessica had the fateful draft in her hand as she ran quickly down the trail and across the cleared s.p.a.ce to the cabin door. It was wide open.

Peering warily she saw that both rooms were empty, and, with a guilty last glance about her, she entered. A smile curved her lips as she saw the plain neatness of the interior; the scoured cooking-utensils, the coa.r.s.e Mackinaw clothing hung from wooden pegs, the clean bacon suspended from the rafters. A nail in the wall held an old violin, and beneath it was a shelf of books.

To these, battered and dog-eared novels rescued from the mildewed litter of the cabin, Harry had turned eagerly in the long evenings for lack of mental pabulum. She took one from the meager row, and opened it curiously. It was _David Copperfield_, and she saw with kindling interest that heavy lines were drawn along certain of the pages. The words that had been marked revealed to the loving woman something of his soul.

She looked about her. Where should she put the draft? He had left a marker in the book; he would open it again, no doubt. She laid the draft between the printed leaves, beyond the marker. Then, replacing the volume on the shelf, she ran from the door and hastened back up the steep trail to the k.n.o.b.

Leaning back against the warm rock, lapped in the serene peacefulness of the spot, Jessica fell into reverie. Never since her wedding-day had she said to herself boldly: "I love him!"--never till yesterday. Now all was changed. Her thought was a tremulous a.s.surance: "I shall stay here near him day after day, watching. Some day his memory will come back, and then my love will comfort him. The town will forget it has hated, and will come to honor him. Sometime, seeing how he is changed, his father will forgive him and take him back, and we shall all three go home to the white house in the aspens. If not, then my place will still be with Hugh! Perhaps we shall live here. Perhaps a cabin like that will be home, and I shall live with him, and work with him, and care for him."

Thus she dreamed--a new day-dream, unravaged by the sordid tests of verity.

So absorbed was she that she did not hear a step approaching over the springy moss--a sharply drawn breath, as the intruder stifled an exclamation. She had drawn her handkerchief across her eyes against the dancing glimmer of sunlight. Suddenly it dropped to her lap, and she half turned.

In the instant of surprise, as Harry's look flashed into hers, a name sprang unbidden to her lips--a name that struck his strained face to sudden whiteness, ringing in his ears like the note of a sunken bell.

All that was clamoring in him for speech rushed into words.

"You call my name!" he cried. "You know me! Have I ever been 'Hugh' to you? Is that what your look said to me? Is that why your face has haunted me? Tell me, I pray you!"

She had struggled to her feet, her hands pressed to her bosom. The surprise had swung her from her moorings. Her heart had been so full in her self-communings that now, between the impulse toward revealment and the warning of caution, she stood confused.

"I had never seen you in the town before that day," she said. "I am stopping there"--she pointed to the ridge above, where the roof of the sanatorium glistened in the sunlight. "I was at the hotel by merest accident when--you played."

The light died in his eyes. He turned abruptly and stared across the foliaged s.p.a.ce. There was a moment's pause.

"Forgive me!" he said at length, in a voice curiously dull. "You must think me a madman to be talking to you like this. To be sure, every one knows me. It is not strange that you should have spoken my name. It was a sudden impulse to which I yielded. I had imagined ... I had dreamed ... but no matter. Only, your face--that white band across your eyes--your voice--they came to me like something far away that I have known. I was mistaken. I was crazy to think that you--"

He stopped. A wave of sympathy pa.s.sed over her. She felt a mad wish to throw all aside, to cry to him: "You _did_ know me! You loved me once! I am Jessica--I am your wife!" So intense was her emotion that it seemed to her as if she had spoken his name again audibly, but her lips had not moved, and the tap of a woodp.e.c.k.e.r on a near-by trunk sounded with harsh distinctness.

"I have wanted to speak to you," she said, after an instant in which she struggled for self-control. "You did a brave thing yesterday--a splendid thing. It saved me from sorrow all my life!"

He put aside her thanks with a gesture. "You saved me also. You found me ill and suffering and your horse carried me to my cabin."

"I want to tell you," she went on hastily, her fingers lacing, "that I do not judge you as others do. I know about your past life--what you have forgotten. I know you have put it all behind you."

His face changed swiftly. To-day the determination with which he had striven to put from his mind the problem of his clouded past had broken down. In the light of the charge which had been flung in his teeth the afternoon before, his imagination had dwelt intolerably on it. "Better to have ended it all under the wheels of the freight-engine," he had told himself. "What profit to have another character, if the old lies chuckling in the shadow, an old-man-of-the-sea, a lurking thing, like a personal devil, to pull me down!" In these gloomy reflections her features had recurred with a painful persistence. He had had a bad half-hour on the mountain, and now, before her look and tone, the ever-torturing query burst its bonds.

"You know!" he said hoa.r.s.ely. "Yet you say that? They stoned me in the street the day I came back. Yesterday they counted me a thief. It is like a hideous nightmare that I can't wake from. Who am I? Where did I come from? I dare not ask, for fear of further shame! Can you imagine what that means?"

He broke off, leaning an unsteady hand against a tree. "I've no excuse for this raving!" he said, in a moment, his face turned away. "I have seen you but twice. I do not even know your name. I am a man s.n.a.t.c.hed out of the limbo and dropped into h.e.l.l, to watch the bright spirits pa.s.sing on the other side of the gulf!"

Pain lay very deep in the words, and it pierced her like a bodily pang, so close did she seem to him in spirit. She felt in it unrest, rebellion, the shrinking sensibility that had writhed in loneliness, and the longing for new foothold on the submerged causeway of life.

She came close to him and touched his arm.

"I know all that you suffer," she said. "You are doing the strong thing, the brave thing! The man in you is not astray now; it was lost, but it has found its way back. When your memory comes, you will see that it is fate that has been leading you. There was nothing in your past that can not be buried and forgotten. What you have been you will never be again.

I know that! I saw you fight Devlin and I know why you did it. I heard you play the violin! Whatever has been, I have faith in you now!"

She spoke breathlessly, in very abandon, carried away by her feeling. As she spoke he had turned toward her, his paleness flushed, his eyes leaping up like hungry fires, devouring her face. At the look timidity rushed upon her. She stopped abruptly and took a startled step from him.

He turned from her instantly, his hands dropped at his sides. The word that had almost sprung to speech had slipped back into the void.

"I thank you for the charity you have for me," he said, "which I in no way deserve. I ... I shall always remember it."

She hesitated an instant, made as if to speak. Then, turning, she went quickly from him. At the edge of the bushes she stopped with a sudden impulse. She looked at the handkerchief she held in her hand. Some tiny lettering was embroidered in its corner, the word _Jessica_. She looked back--he had not moved. Rolling it into a ball, she threw it back, over the bushes, then ran on hastily through the trees.

After a time Harry turned slowly, his shoulders lifting in a deep respiration. He drew his hand across his brow as though to dispel a vision. This was the first time he had hit upon the place. He saw the flat ledge, with the bushes twisted before it for a screen. She had known the place before, then! The white and filmy cambric caught his eye, lying at the base of the great, k.n.o.b-like rock. He went to it, picked it up, and looked at it closely.

"Jessica!" he whispered. The name clung about him; the very leaves repeated it in music. He had a curious sensation as if, while she spoke, that very name had half framed itself in some curtained recess of his thought. He pressed the handkerchief to his face. The faint perfume it exhaled, like the dust of dead roses, gave him a ghostly impression of the familiar.

He thought of what she had said; she had not known him! And yet that look, the strange dreaming sense of her presence, his name on her lips in the moment of bewilderment!

He struck his forehead sharply with his open hand.

"Fool!" he said, with a bitter laugh. "Fool!"

CHAPTER XXV

THE OPEN WINDOW