"I'm in better luck," went on the man in shirt-sleeves. "I struck this about two months ago, as gardener first, and now I'm a kind of a sort of a watchman. They gave me a bunk in the summer-house there"--he jerked his thumb backward over his shoulder--"but I know a game worth two of that for these cold nights. I'll show you. I can put you up for the night," he added, "if you like."

The wayfarer shook his head. "I must get away to-night, but I'm much obliged."

"Haven't done anything, have you?" asked his one-time companion curiously. "You didn't seem that sort."

The bearded face turned away. "I'm not 'wanted' by the police, no. But I'm on the move, and the sooner I take the trail the better. I don't mind night travel."

"You'd be better for a rest," said the watchman, "but you're the doctor.

Come in and we'll have a nip of something warm, anyhow."

He led the way to the open door and beckoned the other inside, closing it carefully to. "It's a bully old hole," he observed, as he lit a brace of candles. "It wasn't any trick to file a key, and I sleep in the library now as snug as a bug in a rug." He held the light higher. "You look a sight better," he said. "More flesh on your bones, and the beard changes you some, too. That scar healed up fine on your forehead--it's nothing but a red line now."

His guest followed him into a s.p.a.cious hall, scarce conscious of what he did. A double door to the left was shut, but he nevertheless knew perfectly that the room it hid had a tall French window, letting on to a garden where camelias had once dropped like blood. The open door to the right led to the library.

There the yellow light touched the dark wainscoting, the marble mantelpiece, dim paintings on the wall, and a great bra.s.s-bound Korean desk in a corner. What black thing had once happened in that room? What face had once looked at him from that wheel-chair? It was an old face, gray and lined and pa.s.sionate--his father, doubtless. He told himself this calmly, with an odd sense of apartness.

The other's glance followed his pridefully. "It's a fine property," he said. "The owner's an invalid, I hear, with one leg in the grave. He's in some sanatorium and can't get much good of it. Nice pictures, them,"

he added, sweeping a candle round. "That's a good-looker over there--must be the old man's daughter, I reckon. Well, I'll go and get you a finger or two to keep the frost out of your lungs. It'll be cold as Billy-be-dam to-night. Make yourself at home." The door closed behind him.

The man he left was trembling violently. He had scarcely repressed a cry. The portrait that hung above the mantelpiece was Jessica's, in a house-dress of soft Romney-blue and a single white rose caught in her hair. "The old man's daughter!"--the words seemed to echo and reecho about the walls, voicing a new agony without a name. Then Jessica was his sister!

The owner of the house, his father, an invalid in a sanatorium? It was a sanatorium on the ridge of Smoky Mountain where she had stayed, into which he had broken that stormy night! Had his father been there then, yearning in pain and illness over that evil career of his in the town beneath? Was relationship the secret of Jessica's interest, her magnanimity, that he had dreamed was something more? A dizzy sickness fell upon him, and he clenched his hands till the nails struck purple crescents into the palms.

As he stared dry-eyed at the picture in the candle-light, the misery slowly pa.s.sed. He must _know_. Who she was, what she was to him, he must learn beyond peradventure. He cast a swift glance around him; orderly rows of books stared from the shelves, the mahogany table held only a pile of old magazines. He strode to the desk, drew down its lid and tried the drawers. They opened readily and he rapidly turned over their litter of papers, written in the same crabbed hand that had etched the one d.a.m.ning word on the draft he had found in the cabin on Smoky Mountain.

This antique desk, with its crude symbols and quaint bra.s.s-work, a gift to him once upon a time from Harry Sanderson, had been David Stires'

carry-all; he had been spending a last half-hour in sorting its contents when the bank-messenger, on that fateful day, had brought him the slip of paper that had told his son's disgrace. Most of the papers the searcher saw at a glance were of no import, and they gave him no clue to what he sought. Then, mysteriously guided by the subtle memory that seemed of late to haunt him, though he was but half conscious of its guidance, his nervous fingers suddenly found and pressed a spring--a panel fell down, and he drew out a folded parchment.

Another instant and he was bending over it with the candle, his fingers tracing familiar legal phrases of a will laid there long ago. He read with the blood shrinking from his heart:

"_To my son Hugh, in return for the care and sorrow he has caused me all the days of his life, for his dissolute career and his graceless desertion, I do give and bequeath the sum of one thousand dollars and the memory of his misspent youth. The residue of my estate, real and personal, I do give and bequeath to my ward, Jessica Holme_--"

The blood swept back to his heart in a flood. Ward, not daughter! He could still keep the one sweet thing left him. His love was justified.

Tears sprang to his eyes, and he laid the parchment back and closed the desk. He hastily brushed the drops away, as the rough figure of the watchman entered and set down two gla.s.ses and a bottle with a flourish.

"There you are; that'll be worth five miles to you!" He poured noisily.

"Here's how!" he said.

His guest drank, set down the gla.s.s and held out his hand. "Good luck,"

he said. "You've got a good, warm berth here; maybe I shall find one, too, one of these days."

The dog thrust a cold muzzle into his hand as he walked down the gravel path slowly, feeling the glow of the liquor gratefully, with the grudging release it brought from mental tension. He had not consciously asked himself whither now. In some subconscious corner of his brain this had been asked and answered. He was going to his father. Not to seek to change the stern decree; not to annul those bitter phrases: _his dissolute career--the memory of his misspent youth!_ Only to ask his forgiveness and to make what reparation was possible, then to go out once more to the world to fight out his battle. His way was clear before him now. Fate had guided him, strangely and certainly, to knowledge. He was thankful for that. He had come a silent shadow; like a shadow he would go.

He retraced his steps, and again stood on the square near where the rose-window of the Gothic chapel cast a tinted l.u.s.ter on the cl.u.s.tering shrubbery. The audience-room was full now, a string of carriages waited at the curb, and as he stood on the opposite pavement the treble of the choir rose full and clear:

"Lead, kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on; The night is dark, and I am far from home, Lead Thou me on!

Keep Thou my feet! I do not care to see The distant scene; one step enough for me."

He drew his hat-brim over his eyes, and mingled with the hurrying street.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE CALL OF LOVE

The bell was tapping in the steeple of the little Catholic church on the edge of the town, and the mellow tone came clearly up the slope of the mountain where once more the one-time partner of Prendergast stood on the threshold of the lonely cabin, sentinel over the mounds of yellow gravel that marked his toil.

The returned wanderer had met with a distinct surprise in the town. As he pa.s.sed through the streets more than one had nodded, or had spoken his name, and the recognition had sent a glow to his cheek and a lightness to his step.

Since the daring feat in the automobile, the tone of the gossip had changed. His name was no longer connected with the sluice robberies. The lucky find, too, const.i.tuted a material boom for Smoky Mountain and bettered the stock in its hydraulic enterprises, and this had been written on the credit side of the ledger. Opinion, so all-powerful in a new community, had altered. Devlin had abruptly ordered from his place one who had done no more than to repeat his own earlier gibes, and even Michael Halloran, the proprietor of the Mountain Valley House, had given countenance to the more charitable view championed by Tom Felder. All this he who had been the outcast could not guess, but he felt the change with satisfaction.

As he gazed up the slope, all gloriously afire with the marvellous frost-hues of the autumn--dahlia crimsons, daffodil golds and maple tints like the flames of long-sought desires--toward the gla.s.s roof that sparkled on the ridge above, one comfort warmed his breast. If it had been the subtle stirring of blood kinship, the blind instinct of love, that had drawn him to that nocturnal house-breaking, not the lawless appetence of the natural criminal! Whether his father was indeed there he must discover.

Till the sun was low he sat in the cabin thinking. At length he called the dog and fastened it in its accustomed place, and began slowly to climb the steep ascent. When he came to a certain vine-grown trail that met the main path, he turned aside. Here lay the spot where he had first spoken with her, face to face. Here she had told him there was nothing in his past which could not be buried and forgotten!

As he parted the bushes and stepped into the narrow s.p.a.ce beside the jutting ledge, he stopped short with an exclamation. The place was no longer a tangle of vines. A grave had been lately made there, and behind it, fresh-chiseled in the rock, was a statue: a figure seated, chin on hand, as if regarding the near-by mound. As in a dream he realized that its features were his own. Awestruck, the living man drew near.

It was Jessica's conception of the Prodigal Son, as she had modelled it in Aniston in her blindness, after Hugh's early return to the house in the aspens. That David Stires should have pointed out the distant k.n.o.b as a spot in which he would choose to be buried had had a peculiar significance to her, and the wish had been observed. Her sorrow for his death had been deepened by the thought that the end had come too suddenly for David Stires to have reinstated his son. This sorrow had possessed one comfort--that he had known at the last and had forgiven Hugh. Of this she could a.s.sure him when he returned, for she could not really believe--so deep is the heart of a woman--that he would not return. In the days of vigil she had found relief in the rough, hard work of the mallet. None had intruded in that out-of-the-way spot, save that one day Mrs. Halloran, led by curiosity to see the grave of the rich man whose whim it had been to be buried on the mountain side, had found her at her work, and her Jessica had pledged to silence. She was no fool, was Mrs. Halloran, and to learn the name of the dead man was to put two and two together. The guess the good woman evolved undershot the mark, but it was more than sufficient to summon all the romance that lurked beneath that prosaic exterior; nevertheless she shut her lips against temptation, and all her motherly heart overflowed to the girl who worked each day at that self-appointed task. Only the afternoon before Jessica had finished carving the words on the base of the statue on which the look of the startled man was now resting: _I will arise and go unto my father_.

The gazer turned from the words, with quick question, to the mound. He came close, and in the fading light looked at the name on the low headstone. So he had come too late!

_And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son._ Though for him there could have been no robe or ring, or fatted calf or merriment, yet he had longed for the dearer boon of confession and understanding. If he could only have learned the truth earlier! If he might only put back the hands of the clock!

Hours went by. The shadows dreamed themselves away and dark fell, cloudless and starry. The half-moon brightened upon him sitting moveless beside the stone figure. At length he rose to his feet, his limbs cramped and stiffened, and made his way back to the lonely cabin on the hillside.

There he found fuel, kindled a blaze in the fireplace and cooked his frugal supper. The shock of surprise past, he realized his sorrow as a thing subjective and cerebral. The dead man had been his father; so he told himself, but with an emotion curiously dest.i.tute of primitive feeling. The very relationship was a portion of that past that he could never grasp; all that was of the present was Jessica!

He thought of the losing battle he had fought there once before, when tempest shrieked without--the battle which had ended in _debacle_ and defeat. He thought of the will he had seen, now sealed with the Great Seal of Death. He was the shorn beggar, she the beneficiary. What duty she had owed his father was ended now. Desolate she might be--in need of a hand to guide and guard--but she was beyond the reach of penury. This gave him a sense of satisfaction. Was she there on the mountain at that moment? There came upon him again the pa.s.sionate longing that had held him in that misty sanatorium room when the odor of the jasmin had wreathed them both--when she had protected and saved him!

At last he took Old Despair's battered violin from the wall, and, seating himself in the open doorway, looking across the mysterious purple of the gulches to the skyline sown with pale stars, drew the bow softly across the strings. In the long-past days, when he had been the Reverend Henry Sanderson, in the darker moods of his study, he had been used to seek the relief to which he now turned. Never but once since then had he played with utter oblivion of self. Now his struggle and longing crept into the music. The ghosts that haunted him cl.u.s.tered together in the obscurity of the night, and stood between his opening future and her.

Through manifold variations the music wandered, till at length there came from the hollowed wood an air that was an unconscious echo of a forgotten wedding-day--"O perfect love, all human thought transcending."

After the fitful medley that had spoken, the placid cadence fell with a searching pathos that throbbed painfully on the empty silence of the mountain.

Empty indeed he thought it. But the light breeze that shook the pine-needles had borne the sound far to an ear that had grown tense with listening--to one on the ridge above to whom it had sounded the supreme call of youth and life. He did not feel her nearer presence as she stole breathless across the dark path, and stood there behind him with outstretched hands, her whole being merged in that mute appeal.

The music died, the violin slipped from beneath his chin, the bow dropped and his head fell on his arms. Then he felt a touch on his shoulder and heard the whisper: "Hugh! Hugh!"

"Jessica!" he cried, and sprang to his feet.

In those three words all was asked and answered. It did not need the low cry with which she flung herself on her knees beside the rough-hewn steps, or the broken sentences with which he poured out the fear and hope that he had battled with.

"I have watched every day and listened every night," she said. "I knew that you would come--that you _must_ come back!"