A quarter of an hour later, with Mary Josephine at his side, he was
walking down the green slope toward the Saskatchewan. In that direction
lay the rims of timber, the shimmering valley, and the broad pathways
that opened into the plains beyond.
The town was at their backs, and Keith wanted it there. He wanted to
keep McDowell, and Shan Tung, and Miriam Kirkstone as far away as
possible, until his mind rode more smoothly in the new orbit in which
it was still whirling a bit unsteadily. More than all else he wanted to
be alone with Mary Josephine, to make sure of her, to convince himself
utterly that she was his to go on fighting for. He sensed the nearness
and the magnitude of the impending drama. He knew that today he must
face Shan Tung, that again he must go under the battery of McDowell's
eyes and brain, and that like a fish in treacherous waters he must swim
cleverly to avoid the nets that would entangle and destroy him. Today
was the day--the stage was set, the curtain about to be lifted, the
play ready to be enacted. But before it was the prologue. And the
prologue was Mary Josephine's.
At the crest of a dip halfway down the slope they had paused, and in
this pause he stood a half-step behind her so that he could look at her
for a moment without being observed. She was bareheaded, and it came
upon him all at once how wonderful was a woman's hair, how beautiful
beyond all other things beautiful and desirable. In twisted, glowing
seductiveness it was piled up on Mary Josephine's head, transformed
into brown and gold glories by the sun. He wanted to put forth his hand
to it, and bury his fingers in it, and feel the thrill and the warmth
and the crush of the palpitant life of it against his own flesh. And
then, bending a little forward, he saw under her long lashes the sheer
joy of life shining in her eyes as she drank in the wonderful panorama
that lay below them to the west. Last night's rain had freshened it,
the sun glorified it now, and the fragrance of earthly smells that rose
up to them from it was the undefiled breath of a thing living and
awake. Even to Keith the river had never looked more beautiful, and
never had his yearnings gone out to it more strongly than in this
moment, to the river and beyond--and to the back of beyond, where the
mountains rose up to meet the blue sky and the river itself was born.
And he heard Mary Josephine's voice, joyously suppressed, exclaiming
softly,
"Oh, Derry!"
His heart was filled with gladness. She, too, was seeing what his eyes
saw in that wonderland. And she was feeling it. Her hand, seeking his
hand, crept into his palm, and the fingers of it clung to his fingers.
He could feel the thrill of the miracle passing through her, the
miracle of the open spaces, the miracle of the forests rising billow on
billow to the purple mists of the horizon, the miracle of the golden
Saskatchewan rolling slowly and peacefully in its slumbering sheen out
of that mighty mysteryland that reached to the lap of the setting sun.
He spoke to her of that land as she looked, wide-eyed, quick-breathing,
her fingers closing still more tightly about his. This was but the
beginning of the glory of the west and the north, he told her. Beyond
that low horizon, where the tree tops touched the sky were the
prairies--not the tiresome monotony which she had seen from the car
windows, but the wide, glorious, God-given country of the Northwest
with its thousands of lakes and rivers and its tens of thousands of
square miles of forests; and beyond those things, still farther, were
the foothills, and beyond the foothills the mountains. And in those
mountains the river down there had its beginning.
She looked up swiftly, her eyes brimming with the golden flash of the
sun. "It is wonderful! And just over there is the town!"
"Yes, and beyond the town are the cities."
"And off there--"
"God's country," said Keith devoutly.
Mary Josephine drew a deep breath. "And people still live in towns and
cities!" she exclaimed in wondering credulity. "I've dreamed of 'over
here,' Derry, but I never dreamed that. And you've had it for years and
years, while I--oh, Derry!"
And again those two words filled his heart with gladness, words of
loving reproach, atremble with the mysterious whisper of a great
desire. For she was looking into the west. And her eyes and her heart
and her soul were in the west, and suddenly Keith saw his way as though
lighted by a flaming torch. He came near to forgetting that he was
Conniston. He spoke of his dream, his desire, and told her that last
night--before she came--he had made up his mind to go. She had come to
him just in time. A little later and he would have been gone, buried
utterly away from the world in the wonderland of the mountains. And now
they would go together. They would go as he had planned to go, quietly,
unobtrusively; they would slip away and disappear. There was a reason
why no one should know, not even McDowell. It must be their secret.
Some day he would tell her why. Her heart thumped excitedly as he went
on like a boy planning a wonderful day. He could see the swifter beat
of it in the flush that rose into her face and the joy glowing
tremulously in her eyes as she looked at him. They would get ready
quietly. They might go tomorrow, the next day, any time. It would be a
glorious adventure, just they two, with all the vastness of that
mountain paradise ahead of them.
"We'll be pals," he said. "Just you and me, Mary Josephine. We're all
that's left."
It was his first experiment, his first reference to the information he
had gained in the letters, and swift as a flash Mary Josephine's eyes
turned up to him. He nodded, smiling. He understood their quick
questioning, and he held her hand closer and began to walk with her
down the slope.
"A lot of it came back last night and this morning, a lot of it," he
explained. "It's queer what miracles small things can work sometimes,
isn't it? Think what a grain of sand can do to a watch! This was one of
the small things." He was still smiling as he touched the scar on his
forehead. "And you, you were the other miracle. And I'm remembering. It
doesn't seem like seven or eight years, but only yesterday, that the
grain of sand got mixed up somewhere in the machinery in my head. And I
guess there was another reason for my going wrong. You'll understand,
when I tell you."
Had he been Conniston it could not have come from him more naturally,
more sincerely. He was living the great lie, and yet to him it was no
longer a lie. He did not hesitate, as shame and conscience might have
made him hesitate. He was fighting that something beautiful might be
raised up out of chaos and despair and be made to exist; he was
fighting for life in place of death, for happiness in place of grief,
for light in place of darkness--fighting to save where others would
destroy. Therefore the great lie was not a lie but a thing without
venom or hurt, an instrument for happiness and for all the things good
and beautiful that went to make happiness. It was his one great weapon.
Without it he would fail, and failure meant desolation. So he spoke
convincingly, for what he said came straight from the heart though it
was born in the shadow of that one master-falsehood. His wonder was
that Mary Josephine believed him so utterly that not for an instant was
there a questioning doubt in her eyes or on her lips.
He told her how much he "remembered," which was no more and no less
than he had learned from the letters and the clippings. The story did
not appeal to him as particularly unusual or dramatic. He had passed
through too many tragic happenings in the last four years to regard it
in that way. It was simply an unfortunate affair beginning in
misfortune, and with its necessary whirlwind of hurt and sorrow. The
one thing of shame he would not keep out of his mind was that he,
Derwent Conniston, must have been a poor type of big brother in those
days of nine or ten years ago, even though little Mary Josephine had
worshiped him. He was well along in his twenties then. The Connistons
of Darlington were his uncle and aunt, and his uncle was a more or less
prominent figure in ship-building interests on the Clyde. With these
people the three--himself, Mary Josephine, and his brother Egbert--had
lived, "farmed out" to a hard-necked, flinty-hearted pair of relatives
because of a brother's stipulation and a certain English law. With them
they had existed in mutual discontent and dislike. Derwent, when he
became old enough, had stepped over the traces. All this Keith had
gathered from the letters, but there was a great deal that was missing.
Egbert, he gathered, must have been a scapegrace. He was a cripple of
some sort and seven or eight years his junior. In the letters Mary
Josephine had spoken of him as "poor Egbert," pitying instead of
condemning him, though it was Egbert who had brought tragedy and
separation upon them. One night Egbert had broken open the Conniston
safe and in the darkness had had a fight and a narrow escape from his
uncle, who laid the crime upon Derwent. And Derwent, in whom Egbert
must have confided, had fled to America that the cripple might be
saved, with the promise that some day he would send for Mary Josephine.
He was followed by the uncle's threat that if he ever returned to
England, he would be jailed. Not long afterward "poor Egbert" was found
dead in bed, fearfully contorted. Keith guessed there had been
something mentally as well as physically wrong with him.
"--And I was going to send for you," he said, as they came to the level
of the valley. "My plans were made, and I was going to send for you,
when this came."
He stopped, and in a few tense, breathless moments Mary Josephine read
the ninth and last letter he had taken from the Englishman's chest. It
was from her uncle. In a dozen lines it stated that she, Mary
Josephine, was dead, and it reiterated the threat against Derwent
Conniston should he ever dare to return to England.