HOW IT ENDED--AND BEGAN.
The railings and uprights of the porch were strips of jet against a
world swimming in blue and silver gray. The planks creaked under our
feet. A confusion of saddles and farm gear hung against the log walls.
The tin basin stood on its accustomed shelf. The world of magic was
jumbled with the commonplace. I led her over to the corner where the eye
could gather in the widest vista. She stood there before me very upright
and slim and her eyes held mine as frankly as a child's might have done.
I gazed at her for a moment more, then my arms went out and encircled
her, and I talked very fast and very low.
"I may, at times, seem extremely abrupt," I confessed, "but I'm not.
I've worshiped you upon a coral reef and I've made love to you through
endless days and nights with stars for my witnesses much larger than
these--and softer. And now I've found you--I've found you, and it
doesn't matter what you say, because I shall never again let you go."
She tilted her face upward and her eyes were dancing as she quoted,
"'Nobody asked you, sir.'"
She stood there, facing me, within the circle of my arms, with her chin
as proudly tilted as though she were not surrendering, and with the old
incomparable smile lingering on her lips.
And as I gazed at her in the witchery of the moon, the utter
improbability of it all dawned upon me, until I felt that a moment would
bring awakening and the old gnawing despair. The expression was that
which I knew so well, and she seemed no more and no less real than she
had been, looking out from the mate's chest, with the circle of
mahogany-skinned savages sitting silent before her shrine.
That I had loved her was inevitable. It was written, but that was the
lesser part. Here she stood looking at me out of eyes that were
accepting my love without question. Why did she, without even the siege
of a long wooing, so permit me to step into the temple of her life, as
naturally as though it were the shrine of the coral island where I
belonged as high-priest and demi-god?
She had, before to-night, met me only once, and then I had been the
churl, brusquely rebuffing her sweet courtesy. Yet she had ridden across
the hills, and something sang to me that it was to me she had ridden,
though she may have called it coming to her brother. Why was it? Had I
really conjured her soul to me by wishing it across the world? Had
supreme forces compelled us both, so that preliminary details were
superfluous between us?
However that might be, the gracious smile died slowly on her lips to a
seriousness far sweeter, and as she looked into my face her eyes
widened, and dropped all concealment until I was gazing into her soul.
When a woman meets the eyes of a man in that fashion he ceases to
question, and wishes only to do reverence. It is like rolling back the
waters of the sea and revealing the wonders of the deeps. For it is
decreed that the eyes of a woman are given her in defense, to hide
behind their dance and sparkle the things which lie beneath--and to
disarm. When once they have opened in the miracle of self-revelation and
surrendered their secret, one must be unworthy who feels himself worthy
of such a manifestation.
And the secret I read there was that she loved me beyond all doubting.
It mattered no longer how the wonder had come to pass. That was a mere
point of god-craft. It had happened, and the stars were singing.
I dropped on one knee and lifted her hand to my lips.
Later, I sketched rapidly, agitatedly, the story of the coming of her
portrait to the island, of its place on the chest and its subsequent
worship. I told her of meeting Keller on the steamer and Maxwell in New
York. I summarized the chain of evidence which had to my mind proved her
to be Mrs. Weighborne. I have no doubt that I told it badly, but that
was of no consequence, since back of my broken narration was the pent-up
rush of emotion, and to her this seemed important. Nor did my story, so
fantastic that I hardly expected her to accept it without proof, seem to
surprise her.
"And," I concluded, "I am going to build you a new temple which will
make the Taj Mahal a tawdry mosque, for every block and rafter will be
love, and each year we live I shall add new minarets of worship--and not
only five times each day but a hundred, its _muezzin_ shall call me to
prayer."
Her eyes were glowing, and her laugh trembled.
"I came quite a long way," she told me, "to make you say that, but after
all you have done it very nicely."
"But," I admitted after a long pause, "I don't yet understand--not that
it matters now--but why? That word is beating at my brain--why in the
names of all the gods should you care?"
"Why shouldn't I?" she indignantly countered.
"You have known me," I said blankly, "a few days--and I should have
imagined that I made a sorry impression."
She laughed again.
"I have known you always," she replied.
I shook my head wonderingly.
"Listen," she commanded. "Once upon a time--that's the way all fairy
stories start--I saw you. You didn't notice me much. I was just a kid,
but I fell in love with you. To be exact, it was ten years ago this
month."
There was no end to wonders. All the loose threads of coincidence were
being plaited into a single cable, and the cable was my life line.
"As I grew up I met a lot of men and they insisted on saying nice things
to me; but they were all things of one kind and that wasn't the kind I
wanted--besides, you see, I was waiting. I knew that some day you would
come and that if you had anything to say it would be different. I
compared them all with you. It wasn't just a girl's romantic
foolishness. There was destiny in it. You know the Moslem text--'man's
fate is about his neck.' You had no chance to escape me."
"I, too, knew it was written," I told her, "but I was afraid we should
meet too late. When I saw you at Lexington I thought it was too late."
"I was never afraid of that," she affirmed. "Sometimes I have known that
you were in danger--and later I've known that you escaped. Then there
was the dream--the one dream about the door that came over and over....
At times it seemed that you were very near. Once at Cairo I felt that I
was going to meet you around some corner or in some bazaar--but I
didn't."
"You might, if you had turned your head," I declared. "Did you by any
chance lose a diary at Cairo?"
This time it was she who was surprised.
"I lost one somewhere," she acknowledged; then as she colored divinely
she demanded, "You didn't find it, did you? You didn't read those fool
things?"
"It wasn't foolishness," I quoted. "There was destiny in it." And then I
made full confession.
"I'm glad you wrote it," I added. "I owe that diary something and I want
all my debt to be to you."
For a moment she was silent, then she looked up again and confronted me
once more with a charge of stupidity.
"And you read that, and knew what football game it was, and yet you
never recognized yourself! What are your brains made of, anyway?"
How could a man reply to such a sublime absurdity as that? I groaned.
"In the diary you wrote of an apotheosis," I confessed. "How in the name
of all that is logical could I connect myself with this admirable,
impossible superman? You failed to give the name."
She looked at me and laughed.
"The man is also modest," she observed.
"Of course," I demurred, "it's great to see you treading the clouds,
with ideals for your playmates. Moreover, it's appropriate; but I'm down
here, you know, earthbound and extremely mortal. If we are to walk
together you must come down and join me."
"I'll take you up with me," she hospitably asserted, and though since
then she must have discovered many times that she had draped her cloth
of gold upon a lay figure and had made a plumed and mailed knight of a
failure and an inconsequent, yet she has, with gallant stubbornness,
refused to admit it.
"Dearest," I said very humbly, "I have been inconceivably boorish, and
worse. How could you bring yourself to forgive it?"
"Because," she answered, "I'm a woman--and inquisitive. I knew how you
felt, and I wanted to find out why you acted so horridly at Lexington."
"I was trying very hard not to tell you how I felt," I admitted.
"You didn't have to tell me--in words," she laughed. "You told me in a
hundred other ways, that were just as plain."
"Then the only part of my story," I said, a little crest-fallen, "which
is new to you is the information that you were a goddess and I a high
priest, out there in the South Seas?"
"Oh, that wasn't new at all," she ruthlessly enlightened, "I knew that,
too."
"Is there anything you don't know?" I inquired. "What gift of prophetic
vision--"
"There wasn't any vision about it," she interrupted. "I got a letter
from Mrs. Keller the day before you reached Kentucky. I guess when you
get back to New York you'll find one from the captain. His wife wrote to
tell me you were coming. That was why I got a headache and stayed at
home that night."
She laid her hand on my forearm. My sleeves were uprolled to the elbows.
"Dearest," she exclaimed in sudden anxiety, "you're cold!" I suppose I
was, but I had not known it.
* * * * *
It has been some time now since I have written in the diary which had
its birth under such strange circumstances. The narrative went into a
pigeon-hole because I have been too busy living to think of reflecting
upon life. It was a device for moments of emptiness and in later times
also for moments of extraordinary jubilation, but since the last pages
were scribbled there has been enough of celebration in merely living out
the days. Yet now I must add a postscript, so that some time He may
have the full record before him. He is my little son.
He is teaching me a great many things and finding in me a willing pupil.
When I first walked out into the public ways after his entrance to the
stage whereon I hope he will be cast in a worthy part, I walked
differently. I walked with the pride of an emperor. Not the pride of
arrogance. I needed no car of ivory and bronze with captives marching
fettered at its wheel. I needed no slave to whisper in my ear,
"Remember, Caesar, thou art but a man." I was filled with a new
graciousness and wished to be generously courteous to all men, yet that
desire was born of a sense of vast superiority. I had found the meaning
of life; the secret of which the gulls shrieked in mating-time around
the rocks of the island--though then my ears were deaf to its
significance.
She has minted from the precious metal of her soul a life which, with
the other lives of his day, will form the mosaic of his times. I have
the prospect before me of new miracles as that new life unfolds. I feel
the exaltation of being undeservedly linked with something vastly
greater than myself. I made an awkward effort once to put some part of
this idea into words, but Frances only laughed. To her it is all quite
natural. Her only comment was that he is as much mine as hers, which was
a flattery that even my egotism could scarcely assimilate.
We have not named him yet, but an idea struck me a day or two ago while
I was sitting at my down-town desk, and I straightway called her up.
"I have just thought of a name," I said. "I want to call him Francis
Ra-Tuiki. Of course," I hastened to add, realizing that the silence at
the other end of the wire threatened protest, "of course we can dignify
it with highly unphonetic spelling, if you like."
"I don't know," she judiciously reflected. Then with a sudden
afterthought she added, "That might possibly do for a middle name. I
have already decided upon the first."
I wonder what name she has in mind--and she had just finished telling me
that I had a full half-interest in that kid!
A railroad now runs into Adamson County and the new order is replacing
the old. My wife and I and our brother went down on the first train run
over the new line. The people had gathered to see the spectacle, and
incredible as it may seem, there were among them some who looked for the
first time on a locomotive. Old Mrs. Marcus, a little more withered and
monkey-like, was there, and as she contemplated the marvel she could
only murmur in wonderment, "Well, Provi-_dence_!"
Calloway Marcus no longer rides in a hollow square, but goes openly to
court to defend the railway's damage suits. Yet now that the law is
becoming adequate, he will never have the opportunity to turn it, as his
weapon of reprisal, against Jim Garvin. Retribution came to the head of
the murder syndicate with grimmer and more appropriate drama than Marcus
had planned. The judge fell behind his own counter, riddled with bullets
bought from his own shelf, and fired by the hand of his own chief
henchman and jackal.
Though one of the last of the terrorized juries sat in the box, to the
end that the slayer "came cl'ar," it is now Curt Dawson who goes
sunken-eyed and body-guarded, searching the shadows. Shots from the
laurel are few--but occasional even now--and Garvin's boy is nearing
manhood. At all events, Garvin's executioner seems convinced that
reprisal will come to him. Perhaps it is a premonition.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Portal of Dreams, by Charles Neville Buck