"Pete," she asked tremulously, and he felt her drawing even closer to his side, "Pete, don't you want--you _do_ want--I know--I mean, will you, would you--marry me?"

He was dumb as a rock, and gray. His hand opened; he stared from her to the impossible intruder, the worker of the miracle, or rather for he felt like a beast trapped, the strange layer of the snare. For an instant the lake and the forest and the red sky turned in a great wheel before his eyes. Then he caught Sylvie's wrist almost brutally in his hand. "Be quiet!" he said; it was the savage speaking to his woman.

"You've gone mad. Come with me. As for you, sir, my marrying or not marrying is none of your business--"

The minister looked sadly up into the young man's white and rigid face.

"G.o.d be with you!"

He bowed, turned and walked back along the beach, hands locked behind his broad tweed back, his head bent.

Pete tightened his grip on Sylvie's arm. "Come," he said to her as harshly as before. "We must hurry. It's nearly night."

Sylvie set her small teeth tight, bent down her head, and followed him without a word. Their silence seemed to grow into a pressure, a weight.

It bent Pete's shoulders and Sylvie's slender neck, and whitened their lips. All that they did not dare to say aloud bulked itself, huge and thunderous, before the combined consciousness which makes a strange third companion in such dual silences. They dared not pause, or look at each other, or move their strained lips for fear truth, the desperate, treacherous truth, would leap out and link them like a lightning-flash.

The somber forest enveloped them. They moved through it as through a deep wall that opened by enchantment. The moon came up, gibbous and white and glittering, paler than silver; and the forest became streaked and mottled with its light. A soft, sudden wind tore the light and shade into eerie, dancing ribbons and tatters and shreds. There were such sounds as are not heard in daylight--moon sounds and cloud sounds and sounds of dark wind; branches talked and other small voices answered in anxious undertones. A moose rubbed his antlers and coughed. They heard his big body hulking through a swamp down there in a well of darkness.

"I can't go so fast." Sylvie's shaken voice moved doubtfully. "I'm tired."

She pulled at his arm and stopped. The whole forest seemed to sway and stir and urge them to haste and secrecy.

"A storm's coming," Pete answered. "I can't carry you, Sylvie, unless I leave my load."

"Do you think I'd let you carry me?" she answered through her set teeth.

"I'd rather die here than let you lift me up in your arms. I'll go on till I drop. I don't care for the storm. But I can't walk so fast. How can you see? The moon isn't--can't be, I mean--very, very bright here in the woods."

"The moon? There's a big storm-cloud just going to wipe it out. Listen!

Don't you hear that thunder, that wind?"

The storm blew its distant trumpets, shouted louder, trampled the world with great steps, crashed and came upon them with a wet, cold blast.

They were stunned with noise, dazzled with flashes, smothered and beaten with long, wet whips. Under a big rocking pine which shouted with a hundred confused tongues they found a dangerous shelter. Not far from them a tree was struck, splitting their ears, half stunning them. When the worst was over, Pete drew Sylvie out relentlessly and started in the heavily falling rain. The storm was drawing away, but the night was still impenetrably black. They walked for a few groping yards when Pete gave a sudden desperate laugh and stopped.

"What's the good of this! We're off the trail. We'll have to wait for the light. My G.o.d! How cold and wet and trembling you are." He threw down his pack, took off his coat, wet only on the outside, and wrapped it closely about her. She felt that he parted branches for her, and she knew that they were in a dry, still, scented place whose walls stirred and breathed. She sank down beside him on the smooth pine-needles and crept close. They were giddy, beaten and confused; they felt each other's trembling warmth; for greater comfort she tucked her hands under his arm. Her head dropped back against his shoulder so that her breath fell on his cheek. He felt the silent tears of her humiliation, hot and bitter and human after the cold, impersonal wetness of rain. It was as though a hand drew them together in the darkness; they moved numbly at the same instant, by the same impulse; then with a sort of convulsion they were in each other's arms. Cold, wet, tremulous, their lips met.

The night became the beating of a heart.

CHAPTER XIV

Hugh sat in his great carved chair, his hands laid out across the bulky arms, his head bent forward a little so that his eyes encompa.s.sed all the restless beauty of the fire. After nightfall, when the wind began to shake the cabin, he had built up the fire, and its light now fought ruddily against the whiteness of the moon. Hugh had not lighted his lamp, nor let Bella light it, but he told her to make some strong coffee and keep it hot on the stove. "When Sylvie comes in," he had said, "she'll be exhausted. We'll give her a hot drink and send her to bed, eh, Bella! The foolish child!" This had been said softly, but with a wild, half-vacant look which Bella could not meet.

It was her belief that Pete and Sylvie had gone, not to return that night or any other night. In a desperate, still fashion she guarded this flaming conviction, peering up from long contemplations of it to learn whether there flickered any light of torment on Hugh's face. But all day, after the queer blankness of face and eyes with which he had first received her news of Sylvie's disappearance, he had been alternately gay and tranquil. All morning he had mended his boat, and in the afternoon he had cleaned his gun; and whenever he could cajole Bella into being his audience, he had talked. His talk was all of Sylvie, of her pretty childishness, her sweet, wayward ways, of her shyness, her timidity; and later, when supper was cleared away and he had throned himself in the center of that familiar circle of firelight, he had dropped his beautiful voice to a lower key and had boasted of Sylvie's love for him.

Bella sat on a big log sawed to the height of a low stool. She sat with her face bent down between her hands as though she were saving her eyes from the fire, but those bright, devoted eyes never left Hugh's face, though sometimes they made of it but a blurred image set in the broken crystals of her tears.

Thus, together, they heard the first rumble of the storm and saw the white squares of moonlight wiped from the floor as with a dark cloth.

Next, the windows seemed to jump at them and jump away. "Lightning!"

said Hugh. "She'll be afraid! Will Pete be able to comfort her? Will he, Bella?" Then, because she took courage to look into his face, she saw that his heart had been burnt all day, but that his faith, stronger than his fear, had kept the flame smothered, almost below his consciousness.

While the storm raged across their roof, beat a brutal tattoo close above their deafened heads, pushed at the door, drove a pool of water under the threshold, Hugh walked up and down, to and fro, from fire to window, from door to wall, but not fast, rather with a sort of stateliness. Sometimes he looked sidelong at Bella's expressionless, listening face. At last he forced himself back to the chair and sat there, mechanically polishing the barrel of his gun, but his tongue still spoke the saga of illusion. It stopped when the storm dropped into the bottomless silence of dawn. Then there was only the dripping from their eaves. Hugh sat there, very white, his gun laid across his lap.

Bella, as white, lifted her face.

"They're coming," she whispered, and got stiffly to her feet.

Hugh moved back into his chair, turning sidewise and gathering himself as though for a spring. His nervous hands clutched at his gun. Upon the silence the door opened, and Pete and Sylvie came into the room. Wet and storm-beaten and beautiful they were, with scarlet cheeks.

Pete came quickly over to Hugh's chair; he let fall his pack and gazed resolutely down at his brother's face.

"Sylvie had a fancy to come with me to the trading-station," he said.

"She came out after me and didn't overtake me until just where the trail comes out into the road. We hurried back, but the storm caught us. It was pitch-black in the woods; we couldn't keep the trail. We had to wait for daylight. I hope you weren't too anxious about her, Hugh.--Bella"--he glanced over his shoulder--"could you make us some hot coffee and help Sylvie into some dry clothes? We are properly drenched, both of us."

This speaker of terse, authoritative sentences was not the boy that had gone out that morning. That boy was gone forever.

Hugh stood up and looked slowly from Sylvie, who had stayed near the door and held her head up like a queen, to Pete.

"Where were you," he asked gently--"where were you while it stormed?"

Pete moved toward the fire, holding out his hands. "Ugh!" he shivered, "I'm numb with cold."

"Where were you," Hugh repeated, "during the storm?"

Pete lifted his eyes slowly. They were bluer than the blue heart of a sapphire. "Under a pine-tree," he answered casually enough, and then, just as Hugh would have smiled, the color creeping up into his lips, Pete's young and honest blood poured over his forehead, engulfing him, blazing the truth across his face. Bella saw it and clenched her hands.

Sylvie's cheeks, too, caught fire. Hugh turned from him, blinded by terror, saw Sylvie's trembling mouth in her dyed countenance, and turned back. He lifted the hand that had held, all this while, to the chair, and balled it into a fist.

"Don't strike him," said Sylvie quietly, not moving from her place by the door. "Don't ever strike him again--_Ham Rutherford_!"

Hugh's bones seemed to crumble; his knees bent; he leaned back against the chair, holding to it behind him with both hands. The gun clattered to the floor. In the silence Sylvie walked across the room and lifted her face. As if for the first time they saw her eyes, black and brilliant and young, sharpening the softness of her features. She looked at Hugh mercilessly, pitilessly.

"I've been able to see you for a long time now, Ham Rutherford," she said. "And the instant I first saw you, I knew your name. Ever since the night you told me that story about the river, I've been watching you.

You are a great and infamous liar! Yes, I know that you once killed a man for telling you that. Kill me if you like, for I am going to repeat it after him--a liar, hideous and deformed outside and in. I have no pity for a liar. Not even your physical misfortune shall shield you!

You have made too great a mockery of it. You brought me here, blind, as helpless as one of the things you catch in your traps, and you played the hero with me. And you fed me with lies and lies and lies. I've eaten and drunk them until I'm sick. Now stand up and look at the truth. You are to eat that until _you_ are sick.--No, Bella; no, Pete; I'm going to speak; no one can stop me. I know you love him. How you can look at him and see him as he is and know what he has done and still love him, I can't understand. Now, Hugh Garth--the name you tried to make me love you by--I'll tell these people that love you, some of the beautiful fables with which you tried to win _my_ love. Maybe, then, they will begin to see you as you are. Here is the first: 'There was once a very n.o.ble youth who had a friend--'"

"Don't!" Hugh groaned pitifully, his head bent before her.

"Perhaps I won't; after all, it's not interesting unless you're fool enough, or blind enough, to be tricked into fancying it's the truth. But let me tell them some of the other things. This n.o.ble youth, this man sacrificed his life for his friend and bore the blame of that friend's guilt. He is as handsome as a Viking, the very ideal of a girl's imagination, strong and shapely and graceful. Has he a humped shoulder and a lame leg and a scarred face revealing his scarred soul? Answer me."

Hugh flinched as though under a lash.

Pete put out his hand uncertainly; his face was drawn with pain.

"Sylvie--stop. You _must_ stop. You're too cruel. He did lie to you, but remember, that was because he--"

The brilliant black eyes flashed back at him.

"Because he loved me, you were going to say? When you love a woman, do you try to ruin her life? Do you creep up in the dark under cover of her blindness and touch her with some dreadful, poisonous wound? You don't know my horror of that man, Pete. Oh, he kissed--kissed me!" She shivered. "A murderer! Yes, a murderer. Oh, Ham Rutherford, if I could only _make_ you see yourself! If I could give you my eyes when they opened, and I saw Pete's beauty and Bella's sweetness and the horrible ugliness of you! And then, day by day--you see, I was afraid to let you know that I _had_ seen you. I was in terror of you, of what you might do to me. I was afraid of you all; you had all deceived me. Day by day I learned the utter distortion of you, mind, body, and soul. How could I help but--but--" She faltered and half turned to Pete, holding out her hands. Her indignation at the treachery practiced upon her, an anger that had grown in silence to unbearable heat, had spent itself in words.

She was all for consolation now--for sympathy. But Pete stepped back from her. He was looking at Hugh, and his clear, young face was an open wound.

Hugh pushed himself up and slowly lifted his face. It was then that he saw Sylvie's hands stretched out to Pete. He started--no one knew what the convulsive movement meant; but as he started--the gun tripped him.

He caught it up carelessly, blindly. There was a flash--a crash. Pete leaped and bent, holding his arm. Blood spurted between his fingers, soaking his wet sleeve; and Sylvie, crying aloud, wrapped him in trembling, protective arms.