THE ALTERNATIVE
Tisdale did not follow the lieutenant aft. When the _Aquila_ turned into
Port Orchard, he still remained looking off her bows. The sun had set, a
soft breeze was in his face, and the Sound was no longer a mirror; it
fluted, broke in racy waves; the cutwater struck from them an intricate
melody. Northward a few thin streamers of cloud warmed like painted
flames, and their reflection changed the sea to running fire. Then he was
conscious that some one approached behind him; she stopped at his elbow to
watch the brilliant scene. And instantly the spirit of combat in him
stirred; his muscles tightened like those of a man on guard.
After a moment she commenced to sing very softly, in unison with the music
of the waves along the keel,
"How dear to me the hour when daylight dies."
Even subdued, her voice was beautiful. It began surely, insistently, to
undermine all that stout breastwork he had reared against her these
twenty-four hours. But he thrust his hands in his pockets and turned to
her with that upward look of probing, upbraiding eyes.
The song died. A flush rose over her face, but she met the look bravely.
"I came to explain," she said. "I thought at the beginning, when we
started on that drive through the mountains, you knew my identity.
Afterwards I tried repeatedly to tell you, but when I saw how bitterly
you--hated--me, my courage failed."
Her lip trembled over a sighing breath, and she looked, away up the
brilliant sea. Tisdale could not doubt her. His mind raced back to
incident on incident of that journey; in flashes it was all made clear to
him. Even during that supreme hour of the electrical storm had she not
tried to undeceive him? He forgave her her transgressions against him; he
forgave her so completely that, at the recollection of the one moment in
the basin, his pulses sang. Then, inside his pockets, his hands clenched,
and he scourged himself for the lapse.
"I was in desperate need," she went on quickly. "There was a debt--a debt
of honor--I wished to pay. And Mr. Foster told me you were interested in
that desert land; that you were going to look it over. He caught me by
long distance telephone the night he sailed for Alaska, to let me know.
Oh, it all sounds sordid, but if you have ever come to the ragged edge of
things--"
She stopped, with a little outward, deprecating movement of her hands, and
turned again to meet Tisdale's look. But he was still silent. "I believed
when you knew me," she went on, "you would see I am not the kind of woman
you imagined; I even hoped, for David's sake, you would forgive me. But I
did not know there was such friendship as yours in the world. I thought
only mothers loved so,--the great ones, the Hagars, the Marys. It is more
than that; it is the best and deepest of every kind of love in one. I
can't fathom it--unless--men sometimes are born with twin souls."
It was not the influence of her personality now; it was not any magnetism.
Something far down in the depths of him responded to that something in
her. It was as though he felt the white soul of her rising transcendent
over her body. It spoke in her pose, her eloquent face, and it filled the
brief silence with an insistent, almost vibrant appeal.
"They are," he answered, and the emotion in his own face played softly
through his voice, "I am sure that they are. Weatherbee had other friends,
plenty of them, scattered from the Yukon territory to Nome; men who would
have been glad to go out of their way to serve him, if they had known; but
he never asked anything of them; he saved the right to call on me. Neither
of us ever came as near that 'ragged edge of things' as he did, toppled on
it as he did, for so long. There never was a braver fight, against greater
odds, single-handed, yet I failed him." He paused while his eyes again
sought that high gorge of the Olympic Mountains, then added: "The most I
can do now is to see that his work is carried on."
"You mean," she said not quite steadily, "you are going to buy that land?"
"I mean"--he frowned a little--"I am going to renew my offer to finance
the project for you. You owe it to David Weatherbee even more than I do.
Go back to that pocket; set his desert blossoming. It's your only
salvation."
She groped for the bulwark behind her and moved back to its support. "I
could not. I could not. I should go mad in that terrible place."
"Listen, madam." He said this very gently, but his voice carried its
vibrant undernote as though down beneath the surface a waiting reserve
force stirred. "I did not tell all about that orchard of spruce twigs. It
was planted along a bench, the miniature of the one we climbed in the
Wenatchee Mountains, that was crossed with tiny, frozen, irrigating canals
leading from a basin; and midway stood a house. You must have known that
trick he had of carving small things with his pocket-knife. Then imagine
that delicately modeled house of snow. It was the nucleus of the whole,
and before the door, fine as a cameo and holding a bundle in her arms, was
set the image of a woman."
There was a silent moment. She waited, leaning a little forward, watching
Tisdale's face, while a sort of incredulous surprise rose through the
despair in her eyes. "There were women at Fairbanks and Seward after the
first year," he went on. "Bright, refined women who would have counted it
a privilege to share things, his hardest luck, with David Weatherbee. But
the best of them in his eyes was nothing more than a shadow. There was
just one woman in the world for him. That image stood for you. The whole
project revolved around you. It would be incomplete now without you."
She shrank closer against the bulwark, glancing about her with the swift
look of a creature trapped, then for a moment dropped her face in her
hands. When she tried to say something, the words would not come. Her
lips, her whole face quivered, but she could only shake her head in
protest again and again.
Tisdale waited, watching her with his upward look from under contracted
brows. "What else can you do?" he asked at last. "Your tract is too small
to be handled by a syndicate, and now that the levels of the Columbia
desert are to be brought under a big irrigation project, which means a
nominal expense to the grower, your high pocket, unimproved, will hardly
attract the single buyer. Will you, then, plat it in five-acre tracts for
the Seattle market and invite the--interest of your friends?"
She drew erect; the danger signals flamed briefly in her eyes. "My friends
can be dis-interested, Mr. Tisdale. It has only been through them, for a
long time, I have been able to keep my hold."
"There's where you made your mistake at the start; in gaining that hold.
When you conformed to their standards, your own were overthrown."
"That is not true." She did not raise her voice any; it dropped rather to
a minor note? but a tremor ran over her body, and her face for an instant
betrayed how deep the shaft had struck. "And, always, when I have accepted
a favor, I have given full measure in exchange. But there is an
alternative you seem to have overlooked."
"I understand," he said slowly, and his color rose. "You may marry again."
Then he asked, without protest: "Is it Foster?"
On occasion, during that long drive through the mountains, he had felt the
varying height and thickness of an invisible barrier, but never, until
that moment, its chill. Then Marcia Feversham called her, and she turned
to go down the deck. "I'm coming!" she answered and stopped to look back.
"You need not trouble about Mr. Foster," she said. "He--is safe."