A dun pony ambled along the pine-needle-carpeted trail leading through
the forest toward Camilla Van Arsdale's camp, comfortably shaded against
the ardent power of the January sun. Behind sounded a soft, rapid
padding of hooves. The pony shied to the left with a violence which
might have unseated a less practiced rider, as, with a wild whoop, Dutch
Pete came by at full gallop. Pete had been to a dance at the Sick Coyote
on the previous night which had imperceptibly merged itself into the
present morning, and had there imbibed enough of the spirit of the
occasion to last him his fifteen miles home to his ranch. Now he pulled
up and waited for the slower rider to overtake him.
"Howdy, Ban!"
"Hello, Pete."
"How's the lady gettin' on?"
"Not too well."
"Can't see much of anythin', huh?"
"No: and never will again."
"Sho! Well, I don't figger out as I'd want to live long in that fix. How
long does the doc give her, Ban?"
"Perhaps six months; perhaps a year. She isn't afraid to die; but she's
hanging to life just as long as she can. She's a game one, Pete."
"And how long will you be with us, Ban?"
"Oh, I'm likely to be around quite a while yet."
Dutch Pete, thoroughly understanding, reflected that here was another
game one. But he remarked only that he'd like to drop in on Miss
K'miller next time he rode over, with a bit of sage honey that he'd
saved out for her.
"She'll be glad to see you," returned the other. "Only, don't forget,
Pete; not a word about anything except local stuff."
"Sure!" agreed Pete with that unquestioning acceptance of another's
reasons for secrecy which marks the frontiersman. "Say, Ban," he added,
"you ain't much of an advertisement for Manzanita as a health resort,
yourself. Better have that doc stick his head in your mouth and look at
your insides."
Banneker raised tired eyes and smiled. "Oh, I'm all right," he replied
listlessly.
"Come to next Saturday's dance at the Coyote; that'll put dynamite in
your blood," prescribed the other as he spurred his horse on.
Banneker had no need to turn the dun pony aside to the branch trail that
curved to the door of his guest; the knowing animal took it by habitude,
having traversed it daily for a long time. It was six months since
Banneker had bought him: six months and a week since Willis Enderby had
been buried. And the pony's rider had in his pocket a letter, of date
only four days old, from Willis Enderby to Camilla Van Arsdale. It was
dated from the Governor's Mansion, Albany, New York. Banneker had
written it himself, the night before. He had also composed nearly a
column of supposed Amalgamated Wire report, regarding the fight for and
against Governor Enderby's reform measures, which he would read
presently to Miss Van Arsdale from the dailies just received. As he
dismounted, the clear music of her voice called:
"Any mail, Ban?"
"Yes. Letter from Albany."
"Let me open it myself," she cried jealously.
He delivered it into her hands: this was part of the ritual. She ran her
fingers caressingly over it, as if to draw from it the hidden sweetness
of her lover's strength, which must still be only half-expressed,
because the words were to be translated through another's reading; then
returned it to its real author.
"Read it slowly, Ban," she commanded softly.
Having completed the letter, his next process was to run through the
papers, giving in full any news or editorials on State politics. This
was a task demanding the greatest mental concentration and alertness,
for he had built up a contemporary history out of his imagination, and
must keep all the details congruous and logical. Several times, with
that uncanny retentiveness of memory developed in the blind, she had all
but caught him; but each time his adroitness saved the day. Later, while
he was at work in the room which she had set aside for his daily
writing, she would answer the letter on the typewriter, having taught
herself to write by position and touch, and he would take her reply for
posting. Her nurse and companion, an elderly woman with a natural
aptitude for silence and discretion, was Banneker's partner in the
secret. The third member of the conspiracy was the physician who came
once a week from Angelica City because he himself was a musician and
this slowly and courageously dying woman was Royce Melvin. Between them
they hedged her about with the fiction that victoriously defied grief
and defeated death.
Camilla Van Arsdale got up from her couch and walked with confident
footsteps to the piano.
"Ban," she said, seating herself and letting her fingers run over the
keys, "can't you substitute another word for 'muffled' in the third
line? It comes on a high note--upper g--and I want a long, not a short
vowel sound."
"How would 'silenced' do?" he offered, after studying the line.
"Beautifully. You're a most amiable poet! Ban, I think your verses are
going to be more famous than my music."
"Never that," he denied. "It's the music that makes them."
"Have you heard from Mr. Gaines yet about the essays?"
"Yes. He's taking them. He wants to print two in each issue and call
them 'Far Perspectives.'"
"Oh, good!" she cried. "But, Ban, fine as your work is, it seems a
terrible waste of your powers to be out here. You ought to be in New
York, helping the governor put through his projects."
"Well, you know, the doctor won't give me my release."
(Presently he must remember to have a coughing spell. He coughed
hollowly and well, thanks to assiduous practice. This was part of the
grim and loving comedy of deception: that he had been peremptorily
ordered back to Manzanita on account of "weak lungs," with orders to
live in his open shack until he had gained twenty pounds. He was
gaining, but with well-considered slowness.)
"But when you can, you'll go back and help him, even if I'm not here to
know about it, won't you?"
"Oh, yes: I'll go back to help him when I can," he promised, as heartily
as if he had not made the same promise each time that the subject came
up. There was still a good deal of the wistful child about the dying
woman.
Out from that forest hermitage where the two worked, one in serene
though longing happiness, the other under the stern discipline of loss
and self-abnegation, had poured, in six short months, a living current
of song which had lifted the fame of Royce Melvin to new heights: her
fame only, for Banneker would not use his name to the words that rang
with a pure and vivid melody of their own. Herein, too, he was paying
his debt to Willis Enderby, through the genius of the woman who loved
him; preserving that genius with the thin, lustrous, impregnable fiction
of his own making against threatening and impotent truth.
Once, when Banneker had brought her a lyric, alive with the sweetness of
youth and love in the great open spaces, she had said:
"Ban, shall we call it 'Io?'"
"I don't think it would do," he said with an effort.
"Where is she?"
"Traveling in the tropics."
"You try so hard to keep the sadness out of your voice when you speak of
her," said Camilla sorrowfully. "But it's always there. Isn't there
anything I can do?"
"Nothing. There's nothing anybody can do."
The blind woman hesitated. "But you care for her still, don't you, Ban?"
"Care! Oh, my God!" whispered Banneker.
"And she cares. I know she cared when she was here. Io isn't the kind of
woman to forget easily. She tried once, you know." Miss Van Arsdale
smiled wanly. "Why doesn't she ever say anything of you in her letters?"
"She does."
"Very little." (Io's letters, passing through Banneker's hands were
carefully censored, of necessity, to forefend any allusion to the
tragedy of Willis Enderby, often to the extent of being rewritten
complete. It now occurred to Banneker that he had perhaps overdone the
matter of keeping his own name out of them.) "Ban," she continued
wistfully, "you haven't quarreled, have you?"
"No, Miss Camilla. We haven't quarreled."
"Then _what_ is it, Ban? I don't want to pry; you know me well enough to
be sure of that. But if I could only know before the end comes that you
two--I wish I could read your face. It's a helpless thing, being blind."
This was as near a complaint as he had ever heard her utter.
"Io's a rich woman, Miss Camilla," he said desperately.
"What of it?"
"How could I ask her to marry a jobless, half-lunged derelict?"
"_Have_ you asked her?"
He was silent.
"Ban, does she know why you're here?"
"Oh, yes; she knows."
"How bitter and desolate your voice sounds when you say that! And you
want me to believe that she knows and still doesn't come to you?"
"She doesn't know that I'm--ill," he said, hating himself for the
necessity of pretense with Camilla Van Arsdale.
"Then I shall tell her."
"No," he controverted with finality, "I won't allow it."
"Suppose it turned out that this were really the right path for you to
travel," she said after a pause; "that you were going to do bigger
things here than you ever could do with The Patriot? I believe it's
going to be so, Ban; that what you are doing now is going to be your
true success."
"Success!" he cried. "Are you going to preach success to me? If ever
there was a word coined in hell--I'm sorry, Miss Camilla," he broke off,
mastering himself.
She groped her way to the piano, and ran her fingers over the keys.
"There is work, anyway," she said with sure serenity.
"Yes; there's work, thank God!"
Work enough there was for him, not only in his writing, for which he had
recovered the capacity after a long period of stunned inaction, but in
the constant and unwearied labor of love in building and rebuilding,
fortifying and extending, that precarious but still impregnable bulwark
of falsehood beneath whose protection Camilla Van Arsdale lived and was
happy and made the magic of her song. Illusion! Banneker wondered
whether any happiness were other than illusion, whether the illusion of
happiness were not better than any reality. But in the world of grim
fact which he had accepted for himself was no palliating mirage. Upon
him "the illusive eyes of hope" were closed.
While Banneker was practicing his elaborate deceptions, Miss Van Arsdale
had perpetrated a lesser one of her own, which she had not deemed it
wise to reveal to him in their conversation about Io. Some time before
that she had written to her former guest a letter tactfully designed to
lay a foundation for resolving the difficulty or misunderstanding
between the lovers. In the normal course of events this would have been
committed for mailing to Banneker, who would, of course, have
confiscated it. But, as it chanced, it was hardly off the typewriter
when Dutch Pete dropped in for a friendly call while Banneker was at the
village, and took the missive with him for mailing. It traveled widely,
amassed postmarks and forwarding addresses, and eventually came to its
final port.
Worn out with the hopeless quest of forgetfulness in far lands, Io Eyre
came back to New York. It was there that the long pursuit of her by
Camilla Van Arsdale's letter ended. Bewilderment darkened Io's mind as
she read, to be succeeded by an appalled conjecture; Camilla Van
Arsdale's mind had broken down under her griefs. What other hypothesis
could account for her writing of Willis Enderby as being still alive?
And of her having letters from him? To the appeal for Banneker which,
concealed though it was, underlay the whole purport of the writing, Io
closed her heart, seared by the very sight of his name. She would have
torn the letter up, but something impelled her to read it again; some
hint of a pregnant secret to be gleaned from it, if one but held the
clue. Hers was a keen and thoughtful mind. She sent it exploring through
the devious tangle of the maze wherein she and Banneker, Camilla Van
Arsdale and Willis Enderby had been so tragically involved, and as she
patiently studied the letter as possible guide there dawned within her a
glint of the truth. It began with the suspicion, soon growing to
conviction, that the writer of those inexplicable words was not, could
not be insane; the letter breathed a clarity of mind, an untroubled
simplicity of heart, a quiet undertone of happiness, impossible to
reconcile with the picture of a shattered and grief-stricken victim. Yet
Io had, herself, written to Miss Van Arsdale as soon as she knew of
Judge Enderby's death, pouring out her heart for the sorrow of the woman
who as a stranger had stood her friend, whom, as she learned to know her
in the close companionship of her affliction, she had come to love;
offering to return at once to Manzanita. To that offer had come no
answer; later she had had a letter curiously reticent as to Willis
Enderby. (Banneker, in his epistolary personification of Miss Van
Arsdale had been perhaps overcautious on this point.) Io began to piece
together hints and clues, as in a disjected puzzle:--Banneker's presence
in Manzanita--Camilla's blindness.--Her inability to know, except
through the medium of others, the course of events.--The bewildering
reticence and hiatuses in the infrequent letters from Manzanita,
particularly in regard to Willis Enderby.--This calm, sane, cheerful
view of him as a living being, a present figure in his old field of
action.--The casual mention in an early letter that all of Miss Van
Arsdale's reading and most of her writing was done through the nurse or
Banneker, mainly the latter, though she was mastering the art of
touch-writing on the typewriter. The very style of the earlier letters,
as she remembered them, was different. And just here flashed the thought
which set her feverishly ransacking the portfolio in which she kept her
old correspondence. There she found an envelope with a Manzanita
postmark dated four months earlier. The typing of the two letters was
not the same.
Groping for some aid in the murk, Io went to the telephone and called up
the editorial office of The Sphere, asking for Russell Edmonds. Within
two hours the veteran had come to her.
"I have been wanting to see you," he said at once.
"About Mr. Banneker?" she queried eagerly.
"No. About The Searchlight."
"The Searchlight? I don't understand, Mr. Edmonds."
"Can't we be open with each other, Mrs. Eyre?"
"Absolutely, so far as I am concerned."
"Then I want to tell you that you need have no fear as to what The
Searchlight may do."
"Still I don't understand. Why should I fear it?"
"The scandal--manufactured, of course--which The Searchlight had cooked
up about you and Mr. Banneker before Mr. Eyre's death."
"Surely there was never anything published. I should have heard of it."
"No; there wasn't. Banneker stopped it."
"Ban?"
"Do you mean to say that you knew nothing of this, Mrs. Eyre?" he said,
the wonder in his face answering the bewilderment in hers. "Didn't
Banneker tell you?"
"Never a word."
"No; I suppose he wouldn't," ruminated the veteran. "That would be like
Ban--the old Ban," he added sadly. "Mrs. Eyre, I loved that boy," he
broke out, his stern and somber face working. "There are times even now
when I can scarcely make myself believe that he did what he did."
"Wait," pleaded Io. "How did he stop The Searchlight?"
"By threatening Bussey with an exposé that would have blown him out of
the water. Blackmail, if you like, Mrs. Eyre, and not of the most polite
kind."
"For me," whispered Io.
"He held that old carrion-buzzard, Bussey, up at the muzzle of The
Patriot as if it were a blunderbuss. It was loaded to kill, too. And
then," pursued Edmonds, "he paid the price. Marrineal got out his little
gun and held him up."
"Held Ban up? What for? How could he do that? All this is a riddle to
me, Mr. Edmonds."
"Do you think you really want to know?" asked the other with a touch of
grimness. "It won't be pleasant hearing."
"I've got to know. Everything!"
"Very well. Here's the situation. Banneker points his gun, The Patriot,
at Bussey. 'Be good or I'll shoot,' he says. Marrineal learns of it,
never mind how. He points _his_ gun at Ban. 'Be good, or I'll shoot,'
says he. And there you are!"
"But what was his gun? And why need he threaten Ban?"
"Why, you see, Mrs. Eyre, about that time things were coming to an issue
between Ban and Marrineal. Ban was having a hard fight for the
independence of his editorial page. His strongest hold on Marrineal was
Marrineal's fear of losing him. There were plenty of opportunities open
to a Banneker. Well, when Marrineal got Ban where he couldn't resign,
Ban's hold was gone. That was Marrineal's gun."
"Why couldn't he resign?" asked Io, white-lipped.
"If he quit The Patriot he could no longer hold Bussey, and The
Searchlight could print what it chose. You see?"
"I see," said Io, very low. "Oh, why couldn't I have seen before!"
"How could you, if Ban told you nothing?" reasoned Edmonds. "The blame
of the miserable business isn't yours. Sometimes I wonder if it's
anybody's; if the newspaper game isn't just too strong for us who try to
play it. As for The Searchlight, I've since got another hold on Bussey
which will keep him from making any trouble. That's what I wanted to
tell you."
"Oh, what does it matter! What does it matter!" she moaned. She crossed
to the window, laid her hot and white face against the cool glass,
pressed her hands in upon her temples, striving to think connectedly.
"Then whatever he did on The Patriot, whatever compromises he yielded to
or--or cowardices--" she winced at the words--"were done to save his
place; to save me."
"I'm afraid so," returned the other gently.
"Do you know what he's doing now?" she demanded.
"I understand he's back at Manzanita."
"He is. And from what I can make out," she added fiercely, "he is giving
up his life to guarding Miss Van Arsdale from breaking her heart, as she
will do, if she learns of Judge Enderby's death--Oh!" she cried, "I
didn't mean to say that! You must forget that there was anything said."
"No need. I know all that story," he said gravely. "That is what I
couldn't forgive in Ban. That he should have betrayed Miss Van Arsdale,
his oldest friend. That is the unpardonable treachery."
"To save me," said Io.
"Not even for that. He owed more to her than to you."
"I can't believe that he did it!" she wailed. "To use my letter to set
spies on Cousin Billy and ruin him--it isn't Ban. It isn't!"
"He did it, and, when it was too late, he tried to stop it."
"To stop it?" She looked her startled query at him. "How do you know
that?"
"Last week," explained Edmonds, "Judge Enderby's partner sent for me. He
had been going over some papers and had come upon a telegram from
Banneker urging Enderby not to leave without seeing him. The telegram
must have been delivered very shortly after the Judge left for the
train."
"Telegram? Why a telegram? Wasn't Ban in town?"
"No. He was down in Jersey. At The Retreat."
"Wait!" gasped Io. "At The Retreat! Then my letter would have been
forwarded to him there. He couldn't have got it at the same time that
Cousin Billy got the one I sent him." She gripped Russell Edmonds's
wrists in fierce, strong hands. "What if he hadn't known in time? What
if, the moment he did know, he did his best to stop Cousin Billy from
starting, with that telegram?" Suddenly the light died out of her face.
"But then how would that loathsome Mr. Ives have known that he was
going, unless Ban betrayed him?"
"Easily enough," returned the veteran. "He had a report from his
detectives, who had been watching Enderby for months.... Mrs. Eyre, I
wish you'd give me a drink. I feel shaky."
She left him to give the order. When she returned, they had both
steadied down. Carefully, and with growing conviction, they gathered the
evidence into something like a coherent whole. At the end, Io moaned:
"The one thing I can't bear is that Cousin Billy died, believing that of
Ban."
She threw herself upon the broad lounge, prone, her face buried in her
arms. The veteran of hundreds of fights, brave and blind, righteous and
mistaken, crowned with fleeting victories, tainted with irremediable
errors, stood silent, perplexed, mournful. He walked slowly over to
where the girl was stretched, and laid a clumsy, comforting hand on her
shoulder.
"I wish you'd cry for me, too," he said huskily. "I'm too old."