ON THE TWO SIDES OF THE DOOR
The cabin contained a large and a small room. In the wall between them
there was a doorway closed by an ordinary batten door with a wooden
latch and no lock. Closed it served to hide the occupant of one room
from the view of the other, otherwise it was but a feeble barrier. Even
had it possessed a lock, a vigorous man could have burst it through in a
moment.
These thoughts did not come very clearly to Enid Maitland. Few thoughts
of any kind came to her. Where she lay she could see plainly the dancing
light of the glorious fire. She was warm; the deftly wrapped bandage,
the healing lotion upon her foot, had greatly relieved the pain in that
wounded member. The bed was hard but comfortable, much more so than the
sleeping bags to which of late she had been accustomed.
Few women had gone through such experiences mental and physical as had
befallen her within the last few hours and lived to tell the story. Had
it not been for the exhaustive strains of body and spirit to which she
had been subjected, her mental faculties would have been on the alert
and the strangeness of her unique position would have made her so
nervous that she could not have slept.
For the time being, however, the physical demands upon her entity were
paramount. She was dry, she was warm, she was fed, she was free from
anxiety and she was absolutely unutterably weary. Her thoughts were
vague, inchoate, unconcentrated. The fire wavered before her eyes, she
closed them in a few moments and did not open them.
Without a thought, without a care, she fell asleep. Her repose was
complete, not a dream even disturbed the profound slumber into which she
sank. Pretty picture she made; her head thrown backward, her golden hair
roughly dried and quickly plaited in long braids, one of which fell
along the pillow while the other curled lovingly around her neck. Her
face in the natural light would have looked pallid from what she had
gone through, but the fire cast red glows upon it; the fitful light
flickered across her countenance and sometimes the color wavered, it
came and went as if in consciousness; and sometimes deep shadows
unrelieved accentuated the paleness born of her sufferings.
There is no light that plays so many tricks with the imagination, or
that so stimulates the fancy as the light of an open fire. In its sudden
outbursts it sometimes seems to add life touches to the sleeping and the
dead. Had there been any eye to see this girl, she would have made a
delightful picture in the warm glow from the stone hearth. There were no
eyes to look, however, save those which belonged to the man on the other
side of the door.
On the hither side of that door in the room where the fire burned on the
hearth, there was rest in the heart of the woman, on the farther side
where the fire only burned in the heart of the man, there was tumult.
Not outward and visible, but inward and spiritual, and yet there was no
lack of apparent manifestation of the turmoil in the man's soul.
Albeit the room was smaller than the other, it was still of a good size.
He walked nervously up and down from one end to the other as ceaselessly
as a wild animal impatient of captivity stalks the narrow limits of his
contracted cage. The even tenor of his life had suddenly been diverted.
The ordinary sequence of his days had been abruptly changed. The privacy
of five years, which he had hoped and dreamed might exist as long as he,
had been rudely broken in upon. Humanity, which he had avoided, from
which he had fled, which he had cast away forever, had found him.
_Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit!_ And, lo, his departures were all in
vain! The world, with all its grandeur and its insignificance, with all
its powers and its weaknesses, with all its opportunities and its
obligations, with all its joys and its sorrows, had knocked at his door;
and that the knocking hand was that of a woman, but added to his
perplexity and to his dismay.
He had cherished a dream that he could live to himself alone with but a
memory to bear him company, and from that dream he had been thunderously
awakened. Everything was changed. What had once been easy had now become
impossible. He might send her away, but though he swore her to secrecy
she would have to tell her story and something of his; the world would
learn some of it and seek him out with insatiable curiosity to know the
rest.
Eyes as keen as his would presently search and scrutinize the mountains
where he had roamed alone. They would see what he had seen, find what he
had found. Mankind, gold-lusting, would swarm and hive upon the hills
and fight and love and breed and die.
He would of course move on, but where? And went he whithersoever he
might, he would now of necessity carry with him another memory which
would not dwell within his mind in harmony with the memory which until
that day had been paramount there alone.
Slowly, laboriously, painfully, he had built his house upon the sand,
and the winds had blown and the floods had come, not only in a literal
but in a spiritual significance, and in one day that house had fallen.
He stood amid the wrecked remains of it trying to recreate it, to endow
once more with the fitted precision of the past the shapeless broken
units of the fabric of his fond imagination.
Whiles he resented with fierce, savage, passionate intensity the
interruption of this woman into his life. Whiles he throbbed with equal
intensity and almost as much passion at the thought of her.
Have you ever climbed a mountain early in the morning while it was yet
dark and having gained some dominant crest stood staring at the far
horizon, the empurpled east, while the "dawn came up like thunder?" Or,
better still, have you ever stood within the cold dark recesses of some
deep valley of river or pass and watched the clear light spread its bars
athwart the heavens, like nebulous mighty pinions, along the light
touched crest of a towering range until all of a sudden, with a leap
almost of joy, the great sun blazed in the high horizon?
You might be born a child of the dark, and light might sear and burn
your eyeballs accustomed to cooler, deeper shades, yet you could no more
turn away from this glory, though you might hate it, than by mere effort
of will you could cease to breathe the air. The shock that you might
feel, the sudden surprise, is only faintly suggestive of the emotions in
the breast of this man.
Once long ago the gentlest and tenderest of voices called from the dark
to the light, the blind. And it is given to modern science and to modern
skill sometimes to emulate that godlike achievement. Perhaps the
surprise, the amazement, the bewilderment, of him who having been blind
doth now see, if we can imagine it, not having been in the case
ourselves, will be a better guide to the understanding of this man's
emotion when this woman came suddenly into his lonely orbit. His eyes
were opened although he would not know it. He fought down his new
consciousness and would have none of it. Yet it was there. He loved her!
With what joy did Selkirk welcome the savage sharer of his solitude!
Suppose she had been a woman of his own race; had she been old,
withered, hideous, he must have loved her on the instant, much more if
she were young and beautiful. The thing was inevitable. Such passions
are born. God forbid that we should deny it. Even in the busy haunts of
men where women are as plenty as blackberries, to use Falstaff's simile,
and where a man may sometimes choose between a hundred, or a thousand,
often such loves are born, forever.
A voice in the night, a face in the street, a whispered word, the touch
of a hand, the answering throb of another heart--and behold! two walk
together where before each walked alone. Sometimes the man or the woman
who is born again of love knows it not, declines to admit it, refuses to
recognize it. Some birth pain must awake the consciousness of the new
life.
If those things are true and possible under every day conditions and to
ordinary men and women, how much more to this solitary. He had seen this
woman, white breasted like the foam, rising as the ancient goddess from
the Paphian Sea. Over that recollection, as he was a gentleman and a
Christian, he would fain draw a curtain, before it erect a wall. He must
not dwell upon that fact, he would not linger over that moment. Yet he
could not forget it.
Then he had seen her lying prone, yet unconsciously graceful in her
abandonment, on the sward; he had caught a glimpse of her white face
desperately up-tossed by the rolling water; he had looked into the
unfathomable depths of her eyes at that moment when she had awakened in
his arms after such a struggle as had taxed his manhood and almost
broken his heart; he had carried her unconsciously, ghastly white with
her pain-drawn face, stumbling desperately over the rocks in the beating
rain to this his home. There he had held that poor, bruised slender
little foot in his hand, gently, skillfully treating it, when he longed
to press his lips passionately upon it. Last of all he had looked into
her face warmed with the red light of the fire, searched her weary eyes
almost like blue pools, in whose depths there yet lurked life and light,
while her golden hair tinged crimson by the blaze lay on the white
pillow--and he loved her. God pity him, fighting against fact and
admission of it, yet how could he help it?
He had loved once before in his life with the fire of youth and spring,
but it was not like this; he did not recognize this new passion in any
light from the past, therefore he would not admit it, hence he did not
understand it. But he saw and admitted and understood enough to know
that the past was no longer the supreme subject in his life, that the
present rose higher, bulked larger and hid more and more of his far-off
horizon.
He felt like a knave and a traitor, as if he had been base, disloyal,
false to his ideal, recreant to his remembrance. Was he indeed a true
man? Did he have that rugged strength, that abiding faith, that eternal
consciousness, that lasting affection beside which the rocky paths he
often trod were things transient, perishable, evanescent? Was he a
weakling that he fell at the first sight of another woman?
He stopped his ceaseless pace forward and backward, and stopped near
that frail and futile door. She was there and there was none to prevent.
His hand sought the latch.
What was he about to do? God forbid that a thought he could not freely
share with humanity should enter his brain then. He held all women
sacred, and so he had ever done, and this woman in her loveliness, in
her helplessness, in her weakness, trebly appealed to him. But he would
look upon her, he would fain see if she were there, if it were all not a
dream, the creation of his disordered imagination.
Men had gone mad in hermitages in the mountains, they had been driven
insane in lonely oases in vast deserts; and they had peopled their
solitudes with men and women. Was this same working of a disordered
brain too much turned upon itself and with too tremendous a pressure
upon it producing an illusion? Was there in truth any woman there? He
would raise the latch and open the door and look. Once more the hand
went stealthily to the latch.
The woman slept quietly on. No thin barricade easily unlocked or easily
broken protected her. Something intangible yet stronger than the
thickest, the most rigid, bars of steel guarded her; something unseen,
indescribable, but so unmistakable when it throbs in the breast that
those who depend on it feel that their dependence is not in vain,
watched over her.
Cherishing no evil thought, the man had power to gratify his desire
which might yet bear a sinister construction should his action be
observed. It was her privacy he was invading; she had trusted to him,
she had said so, to his honor and that stood her in good stead. His
honor! Not in five years had he heard the word or thought the thing, but
he had not forgotten it. She had not appealed to an unreal thing. Upon a
rock her trust was based. His hand left the latch, it fell gently, he
drew back and turned away trembling, a conqueror who mastered himself.
He was awake to the truth again.
What had he been about to do? Profane, uninvited, the sanctity of her
chamber, violate the hospitality of his own house. Even with a proper
motive imperil his self-respect, shatter her trust, endanger that honor
which so suddenly became a part of him on demand. She would not probably
know, she could never know unless she awoke. What of that? That ancient
honor of his life and race rose like a mountain whose scarped face
cannot be scaled.
He fell back with a swift turn, a feeling almost womanly--and more men
perhaps if they lived in feminine isolation, as self-centered as women
are so often by necessity, would be as feminine as their
sisters--influenced him, overcame him. His hand went to his hunting
shirt; nervously he tore it open, he grasped a bright object that hung
against his breast; as he did so, the thought came to him that not
before in five years had he been for a moment unconscious of the
pressure of that locket over his heart, but now that this other had
come, he had to seek for it to find it.
The man dragged it out, held it in his hand and opened it. He held it so
tightly that it almost gave beneath the strong grasp of his strong hand.
From a near-by box he drew another object with his other hand; he took
the two to the light, the soft light of the candle upon the table, and
stared from one to the other with eyes brimming.
Like crystal gazers he saw other things than those presented to the
casual vision, he heard other sounds than the beat of the rain upon the
roof, the roar of the wind down the canyon. A voice that he had sworn he
would never forget, but which, God forgive him, had not now the
clearness that it might have had yesterday, whispered awful words to
him.
Anon he looked into another face, red too, but with no hue from the
hearth or leaping flame, but red with the blood of ghastly wounds. He
heard again that report, the roar louder and more terrible than any peal
of thunder that rived the clouds above his head and made the mountains
quake and tremble. He was conscious again of the awful stillness of
death that supervened. He dropped on his knees, buried his face in his
hands where they rested on picture and locket on the rude table.
Ah, the past died hard; for a moment he was the lover of old--remorse,
passionate expiation, solitude--he and the dead together--the world and
the living forgot! He would not be false, he would be true; there was no
power in any feeble woman's tender hand to drive him off his course, to
shake his purpose, to make him a new, another man. _O, Vanitas,
Vanitatum!_
On the other side of the door the unconscious woman slept quietly on.
The red fire light died away, the glowing coals sank into gray ash.
Within the smaller room the cold dawn stealing through the unshaded
window looked upon a field of battle--deaths, wounds, triumphs,
defeats--portrayed upon one poor human face, upturned as sometimes
victors and vanquished alike upturn stark faces from the field to the
God above who may pity but who has not intervened.
So Jacob may have looked after that awful night when he wrestled until
the day broke with the angel and would not let him go until he blessed
him, walking, forever after, with halting step as memorial but with his
blessing earned. Hath, this man blessing won or not? And must he pay for
it if he hath achieved it?
And all the while the woman slept quietly on upon the other side of that
door.