"_O the long and dreary Winter!
O the cold and cruel Winter!_"
Thayer's voice was wonderfully rich and mellow, as he stood at the
window softly singing over to himself that haunting, tragic Famine Theme
from _The Death of Minnehaha_. Fresh from its weeks of resting, low, yet
suggesting an immeasurable reserve power, it had all its old throbbing
magnetism; but a new quality had been added to it. It had always had
moments of passionate appeal; now it had gained a sadness, a depth of
melancholy which in the past it had been powerless to express. A year
before, Thayer could strike the tragic note, never the pathetic.
Nevertheless, the pathos was apparently merely a matter of the vocal
cords. The tall, alert, well-groomed man who stood at the snow-veiled
window in no way suggested being a candidate for sympathy. His eyes were
clear, his brows unfurrowed. Moreover, one could never dream of
condoling with the owner of such a voice. Taken quite by itself, its
possession would outweigh an almost infinite number of human woes.
"_Ever thicker, thicker, thicker
Froze the ice on lake and river,
Ever deeper, deeper, deeper
Fell the snow_--"
_Hiawatha's_ wigwam might well have been just beyond the spruce thicket,
Thayer reflected. The description was too accurate to be artistic; it
amounted to mere photography. As far as his own eyes could see, the
earth lay buried in a deep, soft blanket of snow, and the air above was
misty with flakes which neither fell nor scurried before the wind, but
hung apparently motionless in the still, cold air. All through the
preceding night, however, the wind had blown fiercely. The snow lay
heaped in heavy, irregular drifts across the open plain; but under the
trees it was rolled up into soft waves whose tops curled over as
daintily as the waves had curled over on the moonlit beach of Monomoy.
The lake was frozen over and snow-covered; but the creek that came
rushing down to meet it was too swift to be overtaken by the frost, and
it showed, an inky-dark, sinuous line of open water, winding away and
away among the trees, now losing itself in a thicket of alders, now
drawing a straight black mark across an open stretch of meadow where the
frost-flowers on its banks offered a delicate substitute for their
summer kin.
Half a mile away to the south, the mountain rose abruptly, its face of
sheer rock making a dark scar on the winter landscape, a scar crossed
with long white bands and bars of ice which, glacier-wise, were creeping
over the edge of the cliff as if seeking to veil its sinister face.
Against the base of the mountain, close to the inky creek, another patch
of darkness stood out in bold relief. This patch was the Lorimers'
cottage.
In spite of the haunting melancholy of his song, Thayer looked out at
the cottage and at the storm with a feeling of supreme content. Lorimer
hated storms with a catlike fervor; it was an old-time peculiarity of
his, dating from their student days in Goettingen. There was no
likelihood of his leaving the cottage, that day; and, inside the cottage
with his man to look out for him, Thayer felt that he was beyond the
possibility of danger. It was seven weeks since they had buried
themselves in that wilderness, seven weeks that Thayer had voluntarily
kept himself under the daily and hourly strain of constant intimate
association with the woman he loved, of knowing that she gained
strength and courage from her reliance upon him, and of forcing himself
to treat her with an offhand good-fellowship which defied analysis for
the mere reason that it challenged none.
A weaker man than Thayer would have yielded to the strain, or else have
grown fretful under its chafing. Thayer did neither. He felt the
chafing, galling burden which he bore; but he kept the scars out of
sight of others, and moreover, he conscientiously refrained from looking
at them, himself. Self-pity is the surest, yet the most insidious foe to
self-poise. When the original Cotton Mather Thayer had stuck a splinter
of wood into the palm of his hand, he had pulled out the splinter with
his teeth and then, punching his hand into his pocket, he had continued
his discussion of the latest election to the General Court. His namesake
was proving himself true to the traditions of his blood.
Twice only had Thayer sought outlet for his mood. Twice the almost
deserted hotel had vibrated with such singing as it was destined never
to have heard, before or since. The piano was passable and, shut up
alone in the barren parlor, Thayer had sung to the empty chairs as he
had never yet sung to any crowded audience. Out in the halls, the
people of the house gathered in listening, whispering groups; but Thayer
never heeded them. It is not certain that, heeding, he would have cared.
Relief he must have at any cost, and this was the one means at his
command. His own voice, laden with passionate sadness, came echoing back
to him from the unresponsive walls, and in time the echo checked his
outcry. It taught him anew the lesson which already he had conned again
and again, the lesson that his bitterest plaint fell on no one else's
ears with half the compelling fervor with which it reached his own, that
his cry for help came beaten back to the one person who could help him,
that was--himself. But at least, there was some relief in having made
his cry.
He had never allowed himself to regret his answer to the impresario. Day
by day, he realized more and more keenly that his presence there was
imperative. Beatrix seemed to him far from well. Her nerves had been
less steady since the shock of that last supper in New York; she was
totally unable to adjust herself to Lorimer's swift alternations of
mood, his hours of demonstrative affection, his times of black
depression and irritability. Thayer saw that she did her best, that she
bravely sought to play a loyal part in the work of reformation. The
failure was in no sense that of will, but of mere nervous strength. But
there were hours and hours when Thayer stood between them, trying by his
sympathy for Lorimer to atone for Beatrix's coldness, trying by his
chivalry to Beatrix to make amends for the fractiousness of Lorimer.
There were hours when he mourned acutely for his work. They invariably
followed upon the heels of a letter from Arlt and they invariably ended
in his going to the cottage and dragging Lorimer out for a tramp in the
stinging air. The doctor had ordered much exercise, and Lorimer, who
refused to go beyond his door in the society of his man, made long
expeditions at Thayer's side, returning weary of body, but of placid
mood and healthy appetite, to spend a short evening and a long and
restful night.
The day before, they had been out since early morning. The deep-packed
snow had lain, hard and solid and tempting, and the sun glittered coldly
back into the windless air. Lorimer had been in high spirits. One of his
old gay, infectious moods was upon him, and, for the passing hour,
Thayer let himself yield to it until he forgot Beatrix, forgot the
tragedy which overhung them all, forgot even the number of miles they
had come. At noon, they had found a wood-choppers' camp and, sitting
around the blazing fire, they had mingled their daintily-packed lunch
with the cruder fare of their temporary hosts. Lorimer had been the life
of the party, and the good-bys had been spoken with real regret. At the
top of the hill above the camp, Lorimer had turned back again to wave
his cap in boyish farewell. Then the episode had ended, ended more
completely than Thayer as yet could realize.
Lorimer's mood changed on the way home. He grumbled about the softening
snow, about the gathering dusk, about the length of the road. His
exasperation reached its height when, ignoring Thayer's advice in regard
to the path, he struck out across an open snowfield, only to go crashing
down through its insecure foundation of baby spruces whose lusty little
branches bore up the snow like myriad arms. When Lorimer emerged from
the shallow caverns beneath, his temper was of the blackest, and, all
the rest of the way home, he had stalked along in gloomy silence, ten
feet in the rear of his companion's heels.
Thayer had judged that it would he well to invite himself to stay to
dinner at the cottage. Lorimer had been in one of his worst moods, and
even Thayer had found it wellnigh impossible to keep the talk brisk and
amicable. He had remained until he had seen that Lorimer was at last
yielding to the inevitable drowsiness of his long day in the open air;
then he had started back to the hotel. Once outside the cottage,
however, he had squared his shoulders and drawn a deep breath of relief.
He needed mental ozone; but even physical ozone was better than mental
nitrous oxide.
And now he was standing at the snow-veiled window, looking across at the
cottage while he hummed to himself the recurring, haunting Famine
Theme,--
"_O the famine and the fever!
O the wasting of the famine!
O the blasting of the fever!_"
He had no notion of the truth of his words. Had he done so, the cottage,
not the hotel, would have held him, that day, and the tragedy, so long
averted, might have been warded off a little longer. But fate willed
otherwise. To Thayer's mind, Lorimer, storm-bound and weary from his
tramp of the day before, would spend the day, drowsing, novel in hand,
before the open fire. Thayer, in his own absolute integrity, could never
imagine the truth: that Lorimer's trusty attendant had at last yielded
to the temptation of the oft-repeated bribe and had given into Lorimer's
hands the bottle from which he was used to measure out, medicine-wise,
the daily lessening allowance of brandy. He could not know how often,
all that day, Beatrix went to the window and looked out across the storm
in the hope of seeing him come striding to her through the snow. Had it
been possible, she would have sent for him; but it was a day when women
are safest inside a house, and she dared not remove either Lorimer's man
or the old butler from their close guard over her husband. She had been
utterly opposed to bringing the faithful old butler with them; but now
she was glad that she had yielded to his begging. He had been with her
father since her childhood, and had insisted upon following "Miss
Beatrix" into her new home. Without him now, she would have been
absolutely, hopelessly alone.
Thayer spent a quiet, contented day. For the time being, he had
dismissed Lorimer from his mind, and he gave himself up to the luxury of
taking thought for no one but himself. The sensation was very luxurious
from its very novelty. He wrote a long letter to Arlt, responded to a
dozen notes of invitation which had pursued him from the city, loitered
about the office and ended the day with a novel which had reached him
when the mail came in, that noon. It was still early when he went to
bed. As he drew the shades, from sheer force of habit he glanced across
at the cottage. Its lights were burning brightly, their quiet steadiness
giving no hint of the hideous carnival within.
No healthy man can go to bed, two hours before his usual time, and
expect to sleep peacefully till dawn. At four o'clock, Thayer waked
suddenly, with the firm belief that his slumber must have reached quite
around the clock. He struck a match and looked at his watch.
Restlessly he rose and began to walk up and down the room. The storm had
increased during the night. He could hear the snow sifting against the
windows and, far off at a distant corner of the house, a loosened blind
was beating to and fro in the wind. The sound echoed drearily through
the almost deserted barracks, and added infinitely to the loneliness of
the wilderness, and of the night, and of the storm.
Thayer paused at the window, raised the shade and peered out into the
night. At first, he could see only the darkness, no longer black, but
gray with the swirling snow. The ceaseless, pitiless fall of the flakes
fascinated him, and he stood long, watching them take shape in the
distance, come whirling against the glass and slide aimlessly down the
pane, as so many had fallen before them. Then, as the storm lost
something of its fury, he glanced up and out across the night. The next
instant, his face was pressed against the pane, while his clasped
fingers shielded his eyes from the light within the room. In the
Lorimers' cottage, half a mile away, the lights were still burning. On
such a night and at such an hour, those lights meant trouble: illness,
or perhaps something infinitely worse.
He had stood at the window longer than he had realized, and the clock in
the office struck five as Thayer, fully dressed, stepped out into the
hall. With the waning of the night, the storm was increasing again and,
strong man as he was, Thayer faltered as he opened the door and went out
into the darkness.
Four times he tried to beat his way against the wind, to force a path
through the wet, heavy drifts. Four times, buffeted and almost spent, he
was driven back to the shelter of the veranda. The office clock struck
six, as he went inside the house to find a shivering servant sweeping
out the office.
"Get me some snowshoes," he ordered briefly. "The lights have burned all
night in Mr. Lorimer's cottage; I am afraid they may be ill and in need
of help. I thought I could get to them; but in this storm it is
impossible, unless I can have some shoes."
By some trick of the brain, anxious and impatient as he was, the Famine
Theme recurred to his mind, and the servant, coming back with the shoes,
found him singing it softly to himself. The words died away into
inarticulate humming, as Thayer bent over to fasten the straps. Then,
buttoning his coat closely and pulling his cap down over his eyes,
Thayer opened the door for the second time and went striding away across
the gray, tempestuous darkness which had shut down again impenetrably
between himself and those steady, ominous lights.