it there, brimming and suspended, during the awful interval before he
could trust his hand to lower it again, untouched, to the table. It was
this merciful preoccupation which saved him, kept him from crying out,
from losing his hold, from slipping down into the bottomless blackness
that gaped for him. As long as the problem of the glass engaged him he
felt able to keep his seat, manage his muscles, fit unnoticeably into
the group; but as the glass touched the table his last link with safety
snapped. He stood up and dashed out of the room.
IV
In the gallery, the instinct of self-preservation helped him to turn
back and sign to young Rainer not to follow. He stammered out something
about a touch of dizziness, and joining them presently; and the boy
waved an unsuspecting hand and drew back.
At the foot of the stairs Faxon ran against a servant. “I should like
to telephone to Weymore,” he said with dry lips.
“Sorry, sir; wires all down. We’ve been trying the last hour to get New
York again for Mr. Lavington.”
Faxon shot on to his room, burst into it, and bolted the door. The
mild lamplight lay on furniture, flowers, books, in the ashes a log
still glimmered. He dropped down on the sofa and hid his face. The
room was utterly silent, the whole house was still: nothing about him
gave a hint of what was going on, darkly and dumbly, in the horrible
room he had flown from, and with the covering of his eyes oblivion and
reassurance seemed to fall on him. But they fell for a moment only;
then his lids opened again to the monstrous vision. There it was,
stamped on his pupils, a part of him forever, an indelible horror burnt
into his body and brain. But why into his—just his? Why had he alone
been chosen to see what he had seen? What business was it of _his_,
in God’s name? Any one of the others, thus enlightened, might have
exposed the horror and defeated it; but _he_, the one weaponless and
defenceless spectator, the one whom none of the others would believe or
understand if he attempted to reveal what he knew—_he_ alone had been
singled out as the victim of this atrocious initiation!
Suddenly he sat up, listening: he had heard a step on the stairs. Some
one, no doubt, was coming to see how he was—to urge him, if he felt
better, to go down and join the smokers. Cautiously he opened his
door; yes, it was young Rainer’s step. Faxon looked down the passage,
remembered the other stairway, and darted to it. All he wanted was
to get out of the house. Not another instant would he breathe its
abominable air! What business was it of _his_, in God’s name?
He reached the opposite end of the lower gallery, and beyond it saw
the hall by which he had entered. It was empty, and on a long table he
recognized his coat and cap among the furs of the other travellers. He
got into his coat, unbolted the door, and plunged into the purifying
night.
* * * * *
The darkness was deep, and the cold so intense that for an instant it
stopped his breathing. Then he perceived that only a thin snow was
falling, and resolutely set his face for flight. The trees along the
avenue dimly marked his way as he hastened with long strides over
the beaten snow. Gradually, while he walked, the tumult in his brain
subsided. The impulse to fly still drove him forward, but he began to
feel that he was flying from a terror of his own creating, and that
the most urgent reason for escape was the need of hiding his state, of
shunning other eyes’ scrutiny till he should regain his balance.
He had spent the long hours in the train in fruitless broodings on a
discouraging situation, and he remembered how his bitterness had turned
to exasperation when he found that the Weymore sleigh was not awaiting
him. It was absurd, of course; but, though he had joked with Rainer
over Mrs. Culme’s forgetfulness, to confess it had cost a pang. That
was what his rootless life had brought him to: for lack of a personal
stake in things his sensibility was at the mercy of such trivial
accidents.... Yes; that, and the cold and fatigue, the absence of hope
and the haunting sense of starved aptitudes, all these had brought him
to the perilous verge over which, once or twice before, his terrified
brain had hung.
Why else, in the name of any imaginable logic, human or devilish,
should he, a stranger, be singled out for this experience? What could
it mean to him, how was he related to it, what bearing had it on his
case?... Unless, indeed, it was just because he was a stranger—a
stranger everywhere—because he had no personal life, no warm strong
screen of private egotisms to shield him from exposure, that he had
developed this abnormal sensitiveness to the vicissitudes of others.
The thought pulled him up with a shudder. No! Such a fate was too
abominable; all that was strong and sound in him rejected it. A
thousand times better regard himself as ill, disorganized, deluded,
than as the predestined victim of such warnings!
He reached the gates and paused before the darkened lodge. The wind had
risen and was sweeping the snow into his face in lacerating streamers.
The cold had him in its grasp again, and he stood uncertain. Should he
put his sanity to the test and go back? He turned and looked down the
dark drive to the house. A single ray shone through the trees, evoking
a picture of the lights, the flowers, the faces grouped about that
fatal room. He turned and plunged out into the road.
He remembered that, about a mile from Overdale, the coachman had
pointed out the road to Northridge; and he began to walk in that
direction. Once in the road, he had the gale in his face, and the wet
snow on his moustache and eye-lashes instantly hardened to metal. The
same metal seemed to be driving a million blades into his throat and
lungs, but he pushed on, desperately determined, the vision of the warm
room pursuing him.
The snow in the road was deep and uneven. He stumbled across ruts and
sank into drifts, and the wind rose before him like a granite cliff.
Now and then he stopped, gasping, as if an invisible hand had tightened
an iron band about his body; then he started again, stiffening himself
against the stealthy penetration of the cold. The snow continued to
descend out of a pall of inscrutable darkness, and once or twice he
paused, fearing he had missed the road to Northridge; but, seeing no
sign of a turn, he ploughed on doggedly.
At last, feeling sure that he had walked for more than a mile, he
halted and looked back. The act of turning brought immediate relief,
first because it put his back to the wind, and then because, far down
the road, it showed him the advancing gleam of a lantern. A sleigh was
coming—a sleigh that might perhaps give him a lift to the village!
Fortified by the hope, he began to walk back toward the light. It
seemed to come forward very slowly, with unaccountable zigzags and
waverings; and even when he was within a few yards of it he could catch
no sound of sleigh-bells. Then the light paused and became stationary
by the roadside, as though carried by a pedestrian who had stopped,
exhausted by the cold. The thought made Faxon hasten on, and a moment
later he was stooping over a motionless figure huddled against the
snow-bank. The lantern had dropped from its bearer’s hand, and Faxon,
fearfully raising it, threw its light into the face of Frank Rainer.
“Rainer! What on earth are you doing here?”
The boy smiled back through his pallor. “What are _you_, I’d like
to know?” he retorted; and, scrambling to his feet with a clutch on
Faxon’s arm, he added gaily: “Well, I’ve run you down, anyhow!”
Faxon stood confounded, his heart sinking. The lad’s face was gray.
“What madness——” he began.
“Yes, it _is_. What on earth did you do it for?”
“I? Do what?... Why, I ... I was just taking a walk.... I often walk at
night....”
Frank Rainer burst into a laugh. “On such nights? Then you hadn’t
bolted?”
“Bolted?”
“Because I’d done something to offend you? My uncle thought you had.”
Faxon grasped his arm. “Did your uncle send you after me?”
“Well, he gave me an awful rowing for not going up to your room with
you when you said you were ill. And when we found you’d gone we were
frightened—and he was awfully upset—so I said I’d catch you....
You’re _not_ ill, are you?”
“Ill? No. Never better.” Faxon picked up the lantern. “Come; let’s go
back. It was awfully hot in that dining-room,” he added.
“Yes; I hoped it was only that.”
They trudged on in silence for a few minutes; then Faxon questioned:
“You’re not too done up?”
“Oh, no. It’s a lot easier with the wind behind us.”
“All right. Don’t talk any more.”
They pushed ahead, walking, in spite of the light that guided them,
more slowly than Faxon had walked alone into the gale. The fact of his
companion’s stumbling against a drift gave him a pretext for saying:
“Take hold of my arm,” and Rainer, obeying, gasped out: “I’m blown!”
“So am I. Who wouldn’t be?”
“What a dance you led me! If it hadn’t been for one of the servants’
happening to see you——”
“Yes: all right. And now, won’t you kindly shut up?”
Rainer laughed and hung on him. “Oh, the cold doesn’t hurt me....”
For the first few minutes after Rainer had overtaken him, anxiety for
the lad had been Faxon’s only thought. But as each laboring step
carried them nearer to the spot he had been fleeing, the reasons for
his flight grew more ominous and more insistent. No, he was not ill;
he was not distraught and deluded—he was the instrument singled out
to warn and save; and here he was, irresistibly driven, dragging the
victim back to his doom!
The intensity of the conviction had almost checked his steps. But what
could he do or say? At all costs he must get Rainer out of the cold,
into the house and into his bed. After that he would act.
The snow-fall was thickening, and as they reached a stretch of the road
between open fields the wind took them at an angle, lashing their faces
with barbed thongs. Rainer stopped to take breath, and Faxon felt the
heavier pressure of his arm.
“When we get to the lodge, can’t we telephone to the stable for a
sleigh?”
“If they’re not all asleep at the lodge.”
“Oh, I’ll manage. Don’t talk!” Faxon ordered; and they plodded on....
At length the lantern ray showed ruts that curved away from the road
under tree-darkness.
Faxon’s spirits rose. “There’s the gate! We’ll be there in five
minutes.”
As he spoke he caught, above the boundary hedge, the gleam of a light
at the farther end of the dark avenue. It was the same light that had
shone on the scene of which every detail was burnt into his brain; and
he felt again its overpowering reality. No—he couldn’t let the boy go
back!
They were at the lodge at last, and Faxon was hammering on the door. He
said to himself: “I’ll get him inside first, and make them give him a
hot drink. Then I’ll see—I’ll find an argument....”
There was no answer to his knocking, and after an interval Rainer said:
“Look here—we’d better go on.”
“No!”
“I can, perfectly——”
“You sha’n’t go to the house, I say!” Faxon furiously redoubled his
blows, and at length steps sounded on the stairs. Rainer was leaning
against the lintel, and as the door opened the light from the hall
flashed on his pale face and fixed eyes. Faxon caught him by the arm
and drew him in.
“It _was_ cold out there,” he sighed; and then, abruptly, as if
invisible shears at a single stroke had cut every muscle in his body,
he swerved, drooped on Faxon’s arm, and seemed to sink into nothing at
his feet.
The lodge-keeper and Faxon bent over him, and somehow, between them,
lifted him into the kitchen and laid him on a sofa by the stove.
The lodge-keeper, stammering: “I’ll ring up the house,” dashed out
of the room. But Faxon heard the words without heeding them: omens
mattered nothing now, beside this woe fulfilled. He knelt down to undo
the fur collar about Rainer’s throat, and as he did so he felt a warm
moisture on his hands. He held them up, and they were red....
V
The palms threaded their endless line along the yellow river. The
little steamer lay at the wharf, and George Faxon, sitting in the
veranda of the wooden hotel, idly watched the coolies carrying the
freight across the gang-plank.
He had been looking at such scenes for two months. Nearly five had
elapsed since he had descended from the train at Northridge and
strained his eyes for the sleigh that was to take him to Weymore:
Weymore, which he was never to behold!... Part of the interval—the
first part—was still a great gray blur. Even now he could not be quite
sure how he had got back to Boston, reached the house of a cousin, and
been thence transferred to a quiet room looking out on snow under bare
trees. He looked out a long time at the same scene, and finally one day
a man he had known at Harvard came to see him and invited him to go out
on a business trip to the Malay Peninsula.
“You’ve had a bad shake-up, and it’ll do you no end of good to get away
from things.”
When the doctor came the next day it turned out that he knew of the
plan and approved it. “You ought to be quiet for a year. Just loaf and
look at the landscape,” he advised.
Faxon felt the first faint stirrings of curiosity.
“What’s been the matter with me, anyhow?”
“Well, over-work, I suppose. You must have been bottling up for a bad
breakdown before you started for New Hampshire last December. And the
shock of that poor boy’s death did the rest.”
Ah, yes—Rainer had died. He remembered....
He started for the East, and gradually, by imperceptible degrees,
life crept back into his weary bones and leaden brain. His friend was
very considerate and forbearing, and they travelled slowly and talked
little. At first Faxon had felt a great shrinking from whatever touched
on familiar things. He seldom looked at a newspaper, he never opened
a letter without a moment’s contraction of the heart. It was not that
he had any special cause for apprehension, but merely that a great
trail of darkness lay on everything. He had looked too deep down into
the abyss.... But little by little health and energy returned to him,
and with them the common promptings of curiosity. He was beginning to
wonder how the world was going, and when, presently, the hotel-keeper
told him there were no letters for him in the steamer’s mail-bag, he
felt a distinct sense of disappointment. His friend had gone into
the jungle on a long excursion, and he was lonely, unoccupied, and
wholesomely bored. He got up and strolled into the stuffy reading-room.
There he found a game of dominoes, a mutilated picture-puzzle, some
copies of _Zion’s Herald_, and a pile of New York and London newspapers.
He began to glance through the papers, and was disappointed to find
that they were less recent than he had hoped. Evidently the last
numbers had been carried off by luckier travellers. He continued to
turn them over, picking out the American ones first. These, as it
happened, were the oldest: they dated back to December and January. To
Faxon, however, they had all the flavor of novelty, since they covered
the precise period during which he had virtually ceased to exist. It
had never before occurred to him to wonder what had happened in the
world during that interval of obliteration; but now he felt a sudden
desire to know.
To prolong the pleasure, he began by sorting the papers
chronologically, and as he found and spread out the earliest number,
the date at the top of the page entered into his consciousness like a
key slipping into a lock. It was the seventeenth of December: the date
of the day after his arrival at Northridge. He glanced at the first
page and read in blazing characters: “Reported Failure of Opal Cement
Company. Lavington’s Name Involved. Gigantic Exposure of Corruption
Shakes Wall Street to Its Foundations.”
He read on, and when he had finished the first paper he turned
to the next. There was a gap of three days, but the Opal Cement
“Investigation” still held the centre of the stage. From its complex
revelations of greed and ruin his eye wandered to the death notices,
and he read: “Rainer. Suddenly, at Northridge, New Hampshire, Francis
John, only son of the late....”
His eyes clouded, and he dropped the newspaper and sat for a long time
with his face in his hands. When he looked up again he noticed that
his gesture had pushed the other papers from the table and scattered
them on the floor at his feet. The uppermost lay spread out before him,
and heavily his eyes began their search again. “John Lavington comes
forward with plan for reconstructing Company. Offers to put in ten
millions of his own—The proposal under consideration by the District
Attorney.”
Ten millions ... ten millions of his own. But if John Lavington was
ruined?... Faxon stood up with a cry. That was it, then—that was what
the warning meant! And if he had not fled from it, dashed wildly away
from it into the night, he might have broken the spell of iniquity, the
powers of darkness might not have prevailed! He caught up the pile of
newspapers and began to glance through each in turn for the headline:
“Wills Admitted to Probate.” In the last of all he found the paragraph
he sought, and it stared up at him as if with Rainer’s dying eyes.
That—_that_ was what he had done! The powers of pity had singled him
out to warn and save, and he had closed his ears to their call, had
washed his hands of it, and fled. Washed his hands of it! That was the
word. It caught him back to the dreadful moment in the lodge when,
raising himself up from Rainer’s side, he had looked at his hands and
seen that they were red....
A MESSENGER
BY
MARY RAYMOND SHIPMAN ANDREWS
The Berserker of the North, because he believed in the directing
power of the gods, knew no fear. Death or life—it was meted out by a
destiny that could not err. In song and story he has been one of the
most attractive figures of the past; far more attractive in his savage
virtues than the more sensuous heroes of Greece and Rome. In this story
he lives again in the American boy who has his ancestor’s inexplicable
uplift of spirit in the presence of danger and his implicit faith in
“the God of battles and the beauty of holiness.” The ideal of Miles
Morgan is such a man as Chinese Gordon, who, not only in youth but all
through life, had eyes for “the vision splendid.”
The ethical value of “A Messenger” may be summed up in the words of the
General: “There is nothing in Americanism to prevent either inspiration
or heroism.”
A MESSENGER[24]
How oft do they their silver bowers leave,
To come to succour us that succour want!
How oft do they with golden pineons cleave
The flitting skyes, like flying Pursuivant,
Against fowle feendes to ayd us militant!
They for us fight, they watch and dewly ward,
And their bright Squadrons round about us plant;
And all for love, and nothing for reward.
O! Why should heavenly God to men have such regard?
—_Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.”_
That the other world of our hope rests on no distant, shining star,
but lies about us as an atmosphere, unseen yet near, is the belief of
many. The veil of material life shades earthly eyes, they say, from
the glories in which we ever are. But sometimes when the veil wears
thin in mortal stress, or is caught away by a rushing, mighty wind of
inspiration, the trembling human soul, so bared, so purified, may look
down unimagined heavenly vistas, and messengers may steal across the
shifting boundary, breathing hope and the air of a brighter world. And
of him who speaks his vision, men say “He is mad,” or “He has dreamed.”
* * * * *
The group of officers in the tent was silent for a long half minute
after Colonel Wilson’s voice had stopped. Then the General spoke.
“There is but one thing to do,” he said. “We must get word to Captain
Thornton at once.”
The Colonel thought deeply a moment, and glanced at the orderly outside
the tent. “Flannigan!” The man, wheeling swiftly, saluted. “Present
my compliments to Lieutenant Morgan and say that I should like to see
him here at once,” and the soldier went off, with the quick military
precision in which there is no haste and no delay.
“You have some fine, powerful young officers, Colonel,” said the
General casually. “I suppose we shall see in Lieutenant Morgan one of
the best. It will take strength and brains both, perhaps, for this
message.”
A shadow of a smile touched the Colonel’s lips. “I think I have chosen
a capable man, General,” was all he said.
Against the doorway of the tent the breeze blew the flap lazily back
and forth. A light rain fell with muffled gentle insistence on the
canvas over their heads, and out through the opening the landscape
was blurred—the wide stretch of monotonous, billowy prairie, the
sluggish, shining river, bending in the distance about the base of
Black Wind Mountain—Black Wind Mountain, whose high top lifted, though
it was almost June, a white point of snow above dark pine ridges of
the hills below. The five officers talked a little as they waited,
but spasmodically, absent-mindedly. A shadow blocked the light of the
entrance, and in the doorway stood a young man, undersized, slight,
blond. He looked inquiringly at the Colonel.
“You sent for me, sir?” and the General and his aide, and the grizzled
old Captain, and the big, fresh-faced young one, all watched him.
In direct, quiet words—words whose bareness made them dramatic for the
weight of possibility they carried—the Colonel explained. Black Wolf
and his band were out on the war-path. A soldier coming in wounded,
escaped from the massacre of the post at Devil’s Hoof Gap, had reported
it. With the large command known to be here camped on Sweetstream Fork,
they would not come this way; they would swerve up the Gunpowder River
twenty miles away, destroying the settlement and Little Fort Slade,
and would sweep on, probably for a general massacre, up the Great Horn
as far as Fort Doncaster. He himself, with the regiment, would try to
save Fort Slade, but in the meantime Captain Thornton’s troop, coming
to join him, ignorant that Black Wolf had taken the war-path, would be
directly in their track. Some one must be sent to warn them, and of
course the fewer the quicker. Lieutenant Morgan would take a sergeant,
the Colonel ordered quietly, and start at once.
In the misty light inside the tent, the young officer looked hardly
more than seventeen years old as he stood listening. His small figure
was light, fragile; his hair was blond to an extreme, a thick thatch of
pale gold; and there was about him, among these tanned, stalwart men in
uniform, a presence, an effect of something unusual, a simplicity out
of place yet harmonious, which might have come with a little child into
a scene like this. His large blue eyes were fixed on the Colonel as he
talked, and in them was just such a look of innocent, pleased wonder,
as might be in a child’s eyes, who had been told to leave studying and
go pick violets. But as the Colonel ended he spoke, and the few words
he said, the few questions he asked, were full of poise, of crisp
directness. As the General volunteered a word or two, he turned to him
and answered with a very charming deference, a respect that was yet
full of gracious ease, the unconscious air of a man to whom generals
are first as men, and then as generals. The slight figure in its dark
uniform was already beyond the tent doorway when the Colonel spoke
again, with a shade of hesitation in his manner.
“Mr. Morgan!” and the young officer turned quickly. “I think it may be
right to warn you that there is likely to be more than usual danger in
your ride.”
“Yes, sir.” The fresh, young voice had a note of inquiry.
“You will—you will”—what was it the Colonel wanted to say? He
finished abruptly. “Choose the man carefully who goes with you.”
“Thank you, Colonel,” Morgan responded heartily, but with a hint of
bewilderment. “I shall take Sergeant O’Hara,” and he was gone.
There was a touch of color in the Colonel’s face, and he sighed as if
glad to have it over. The General watched him, and slowly, after a
pause, he demanded:
“May I ask, Colonel, why you chose that blond baby to send on a mission
of uncommon danger and importance?”
The Colonel answered quietly: “There were several reasons,
General—good ones. The blond baby”—that ghost of a smile touched the
Colonel’s lips again—“the blond baby has some remarkable qualities. He
never loses his head; he has uncommon invention and facility of getting
out of bad holes; he rides light and so can make a horse last longer
than most, and”—the Colonel considered a moment—“I may say he has no
fear of death. Even among my officers he is known for the quality of
his courage. There is one more reason: he is the most popular man I
have, both with officers and men; if anything happened to Morgan the
whole command would race into hell after the devils that did it, before
they would miss their revenge.”
The General reflected, pulling at his moustache. “It seems a bit like
taking advantage of his popularity,” he said.