At four o'clock she started for the hills. In half an hour she was dropping down a winding ravine along a rock-lashing stream with those hills so close to the car on either side that only now and then could she see the tops of them. Through the window the keen air came from the very lungs of them, freighted with the coolness of shadows, the scent of damp earth and the faint fragrance of wild flowers, and her soul leaped to meet them. The mountain sides were showered with pink and white laurel (she used to call it "ivy") and the rhododendrons (she used to call them "laurel") were just beginning to blossom--they were her old and fast friends--mountain, shadow, the wet earth and its pure breath, and tree, plant and flower; she had not forgotten them, and it was good to come back to them. Once she saw an overshot water-wheel on the bank of the rushing little stream and she thought of Uncle Billy; she smiled and the smile stopped short--she was going back to other things as well.

The train had creaked by a log-cabin set in the hillside and then past another and another; and always there were two or three ragged children in the door and a haggard unkempt woman peering over their shoulders.

How lonely those cabins looked and how desolate the life they suggested to her now--NOW! The first station she came to after the train had wound down the long ravine to the valley level again was crowded with mountaineers. There a wedding party got aboard with a great deal of laughter, chaffing and noise, and all three went on within and without the train while it was waiting. A sudden thought stunned her like a lightning stroke. They were HER people out there on the platform and inside the car ahead--those rough men in slouch hats, jeans and cowhide boots, their mouths stained with tobacco juice, their cheeks and eyes on fire with moonshine, and those women in poke-bonnets with their sad, worn, patient faces on which the sympathetic good cheer and joy of the moment sat so strangely. She noticed their rough shoes and their homespun gowns that made their figures all alike and shapeless, with a vivid awakening of early memories. She might have been one of those narrow-lived girls outside, or that bride within had it not been for Jack--Hale. She finished the name in her own mind and she was conscious that she had. Ah, well, that was a long time ago and she was nothing but a child and she had thrown herself at his head. Perhaps it was different with him now and if it was, she would give him the chance to withdraw from everything. It would be right and fair and then life was so full for her now. She was dependent on n.o.body--on nothing. A rainbow spanned the heaven above her and the other end of it was not in the hills. But one end was and to that end she was on her way. She was going to just such people as she had seen at the station. Her father and her kinsmen were just such men--her step-mother and kinswomen were just such women.

Her home was little more than just such a cabin as the desolate ones that stirred her pity when she swept by them. She thought of how she felt when she had first gone to Lonesome Cove after a few months at the Gap, and she shuddered to think how she would feel now. She was getting restless by this time and aimlessly she got up and walked to the front of the car and back again to her seat, hardly noticing that the other occupants were staring at her with some wonder. She sat down for a few minutes and then she went to the rear and stood outside on the platform, clutching a bra.s.s rod of the railing and looking back on the dropping darkness in which the hills seemed to be rushing together far behind as the train crashed on with its wake of spark-lit rolling smoke. A cinder stung her face, and when she lifted her hand to the spot, she saw that her glove was black with grime. With a little shiver of disgust she went back to her seat and with her face to the blackness rushing past her window she sat brooding--brooding. Why had Hale not met her? He had said he would and she had written him when she was coming and had telegraphed him at the station in New York when she started. Perhaps he HAD changed.

She recalled that even his letters had grown less frequent, shorter, more hurried the past year--well, he should have his chance. Always, however, her mind kept going back to the people at the station and to her people in the mountains. They were the same, she kept repeating to herself--the very same and she was one of them. And always she kept thinking of her first trip to Lonesome Cove after her awakening and of what her next would be. That first time Hale had made her go back as she had left, in home-spun, sun-bonnet and brogans. There was the same reason why she should go back that way now as then--would Hale insist that she should now? She almost laughed aloud at the thought. She knew that she would refuse and she knew that his reason would not appeal to her now--she no longer cared what her neighbours and kinspeople might think and say. The porter paused at her seat.

"How much longer is it?" she asked.

"Half an hour, Miss."

June went to wash her face and hands, and when she came back to her seat a great glare shone through the windows on the other side of the car. It was the furnace, a "run" was on and she could see the streams of white molten metal racing down the narrow channels of sand to their narrow beds on either side. The whistle shrieked ahead for the Gap and she nerved herself with a prophetic sense of vague trouble at hand.

At the station Hale had paced the platform. He looked at his watch to see whether he might have time to run up to the furnace, half a mile away, and board the train there. He thought he had and he was about to start when the shriek of the coming engine rose beyond the low hills in Wild Cat Valley, echoed along Powell's Mountain and broke against the wrinkled breast of the c.u.mberland. On it came, and in plain sight it stopped suddenly to take water, and Hale cursed it silently and recalled viciously that when he was in a hurry to arrive anywhere, the water-tower was always on the wrong side of the station. He got so restless that he started for it on a run and he had gone hardly fifty yards before the train came on again and he had to run back to beat it to the station--where he sprang to the steps of the Pullman before it stopped--pushing the porter aside to find himself checked by the crowded pa.s.sengers at the door. June was not among them and straightway he ran for the rear of the car.

June had risen. The other occupants of the car had crowded forward and she was the last of them. She had stood, during an irritating wait, at the water-tower, and now as she moved slowly forward again she heard the hurry of feet behind her and she turned to look into the eager, wondering eyes of John Hale.

"June!" he cried in amazement, but his face lighted with joy and he impulsively stretched out his arms as though he meant to take her in them, but as suddenly he dropped them before the startled look in her eyes, which, with one swift glance, searched him from head to foot. They shook hands almost gravely.

XXII

June sat in the little dummy, the focus of curious eyes, while Hale was busy seeing that her baggage was got aboard. The checks that she gave him jingled in his hands like a bunch of keys, and he could hardly help grinning when he saw the huge trunks and the smart bags that were tumbled from the baggage car--all marked with her initials. There had been days when he had laid considerable emphasis on pieces like those, and when he thought of them overwhelming with opulent suggestions that debt-stricken little town, and, later, piled incongruously on the porch of the cabin on Lonesome Cove, he could have laughed aloud but for a nameless something that was gnawing savagely at his heart.

He felt almost shy when he went back into the car, and though June greeted him with a smile, her immaculate daintiness made him unconsciously sit quite far away from her. The little fairy-cross was still at her throat, but a tiny diamond gleamed from each end of it and from the centre, as from a tiny heart, pulsated the light of a little blood-red ruby. To him it meant the loss of June's simplicity and was the symbol of her new estate, but he smiled and forced himself into hearty cheerfulness of manner and asked her questions about her trip.

But June answered in halting monosyllables, and talk was not easy between them. All the while he was watching her closely and not a movement of her eye, ear, mouth or hand--not an inflection of her voice--escaped him. He saw her sweep the car and its occupants with a glance, and he saw the results of that glance in her face and the down-dropping of her eyes to the dainty point of one boot. He saw her beautiful mouth close suddenly tight and her thin nostrils quiver disdainfully when a swirl of black smoke, heavy with cinders, came in with an entering pa.s.senger through the front door of the car. Two half-drunken men were laughing boisterously near that door and even her ears seemed trying to shut out their half-smothered rough talk. The car started with a b.u.mp that swayed her toward him, and when she caught the seat with one hand, it checked as suddenly, throwing her the other way, and then with a leap it sprang ahead again, giving a nagging snap to her head. Her whole face grew red with vexation and shrinking distaste, and all the while, when the little train steadied into its creaking, puffing, jostling way, one gloved hand on the chased silver handle of her smart little umbrella kept nervously swaying it to and fro on its steel-shod point, until she saw that the point was in a tiny pool of tobacco juice, and then she laid it across her lap with shuddering swiftness.

At first Hale thought that she had shrunk from kissing him in the car because other people were around. He knew better now. At that moment he was as rough and dirty as the chain-carrier opposite him, who was just in from a surveying expedition in the mountains, as the sooty brakeman who came through to gather up the fares--as one of those good-natured, profane inebriates up in the corner. No, it was not publicity--she had shrunk from him as she was shrinking now from black smoke, rough men, the shaking of the train--the little pool of tobacco juice at her feet.

The truth began to glimmer through his brain. He understood, even when she leaned forward suddenly to look into the mouth of the gap, that was now dark with shadows. Through that gap lay her way and she thought him now more a part of what was beyond than she who had been born of it was, and dazed by the thought, he wondered if he might not really be. At once he straightened in his seat, and his mind made up, as he always made it up--swiftly. He had not explained why he had not met her that morning, nor had he apologized for his rough garb, because he was so glad to see her and because there were so many other things he wanted to say; and when he saw her, conscious and resentful, perhaps, that he had not done these things at once--he deliberately declined to do them now. He became silent, but he grew more courteous, more thoughtful--watchful. She was very tired, poor child; there were deep shadows under her eyes which looked weary and almost mournful. So, when with a clanging of the engine bell they stopped at the brilliantly lit hotel, he led her at once upstairs to the parlour, and from there sent her up to her room, which was ready for her.

"You must get a good sleep," he said kindly, and with his usual firmness that was wont to preclude argument. "You are worn to death. I'll have your supper sent to your room." The girl felt the subtle change in his manner and her lip quivered for a vague reason that neither knew, but, without a word, she obeyed him like a child. He did not try again to kiss her. He merely took her hand, placed his left over it, and with a gentle pressure, said:

"Good-night, little girl."

"Good-night," she faltered.

Resolutely, relentlessly, first, Hale cast up his accounts, liabilities, resources, that night, to see what, under the least favourable outcome, the balance left to him would be. Nearly all was gone. His securities were already sold. His lots would not bring at public sale one-half of the deferred payments yet to be made on them, and if the company brought suit, as it was threatening to do, he would be left fathoms deep in debt. The branch railroad had not come up the river toward Lonesome Cove, and now he meant to build barges and float his cannel coal down to the main line, for his sole hope was in the mine in Lonesome Cove.

The means that he could command were meagre, but they would carry his purpose with June for a year at least and then--who knew?--he might, through that mine, be on his feet again.

The little town was dark and asleep when he stepped into the cool night-air and made his way past the old school-house and up Imboden Hill. He could see--all shining silver in the moonlight--the still crest of the big beech at the blessed roots of which his lips had met June's in the first kiss that had pa.s.sed between them. On he went through the shadowy aisle that the path made between other beech-trunks, harnessed by the moonlight with silver armour and motionless as sentinels on watch till dawn, out past the amphitheatre of darkness from which the dead trees tossed out their crooked arms as though voicing silently now his own soul's torment, and then on to the point of the spur of foot-hills where, with the mighty mountains encircling him and the world, a dreamland lighted only by stars, he stripped his soul before the Maker of it and of him and fought his fight out alone.

His was the responsibility for all--his alone. No one else was to blame--June not at all. He had taken her from her own life--had swerved her from the way to which G.o.d pointed when she was born. He had given her everything she wanted, had allowed her to do what she pleased and had let her think that, through his miraculous handling of her resources, she was doing it all herself. And the result was natural. For the past two years he had been hara.s.sed with debt, racked with worries, writhing this way and that, concerned only with the soul-tormenting catastrophe that had overtaken him. About all else he had grown careless. He had not been to see her the last year, he had written seldom, and it appalled him to look back now on his own self-absorption and to think how he must have appeared to June. And he had gone on in that self-absorption to the very end. He had got his license to marry, had asked Uncle Billy, who was magistrate as well as miller, to marry them, and, a rough mountaineer himself to the outward eye, he had appeared to lead a child like a lamb to the sacrifice and had found a woman with a mind, heart and purpose of her own. It was all his work. He had sent her away to fit her for his station in life--to make her fit to marry him. She had risen above and now HE WAS NOT FIT TO MARRY HER. That was the brutal truth--a truth that was enough to make a wise man laugh or a fool weep, and Hale did neither. He simply went on working to make out how he could best discharge the obligations that he had voluntarily, willingly, gladly, selfishly even, a.s.sumed. In his mind he treated conditions only as he saw and felt them and believed them at that moment true: and into the problem he went no deeper than to find his simple duty, and that, while the morning stars were sinking, he found. And it was a duty the harder to find because everything had reawakened within him, and the starting-point of that awakening was the proud glow in Uncle Billy's kind old face, when he knew the part he was to play in the happiness of Hale and June. All the way over the mountain that day his heart had gathered fuel from memories at the big Pine, and down the mountain and through the gap, to be set aflame by the yellow sunlight in the valley and the throbbing life in everything that was alive, for the month was June and the spirit of that month was on her way to him. So when he rose now, with back-thrown head, he stretched his arms suddenly out toward those far-seeing stars, and as suddenly dropped them with an angry shake of his head and one quick gritting of his teeth that such a thought should have mastered him even for one swift second--the thought of how lonesome would be the trail that would be his to follow after that day.

XXIII

June, tired though she was, tossed restlessly that night. The one look she had seen in Hale's face when she met him in the car, told her the truth as far as he was concerned. He was unchanged, she could give him no chance to withdraw from their long understanding, for it was plain to her quick instinct that he wanted none. And so she had asked him no question about his failure to meet her, for she knew now that his reason, no matter what, was good. He had startled her in the car, for her mind was heavy with memories of the poor little cabins she had pa.s.sed on the train, of the mountain men and women in the wedding-party, and Hale himself was to the eye so much like one of them--had so startled her that, though she knew that his instinct, too, was at work, she could not gather herself together to combat her own feelings, for every little happening in the dummy but drew her back to her previous train of painful thought. And in that helplessness she had told Hale good-night. She remembered now how she had looked upon Lonesome Cove after she went to the Gap; how she had looked upon the Gap after her year in the Bluegra.s.s, and how she had looked back even on the first big city she had seen there from the lofty vantage ground of New York. What was the use of it all? Why laboriously climb a hill merely to see and yearn for things that you cannot have, if you must go back and live in the hollow again? Well, she thought rebelliously, she would not go back to the hollow again--that was all. She knew what was coming and her cousin Dave's perpetual sneer sprang suddenly from the past to cut through her again and the old pride rose within her once more. She was good enough now for Hale, oh, yes, she thought bitterly, good enough NOW; and then, remembering his life-long kindness and thinking what she might have been but for him, she burst into tears at the unworthiness of her own thought. Ah, what should she do--what should she do? Repeating that question over and over again, she fell toward morning into troubled sleep. She did not wake until nearly noon, for already she had formed the habit of sleeping late--late at least, for that part of the world--and she was glad when the negro boy brought her word that Mr.

Hale had been called up the valley and would not be back until the afternoon. She dreaded to meet him, for she knew that he had seen the trouble within her and she knew he was not the kind of man to let matters drag vaguely, if they could be cleared up and settled by open frankness of discussion, no matter how blunt he must be. She had to wait until mid-day dinner time for something to eat, so she lay abed, picked a breakfast from the menu, which was spotted, dirty and meagre in offerings, and had it brought to her room. Early in the afternoon she issued forth into the sunlight, and started toward Imboden Hill. It was very beautiful and soul-comforting--the warm air, the luxuriantly wooded hills, with their shades of green that told her where poplar and oak and beech and maple grew, the delicate haze of blue that overlay them and deepened as her eyes followed the still mountain piles north-eastward to meet the big range that shut her in from the outer world. The changes had been many. One part of the town had been wiped out by fire and a few buildings of stone had risen up. On the street she saw strange faces, but now and then she stopped to shake hands with somebody whom she knew, and who recognized her always with surprise and spoke but few words, and then, as she thought, with some embarra.s.sment. Half unconsciously she turned toward the old mill. There it was, dusty and gray, and the dripping old wheel creaked with its weight of shining water, and the m.u.f.fled roar of the unseen dam started an answering stream of memories surging within her. She could see the window of her room in the old brick boarding-house, and as she pa.s.sed the gate, she almost stopped to go in, but the face of a strange man who stood in the door with a proprietary air deterred her. There was Hale's little frame cottage and his name, half washed out, was over the wing that was still his office.

Past that she went, with a pa.s.sing temptation to look within, and toward the old school-house. A ma.s.sive new one was half built, of gray stone, to the left, but the old one, with its shingles on the outside that had once caused her such wonder, still lay warm in the sun, but closed and deserted. There was the playground where she had been caught in "Ring around the Rosy," and Hale and that girl teacher had heard her confession. She flushed again when she thought of that day, but the flush was now for another reason. Over the roof of the schoolhouse she could see the beech tree where she had built her playhouse, and memory led her from the path toward it. She had not climbed a hill for a long time and she was panting when she reached it. There was the scattered playhouse--it might have lain there untouched for a quarter of a century--just as her angry feet had kicked it to pieces. On a root of the beech she sat down and the broad rim of her hat scratched the trunk of it and annoyed her, so she took it off and leaned her head against the tree, looking up into the underworld of leaves through which a sunbeam filtered here and there--one striking her hair which had darkened to a duller gold--striking it eagerly, unerringly, as though it had started for just such a shining mark. Below her was outspread the little town--the straggling, wretched little town--crude, lonely, lifeless! She could not be happy in Lonesome Cove after she had known the Gap, and now her horizon had so broadened that she felt now toward the Gap and its people as she had then felt toward the mountaineers: for the standards of living in the Cove--so it seemed--were no farther below the standards in the Gap than they in turn were lower than the new standards to which she had adapted herself while away. Indeed, even that Bluegra.s.s world where she had spent a year was too narrow now for her vaulting ambition, and with that thought she looked down again on the little town, a lonely island in a sea of mountains and as far from the world for which she had been training herself as though it were in mid-ocean. Live down there? She shuddered at the thought and straightway was very miserable. The clear piping of a wood-thrush rose far away, a tear started between her half-closed lashes and she might have gone to weeping silently, had her ear not caught the sound of something moving below her. Some one was coming that way, so she brushed her eyes swiftly with her handkerchief and stood upright against the tree. And there again Hale found her, tense, upright, bareheaded again and her hands behind her; only her face was not uplifted and dreaming--it was turned toward him, unstartled and expectant. He stopped below her and leaned one shoulder against a tree.

"I saw you pa.s.s the office," he said, "and I thought I should find you here."

His eyes dropped to the scattered playhouse of long ago--and a faint smile that was full of submerged sadness pa.s.sed over his face. It was his playhouse, after all, that she had kicked to pieces. But he did not mention it--nor her att.i.tude--nor did he try, in any way, to arouse her memories of that other time at this same place.

"I want to talk with you, June--and I want to talk now."

"Yes, Jack," she said tremulously.

For a moment he stood in silence, his face half-turned, his teeth hard on his indrawn lip--thinking. There was nothing of the mountaineer about him now. He was clean-shaven and dressed with care--June saw that--but he looked quite old, his face seemed harried with worries and ravaged by suffering, and June had suddenly to swallow a quick surging of pity for him. He spoke slowly and without looking at her:

"June, if it hadn't been for me, you would be over in Lonesome Cove and happily married by this time, or at least contented with your life, for you wouldn't have known any other."

"I don't know, Jack."

"I took you out--and it rests with you whether I shall be sorry I did--sorry wholly on your account, I mean," he added hastily.

She knew what he meant and she said nothing--she only turned her head away slightly, with her eyes upturned a little toward the leaves that were shaking like her own heart.

"I think I see it all very clearly," he went on, in a low and perfectly even voice. "You can't be happy over there now--you can't be happy over here now. You've got other wishes, ambitions, dreams, now, and I want you to realize them, and I want to help you to realize them all I can--that's all."

"Jack!--" she helplessly, protestingly spoke his name in a whisper, but that was all she could do, and he went on:

"It isn't so strange. What is strange is that I--that I didn't foresee it all. But if I had," he added firmly, "I'd have done it just the same--unless by doing it I've really done you more harm than good."

"No--no--Jack!"

"I came into your world--you went into mine. What I had grown indifferent about--you grew to care about. You grew sensitive while I was growing callous to certain--" he was about to say "surface things,"

but he checked himself--"certain things in life that mean more to a woman than to a man. I would not have married you as you were--I've got to be honest now--at least I thought it necessary that you should be otherwise--and now you have gone beyond me, and now you do not want to marry me as I am. And it is all very natural and very just." Very slowly her head had dropped until her chin rested hard above the little jewelled cross on her breast.

"You must tell me if I am wrong. You don't love me now--well enough to be happy with me here"--he waved one hand toward the straggling little town below them and then toward the lonely mountains--"I did not know that we would have to live here--but I know it now--" he checked himself, and afterward she recalled the tone of those last words, but then they had no especial significance.

"Am I wrong?" he repeated, and then he said hurriedly, for her face was so piteous--"No, you needn't give yourself the pain of saying it in words. I want you to know that I understand that there is nothing in the world I blame you for--nothing--nothing. If there is any blame at all, it rests on me alone." She broke toward him with a cry then.

"No--no, Jack," she said brokenly, and she caught his hand in both her own and tried to raise it to her lips, but he held her back and she put her face on his breast and sobbed heart-brokenly. He waited for the paroxysm to pa.s.s, stroking her hair gently.

"You mustn't feel that way, little girl. You can't help it--I can't help it--and these things happen all the time, everywhere. You don't have to stay here. You can go away and study, and when I can, I'll come to see you and cheer you up; and when you are a great singer, I'll send you flowers and be so proud of you, and I'll say to myself, 'I helped do that.' Dry your eyes, now. You must go back to the hotel. Your father will be there by this time and you'll have to be starting home pretty soon."

Like a child she obeyed him, but she was so weak and trembling that he put his arm about her to help her down the hill. At the edge of the woods she stopped and turned full toward him.

"You are so good," she said tremulously, "so GOOD. Why, you haven't even asked me if there was another--"